When Ælfric of Cerne and Eynsham was growing up, in the 960s and 70s, the world seemed to be at peace. Edgar was king and Christ was worshipped throughout his kingdom. Under his and archbishop Dunstan’s auspices, wayward monasteries were, sometimes forcibly, brought into line with Benedictine scrupulosity. Much of the English kingdom was settled by Scandinavians, but the Viking onslaught that first brought them there, which had scarred the end of the ninth century and the beginning of the tenth, was remembered only by the older generations.
All that changed in 991, when a fresh wave of heathen Danes landed in Essex and slew the ealdorman Byrhtrnoth at the battle of Maldon. The Vikings returned in 994, whereupon they were paid off by Edgar’s son, king Æthelred the Unready. That year, addressing archbishop Sigeric of Canterbury, Ælfric, then a monk at Cerne Abbas in Dorset, lamented that his people had been ‘struck by many injuries of hostile pirates’. Around 995, Ælfric embarked on his third major work, the Lives of Saints, which he dedicated to his patrons, distant kinsmen of the king named Æthelweard the Chronicler and Æthelmær the Stout. Like his earlier Catholic Homilies, the Lives of Saints consists predominantly of edifying stories of early Christian martyrs. But, seeking to strengthen English resolve in a moment of acute national crisis, and writing for members of the martial aristocracy, Ælfric decided to also supply something a little more bellicose, a story whose heroes enact violence rather than solely being subjected to it: a loose translation of the two books of Maccabees. There was, for Ælfric, just one problem. The Maccabees story had elephants; tenth-century Dorset didn’t. How do you describe an elephant to people who haven’t seen one? How do you describe an elephant when you haven’t seen one either?
The first and second books of Maccabees contain some of the most entertaining stories in scripture. I use the term ‘scripture’ with caution: although they remain in the Catholic Old Testament, they are not to be found in my scripture; and because we Jews never accepted them as canonical, the Protestant Reformers eventually chose to dispense with them as well. To Ælfric and his contemporaries, however, the first two books of Maccabees were as God-breathed as the rest.
The books are fascinating historical documents in their own right, and almost epic in scope: they begin with the death of Alexander the Great, and shed light on the burgeoning power of the Roman republic. They tell of the Seleucid occupation of Judaea in the second century BC. Incensed by Hellenic encroachments on Jewish life, a member of Jerusalem’s priestly elite, Mattathias, launches a campaign of violent resistance against the Seleucids. Attended by his five sons on his deathbed, he bequeaths to the third of them, Judas Machabeus, his mission; and Judas takes on his father’s mantle as the leader of a guerrilla holy war.
And then come the elephants. Antiochus IV Epiphanes dies in gruesome fashion, according to the account in 2 Maccabees 9:9 which Ælfric follows: ‘worms surged out of his tormented body, and he stank so foully that no one could carry him’. His son, Antiochus V Eupator, takes over. Determined to keep Judaea under his control, the younger Antiochus ‘gathered his army from near and far and sent a hundred thousand marching men and twenty thousand cavalry and thirty elephants, all tamed and trained for war with marvellous skill’. ‘To some people’, writes Ælfric, ‘this will seem strange to hear, because elephants have never come to England’. So he proceeds to provide his audience with a cursory portrait:
An elephant is a massive beast, bigger than a house, all encased in bones beneath the skin, except at the navel, and it never lies down. A mother is with foal for twenty-four months, and they live three hundred years if they are not injured, and people can tame them amazingly for battle.
Figure 1: Ælfric’s description of elephants in his Passio sanctorum Machabeorum, in the Lives of Saints collection, c.995: London, British Library, Cotton MS Julius E.vii f.148r
The odd detail about elephants being vulnerable at the navel becomes relevant to the Maccabees narrative when Eleazar Avaran, one of Judas’s brothers, ‘ran to the greatest elephant’ at the battle of Beth Zechariah because ‘he thought that the king was in the war house that it was carrying’. Eleazar ‘ran with a drawn sword through the middle of the troop and killed continuously on both sides so that they fell dying until he came to the elephant, and then he ran beneath it; then he pierced it at the navel so that they both lay there, each of them the other’s killer’. Another seemingly random detail later included by Ælfric – that elephants love to eat mulberries – is used to explain how they were incentivised, disciplined, and ‘encouraged’ by the Seleucid generals.
Figure 2: A depiction of the martyrdom of Eleazar Avaran; Morgan Library MS M.140 fol. 27r
Naturally Ælfric is eager, first and foremost, to emphasise the elephants’ awesome size. Strikingly, however, he makes no mention of their trunk. This is particularly strange because the main source of his knowledge about elephants (such as, for example, their long gestation periods), the Etymologiae of Isidore of Seville, does refer to the trunk, ‘like a snake protected by an ivory palisade’. Ælfric’s apparent lack of interest in this aspect of elephantine anatomy is reflected elsewhere in Anglo-Saxon portrayals of elephants. Although the Wonders of the East, a text composed c.1000 and now held in the British Library, refers to the elephant’s ‘long nose’, the accompanying illustration looks like a sabre-toothed tiger with a long tongue, burnt orange in hue. Paulus Orosius, in his Seven Books of History Against the Pagans, tells a story of a Roman soldier, Minucius, slicing off an elephant’s trunk; but the Old English translator of the text, possibly working at the court of Alfred the Great, has Minucius - like Eleazar Avaran - stab the elephant at its navel instead.
