Sea Monsters on Medieval and Renaissance Maps

detailed chapters, each devoted to a different sea monster. These are divided into Olaus Magnus’s commentary on the monster; a full-colour, detailed double-page spread illustrating it; an ancestral lore section documenting the monster’s origin and occurrence in the texts used by Olaus; a discussion of the the map’s legacy relative to the monster; and the modern-day take on the monster.

The book is completed with useful appendices and an index. In the glossary, Nigg speculates on which animal(s) may have inspired each of the monsters; this will interest mainstream zoologists and cryptozoologists.

Van Duzer’s book pursues a chronologically arranged path through the history of sea monsters on maps, from classical antecedents to the final examples of note from the late 16th and early 17th Centuries. His fact-filled, monster-brimming text is divided into sections with attention-grabbing titles such as ‘Sea Monsters on the Ceiling’, ‘How to Buy a Sea Monster’, ‘Lighting a Fire on a Whale’s Back’, and ‘The Curious Career of the Flying Turtle’. There are illustrations throughout, an extensive series of endnotes and two different types of index.

Nigg’s volume wins hands-down on the illustrations front, with dazzling images on every page. Van Duzer’s suffers from a surfeit of dull browns and sepia pictures. By virtue of its larger page size, Nigg’s book is able to present its images in a larger, clearer, more detailed format. Its layout, in which each monster type is assessed separately, means that information is very accessible, collating all that the reader needs to know about each type in a single location. This information is more dispersed in Van Duzer’s book.

Van Duzer’s book is more fun, due to his talent for unearthing amid the standard fare all manner of quirky, unexpected information. He is also documenting many different maps, not just one, so the range and variety of monsters he covers is greater.

Both books are comprehensive and remarkably lacking in the basic zoological errors that, sadly, I have come to expect in even the most extensively researched cryptozoological tomes.

So, which is the better of these two very fine books? For sheer beauty, Nigg’s; for compulsive reading, Van Duzer’s.

These labours of love will make handsome, informative and invaluable additions to the library of any sea monster enthusiast or cartography aficionado.

If you’re seeking the origins of and explanations for sea unicorns and sea pigs, giant sea worms and even more gigantic sea serpents, pristers and krakens, the rockas, owl-faced ziphius, aloes, hoge, duck tree, winged sea dragons, mer-folk, sirens, island whales, and much more besides, you definitely need these books. Highly recommended!