apparently modern medieval scholars have no solid idea why there’s so many old paintings of knights fighting snails. Like that wasn’t just one weird painting there’s hundreds of those.
the firste meyme
And my favorite one here
dunno, it makes sense to me. A snail is a hard whirl with sticky stuff coming out and doesn’t really look like any other animal you encounter in day to day life so I imagine they’d be pretty frightening to people whose entire understanding of the natural world is “god did it and he hates us”
I was wondering about this, upon seeing this post,
and then my actually autistic lil’ brain did one of its’ autistic lil’ tricks and said “Hrm- people being scared of snails- Searching files… DING! Remember that one rhyme from when you were a kid? Of course you do, you remember almost everything you ever learned, it’s all still in this brain here.”
Being unwilling to fight a snail, was, if I correctly interpret references in one older English rhyme, considered to be an Archetypal portrayal of Cowardice.
“Four and twenty tailors went to catch a snail
the bravest one among them dare not touch her tail
she puts out her horns like a little kyloe cow,
run, tailors, run, she’ll have you all e’en now!”
Since a snail, slow, small and squishy, is obviously the least scary of things, maybe these illustrations are meant to show silly knights being frightened by the least of all adversaries.. I know I’ve also seen references to men who run away from rabbits or hares as Cowardly.
Mooncustafer 