FABLE AND FOLKLORE 59 



that medieval nature- fakir, Philip de Thaum, who wrote 

 The Anglo-Norman Bestiary about 1120, embroiders his 

 ignorance to gratify the appetite of his age for marvels — 

 sensations, as we say nowadays — and so sell his book: 



"Of such a nature it is," he says of the pelican, "when it comes 

 to its young birds, and they are great and handsome, and it 

 will fondle them, cover them with its wings; the little birds 

 are fierce, take to pecking it — desire to eat it and pick out its 

 two eyes; then it pecks and takes them, and slays them with 

 torment; and thereupon leaves them — leaves them lying dead — 

 then returns on the third day, is grieved to find them dead, and 

 makes such lamentation, when it sees its little birds dead, that 

 with its beak it strikes its body that the blood issues forth; the 

 blood goes dropping, and falls on its young birds — the blood 

 has such quality that by it they come to life " 



and so on, all in sober earnest. But he made a botch of 

 it, for earlier and better accounts show that the male 

 bird kills the youngsters because when they begin to grow 

 large they rebel at his control and provoke him ; when the 

 mother returns she brings them to life by pouring over 

 them her blood. Moreover, there crept in a further cor- 

 ruption of the legend to the effect that the nestlings were 

 killed by snakes, as Drayton writes in his Noah's Flood: 



By them there sat the loving pellican 



Whose young ones, poison'd by the serpent's sting, 



With her own blood again to life doth bring. 



St. Jerome seems to have had this version in mind 

 when he made the Christian application, saying that as 

 the pelican's young, "killed by serpents," were saved by 

 the mother's blood, so was the salvation by the Christ re- 

 lated to those dead in sin. This point is elaborated some- 

 what in my chapter on Symbolism. 