Figure 3: An elephant in the Wonders of the East; British Library, Cotton MS Tiberius B V/1, f. 81r
As the Old English Orosius shows, elephants were known among the English chiefly for their hardiness in battle. This already held true in the seventh century: a riddle composed by Aldhelm of Sherborne, for instance, describes them as ‘fierce’ and ‘bold’. On the continent, although they continued to evoke stories of Hannibal as well as the Maccabees, they were also associated with courtly splendour and magnificence. Einhard, the court biographer of Charlemagne (whose Life was known in Wessex by the end of the ninth century, as the template for Asser’s similar portrait of Alfred the Great) describes how ‘Aaron, the king of the Persians’ – Harun al-Rashid, the ‘Abbasid caliph – sent Charlemagne ‘at his request an elephant, which was then the only one he had’. This elephant, called Abu’l-Abbas, was dispatched from Baghdad to Bavaria with the assistance of one Frankish diplomat, Isaac the Jew; Abu’l-Abbas’s death in 810, four years before Charlemagne’s, was deemed to be of such significance that it merited mention in the Royal Frankish Annals.
The English kingdoms were hardly cut off from Charlemagne’s empire: Charlemagne corresponded with Offa, king of Mercia, and the Aachen scholar Alcuin of York never lost touch with the land of his birth. Thus it is plausible that some of the Abu’l-Abbas craze washed up on our shores. The ivory of his fellow creatures certainly did: the Genoels-Elderen diptych, for instance, is carved from elephant ivory and features an eighth-century Northumbrian inscription. But it proved a longer wait for a living, breathing elephant to set foot on British soil. The Annals of Innisfallen record that king Edgar of Scotland gave a large animal to the king of Munster, Muirchertach Ua Briain, in 1105; fancifully this might have been an elephant, but it was more probably a camel. The Ayyubid sultan al-Kamil sent an elephant to emperor Frederick II in 1229, which revived elephant-mania in western Europe. Matthew Paris, a monk of St Albans, was moved to draw one of Frederick’s famous elephant parades; since he was not an eye-witness to this event, he had to use his imagination. He did not, however, need to rely on his imagination for his second elephant drawing. Louis IX of France gifted an elephant to Henry III’s menagerie at the Tower of London in 1255 (where it was sustained on a steady diet of beef and red wine), and Matthew Paris became the first person in England to draw one from life.
Figure 4: the 'Cremona elephant' of Frederick II, in Matthew Paris's Chronica maiora; Corpus Christi College, Cambridge, Parker Library, MS 16, fol. 151v
Figure 5: Henry III's elephant; Corpus Christi College, Cambridge, Parker Library, MS 16l, f.iir
So imagination gave way to reality; biblical exoticism and otherworldly mystery to lifelike imitation. It is rare for medieval art to give us a sense of how a thing actually was, but with Henry III’s elephant we have it all: its matt colour, its pillar-like legs and hinging knees, its fanning ears, its almost sorrowful beady eyes, its textured trunk hanging down to the floor and curling inwards. I do not know which of Paris’s drawings would have been more impressive to a medieval observer, or which of the depictions would have demanded from him a greater suspension of disbelief – though one looks faintly ridiculous to the modern eye, and the other magisterial. That Isaac the Jew was able to transport Abu’l-Abbas, by land and by sea, to the realm of Charlemagne is something wondrous in itself; that a similar creature dwelt by the Thames in the thirteenth century is a further testament, of a sort, to human ingenuity. In the medieval west, the elephant was, above all, a symbol of man’s mastery over nature, an emblem of his divinely-ordained stewardship over the world. That Antiochus V Eupator was able to put the elephants to his own purposes, to ‘tame them amazingly for battle’, bespoke his terrible power. But if Eleazar could bring down even a mighty elephant, then so too could the English of Ælfric’s day, their hearts filled with courage by God, bring down their Viking enemies. The elephant thus represented peace as well as war: peace between man and the natural dangers which surround him, and the peace of salvation ensured by divine providence. ‘The whale is the biggest of all the fish,’ Ælfric comments in one of his digressions in his homily on Maccabees, ‘and the elephant is the biggest of all the animals – but nevertheless, a person’s reason can subdue them.’
Samuel Rubinstein is a finalist at Trinity College reading the Historical Tripos. He is interested first and foremost in the political thought of late antiquity and the early middle ages, across a broad geographical span that includes the Byzantine and Islamic worlds. He is also editor-in-chief of The Cambridge Globalist and a news columnist for Varsity.
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