Thursday, July 9, 2009

Translating Through Time

Got Medieval needs your help!

Explain why a knight fighting a snail is funny.

Apparently you can find that particular image all over in the margins of medieval manuscripts, but no one at the time ever bothered to explain the joke, leaving modern viewers baffled.

I know why I find a knight fighting a snail to be amusing: 'cause it's a knight, and you expect them to be all serious, and then there's one getting all worked up about a snail, which is kind of a silly-looking creature to be threatening a knight.

But I don't necessarily expect that my sensibilities would have been shared by the artists who made these little pictures. Nor would I expect my mild amusement to be the foundation for an extensive series of illustrations.

So basically I got nothin.'

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