(06-06-2019, 02:17 PM)-JKP- wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.There are several long-eared, long-nosed mammalian creatures with fish-tails, but I like the ones Koen posted because they have scales (many of the fish-mammal hybrid drawings in that series of manuscripts are without scales).
Yeah, and it wasn't really fixed between manuscripts, copyists would blend properties or add their own twists (often the text does not match at all or only partially describes the physical traits of the animal). It does not require much deviation to get the permutation present in the VM.
This all comes down to the (to me) fascinating question which kind of Cantimpré(tradition) manuscript the VM could have sampled from. My impression is often that it is stylistically close to the German examples, but - given parallels and differences with Valenciennes 320 - sits on a different node of transmission than the particular German manuscripts I have viewed. The Czech line is further removed both stylistically and in terms of content. The same goes for the Maerlant line. So something between the French originals and the German copies remains plausible.