Monstrous and inaccurate depictions of a narwhal. Top: from Ortelius’s map of Iceland (1592). Bottom: from Histoire generale des drogues (1694) by Pierre Pomet.

‘Spouter’, based on a whale, attacking a ship from Description of the Northern Peoples (1555).

Animals formed a large part of the southern European conception of the North as a monstrous region where wonders were found. Some Scandinavians and other European travellers knew of these animals first-hand. Indigenous peoples of the Arctic in Greenland, Northern Scandinavia and Russia were familiar with these animals and hold diverse beliefs concerning them, such as the animal spirits invoked in Sámi shamanism and the commonality of animals and people in Inuit beliefs.

Sailors from the South, encountering Arctic creatures in person, mainly focused on extracting valuable materials like oil and bone from them. Reports of animals they saw were interpreted by scholars in the South through the lens of earlier classical and medieval writers, leading to texts full of bizarre accounts of the North. Animals with misunderstood life cycles such as the barnacle goose contributed to this strangeness. Many monsters can be identified with species that have now been scientifically described.

Narwhal

or Greenland unicorn, or monodon monoceros

Tusk of a narwhal (monodon monoceros)

The narwhal is a species of whale found in the Arctic. Inuit in Greenland used narwhal tusk to create tools like harpoon shafts, and began trading tusks to the Norse who visited and settled in Greenland in the medieval era.

In Europe it was traded as ‘alicorn’ or unicorn horn, worth ten times its weight in gold. It was made into cups which were believed to neutralise poison and mixed into medicines for many diseases.

Narwhal skulls and tusks in De unicornu observationes novae (New observations about the unicorn)

Thomas Bartholin, 1678 (original 1645)

Thomas Bartholin (1616-1680) was one of many physicians who sold expensive ‘alicorn’ or unicorn horn remedies. When it became widely known that alicorns were in fact narwhal tusks and their medicinal value was questioned, Bartholin published this book.

The book concludes that the narwhal is not the same as the unicorn, the horse-like creature reported by classical authors like Aristotle and Pliny, whose existence was still being debated at this time. Bartholin claims the narwhal’s tusk is however the true alicorn with medicinal properties. In the 18^th century, experiments with the tusk concluded it had no medical properties and it fell out of use.

Geese emerging from barnacles in Cosmographiae uniuersalis (description of the world)

Sebastian Münster, 1550

The story that geese grew from barnacles was first illustrated in this book (lower right page). The text claims that a tree grows in Orkney which produces fruit, which turn into geese when they fall into water. Ortelius’s atlas similarly describes geese growing out of driftwood in Scotland.

Many authors who wrote on the subject from the 13^th to 17^th centuries concluded that geese must indeed grow from barnacles, because famous scholars of the past had claimed so. The myth eventually died in the 18^th century, when people became more sceptical of the scholarly authority of earlier writers and more reliant on evidence.

Barnacle goose (Branta leucopsis)

Barnacle geese winter in Scotland, Denmark, Germany and the Netherlands. They migrate in summer to breeding colonies in the far North, unknown to people further South until reports from Willem Barents’s 1596 expedition to the islands of Svalbard and Novaya Zemlya. The expedition encountered the geese nesting and breeding normally, which contributed to the myth’s demise.

Goose barnacles (Lepas anatifera)

Goose barnacles grow on driftwood and have a long, goose-like neck with a beak-like shell, and feathery ‘cilia’ to catch plankton. These misled observers, like Hector Boece, the first principal of King’s College, Aberdeen, who claimed that he had seen geese growing on driftwood by Pitsligo Castle in the 1520s. Dissections of barnacles under a microscope were published in 1661 and 1680, showing that the features only superficially resembled those of birds.

Walrus in Historia de gentibus septentrionalibus (Description of the Northern peoples)

Olaus Magnus, 1558 (original 1555)

Magnus’s walrus is a swift, murderous creature that climbs cliffs with its tusks, but is prone to a “heavy drowsiness” and often falls asleep, hanging by its tusks. In this state it is vulnerable to hunters who turn its skin into ropes.

The tusks are depicted the wrong way up. In 1558 Conrad Gessner published his book Historia animalium which contained an illustration of the walrus based on body parts and more recent accounts brought to continental Europe. Thus, in a later edition of Magnus’s book the tusks are put in their correct place. In 1612 a living walrus pup and a taxidermied adult were brought to Amsterdam, allowing more accurate images of wlaruses to circulate.

Skull of a walrus (Odobenus rosmarus)

Walruses live in the Arctic, including in the waters around Greenland, Svalbard and Arctic Russia. Both males and females have prominent tusks. The tusks aren’t used for climbing cliffs as was once believed, but for making holes in ice and aiding the walrus in hauling themselves onto ice, and in displays of dominance between males.

Walrus carving

Inuit made harpoon parts with ivory from walruses, tools with their bones, and boats and cables with their skin. Artworks carved from tusks such as this one have been made by Inuit to sell to travellers, originally inspired by amulets used by hunters to invoke the spirit of the animal for good luck.