Unit I: Meeting the Creatures
BESTIARY HALL · UNIT I OF VI
We begin by meeting the creatures — and by learning how we know about them at all. Every being in this class comes to us the same way: through the tales told of it, the pictures made of it, the sightings people reported, and, where there is one, the real animal underneath. This unit teaches you to hold those apart, with the keeper's marks — T for a tale, S for a sighting, F for a fact — beginning with the lion, the most told-of creature on the shelf.
After the lion come the small people, and there is a keeper's reason for it: they live closest to home. Fairies, hidden folk, and household helpers were told of by neighbors, in kitchens and mine shafts as much as in libraries — so their trails are the easiest to follow while the marks are new in your hand, before the trails run to the edges of the map.
Unit Learning Objectives
By the end of this unit, scholars will be able to:
- Meet a creature the class's way, in six parts — the creature itself, when and where it was first told of, the tales, the reported sightings, what it actually is, and why it is still with us.
- Mark any account line by line with the keeper's marks — T, S, or F — and say why.
- Read a creature's map: the starred first telling, the journey of the tale, the timeline beneath — and follow its pictures through history.
- Tell a first telling from a later retelling, and a surviving account from the older tradition behind it.
- Begin a bestiary of your own, kept to the class standard from its first entry.
In This Unit
Lesson 1: Meeting the Creatures
Meet the lion — what he is, the tales told of him for a thousand years, his pictures from copied drawings to a photograph, and the keeper's marks, T, S, and F, you will use all through this class.
The class's method in full dress: the fairy record from a twelfth-century poem to the modern nursery, with changelings named and weighed as history.
Elves of the Norse record, Cornish pixies, and the leprechaun — in writing since the eighth century, as a water sprite, before the green coat.
Lesson 4: Brownies & the Household Helpers
The brownie's five-hundred-year paper trail, with hobgoblins, and the knockers who followed Cornish miners across the ocean to America.
Lesson 5: The Elementals of Paracelsus
A sixteenth-century physician sets the spirit world in order: gnomes, sylphs, undines, and salamanders — a class of beings with a datable author, this class's favorite kind of first record.
Beings made by human hands and knowledge, not born: the golem of the Jewish record, the alchemists' homunculus, and Frankenstein's creature — three records, and one question: what do we owe a thing we have made?
The Unit I Quiz closes this unit. You will find it, with its download, at the end of Lesson 6: The Made.
What Scholars Will Observe, Practice, and Make
Scholars mark the lion's entry line by line with the keeper's marks — T, S, and F — rule the first pages of the journal that will become their bestiary, write Entry No. 1 entire — the lion, to the standard — and copy the marks and their meanings inside the front cover, in their own hand.
With the creatures met and the marks in hand, we go on to the beasts of the land, beginning with the unicorn.