Where are the dog heads?

Everyone in the Middle Ages knew that St. Christopher was a dog head, a man’s body with a dog’s head. A Welsh poem about King Arthur told of his battle with the dogheads near Edinburgh: “By the hundred they fell” before Excalibur.

But where did they live? A few said Scandinavia, but most believed they were an Oriental race. When William of Rubruck traveled from Constantinople to Karakorum, the capital of the Mongol empire, in the 1250s, he was surprised to find – no dogheads! And when John de Marigonollis went to China in the following century, they asked him if he knew of dogheads in the West .

The “other” is always exotic, no?

Next
YOU MIGHT ALSO LIKE

Restoring Man at Notre Dame

Carl R. Trueman

It is fascinating to be an outsider on the inside of an institution going through times of…

Deliver Us from Evil

Kari Jenson Gold

In a recent New York Times article entitled “Freedom With a Side of Guilt: How Food Delivery…

Natural Law Needs Revelation

Peter J. Leithart

Natural law theory teaches that God embedded a teleological moral order in the world, such that things…