The mystery of the medieval fighting snails
www.bbc.com
The pages of medieval books are stalked by a ferocious monster: the fighting snail.
  • Taleya@aussie.zoneEnglish
    1441·
    11 个月前

    Monks did most of the writing and artwork.

    Monks main diet was brassicas.

    They grew their own food.

    Do the math, it’s wish fulfillment

  • starman2112English
    85·
    11 个月前

    The exact same thing will happen hundreds of years from now with amogus memes and :.|:;

  • afraid_of_zombies@lemmy.worldEnglish
    72·
    11 个月前

    I saw this years ago and I still think it was primitive office humor. Snails ate delicious plants and there were probably monks waging a war against them. The incredulity of fighting so hard against an enemy so weak was funny.

    • butterflyattack@lemmy.worldEnglish
      18·
      11 个月前

      This seems like a plausible explanation, but I’d maybe expect to see a few giant slugs and caterpillars - these are at least as damaging to crops as snails.

    • postmateDumbass@lemmy.worldEnglish
      121·
      11 个月前

      Im betting they got all done up in their armor and went to fight in muddy battlefields, and when they were not fighting the enemy they were dealing with snails crawling inside the armor and being all slimy and disgusting crawling between the knights legs and the armor.

    • Kogasa@programming.devEnglish
      18·
      11 个月前

      Our DNA never forgets. That’s why to this day, every human has an innate and irrepressible fear of snails. It’s true.

      • bouh@lemmy.worldEnglish
        18·
        11 个月前

        Well, in France people eat them… It could still be related though…

        • theneverfox@pawb.socialEnglish
          71·
          11 个月前

          Most things are actually delicious when cooked well. Alligator? Stingray? Guinea pig? Cow tongue? The heart of nearly any creature? All of them are better than chicken

          We eat things not because they’re delicious, but because they’re convenient and reasonably delicious. Snail used to be a delicacy… They don’t eat it in France much anymore because they’re not convenient anyone

          • Herbal GamerEnglish
            5·
            11 个月前

            We eat things not because they’re delicious, but because they’re convenient and reasonably delicious.

            Like children.

          • Sylvartas@lemmy.worldEnglish
            5·
            11 个月前

            IIRC snail was originally a survival food. I guess over time people kept refining the preparation process and accompaniments until it became a delicacy (indeed, probably because it’s very far from being a convenient dish to make).

            Source : am french. I ate snails yesterday for Christmas Eve’s dinner, actually.

          • Magnor@lemmy.magnor.ovhEnglish
            3·
            11 个月前

            We still do eat them. Well at least I assume some people do as I can’t stand it. But you still find frozen snails in pretty much every supermarket around where I live.

  • athos77@kbin.social
    451·
    11 个月前

    A few hundred years from now, historians are going to be equally confused by the horse-sized duck images …

      • athos77@kbin.social
        12·
        11 个月前

        "We hypothesize that the bananas of the 21st century were a different type, one that grew in a wider range of climates. We’re not certain why this breed seem to have randomly fallen from the trees so often, but perhaps it helps explain all these other drawings of inattentive humans slipping on random banana peels as well. … "

        • Drivebyhaiku@lemmy.worldEnglish
          11·
          11 个月前

          … Actually the lore behind banana peel gags is more interesting than you think. They were a super cheap snack in Victorian London and the bananas they had were the gros Michel cultivar which had really thick slippery peels and a lack of general cuture of actually throwing garbage in the bin meant that a lot of them rotted on the street so early comedy stage acts started using them as a gag because slipping on them was a common sometimes life threatening hazard.

          But because art borrows from art the banana peel gag outlasted the cultural problem that sparked it by over a century.

    • afraid_of_zombies@lemmy.worldEnglish
      11·
      11 个月前

      There was this thing going around my work where people would caption a nuke explosion with a mention of a certain guy using the microwave again. There was an incident with a break room microwave. Now imagine if that survives and a thousand years passes.

      We believe the one called Gary was a deity of all things nuclear to these people.

      • OpenStars@kbin.social
        131·
        11 个月前

        Porn will train the next-gen AIs and, since AI cannot tell the difference, in the future 90% (-99%?) of all language will be based on porn, just as (looking back with 20/20 hindsight) the proportion of the current internet would imply must have been true of today’s culture.

        “Yes spank me harder daddy” will come to mean “I would like a promotion in my place of employment, so that I can take on exciting new challenges in this fast-paced, team environment”:-)

        Ofc, “help me stepbro, I am stuck” will still mean the same thing as it always has.

        spoiler

        the joke here is that the change in meaning has already occurred

        Future generations are going to be so confused… :-P So exactly as we are now, I guess? :-D

    • shroomaroomboom@kbin.social
      7·
      11 个月前

      Well Dodo’s were big ass duck like birds, though not as near as big as a horse. Weird thing, they haven’t been extinct that long.

  • SlothMama@lemmy.worldEnglish
    27·
    11 个月前

    Honestly, it would be amazing if the answer was that large mollusks actually existed and were poorly documented.

      • BleatingZombie@lemmy.worldEnglish
        14·
        11 个月前

        I’m not an expert by ANY means, but I think there needs to be strict conditions to make fossils. I think most bones just eventually turn to dust

        • wolfshadowheart@slrpnk.netEnglish
          7·
          11 个月前

          That’s true although I would also hypothesize that giant mollusks would likely fall into a biome that has these conditions.

          That said, I could see body of a slug not really getting fossilized. The shell probably would be, but maybe not depending on circumstances.

      • SlothMama@lemmy.worldEnglish
        10·
        11 个月前

        The bodies yes, the shells I imagine were fashioned into exceptional armor locked in ancient vaults.

  • cannache@slrpnk.netEnglish
    23·
    11 个月前

    Because they probably had a great sense of humour, comedy clubs and memes back then too, but hey let’s ignore that for just a moment to imagine how hardcore a knight you would have to be to fight off Cthulhu snails

  • A_Random_Idiot@lemmy.worldEnglish
    211·
    11 个月前

    I think we know the real answer.

    Humanity was ruled by giant snails and their hyper intelligent queen, and it was only through the bravery of these fine knights were our shackles cast off and the mollusk menace thrown down.

    And, in great effort to hide our collective shame, all knowledge about this was intentionally purged, Save for a few manuscripts who managed to be overlooked or were kept in hiding, so hints of humanities true history would be known.