The origins of the lion with a thorn in its paw
Ajogger strangled a mountain lion that attacked him in the foothills of the Rockies this week. It’s the stuff of fable.
One story about a lion came down from the ancient world in two versions, and both were rendered into English by William Caxton, who was as successful as a publisher as he was as a printer. One he included in his edition of Aesop’s Fables. It is not really from Aesop, but tells the tale that we know as Androcles and the Lion. This had been included by Aulus Gellius in his admirably discursive Attic Nights.
Caxton’s version has a shepherd take a thorn out of a lion’s paw. When the shepherd was condemned to be devoured by wild beasts in Rome, for some “crymynous dede”, the same lion recognised him and “lykked hym with his tongue”. The shepherd was reprieved and the lion sent back to the forest.
But the same basic story is also told by Caxton in his translation of the medieval bestseller, The Golden Legend, a compilation of saints’ legends put together in the 13th century by Jacobus de Voragine. This time it is St Jerome, at his monastery in Bethlehem, who takes the thorn from the lion’s paw.
The lion stays as a tame companion and is given the job of accompanying an ass each day as it fetches firewood. One day, as the lion sleeps, some passing merchants steal the ass, and when the lion comes home without it he is blamed for eating it.
The lion, now given the chore of bearing home the firewood, spots the ass with the merchants one day and scares them off with his roar. The vindicated lion “began to run joyously throughout all the monastery as he was wont to do, and kneeled down before every brother and fawned them with his tail”.
St Jerome is depicted in medieval art with a lion beside him or curled up like a cat in his study, where this fourth-century Father of the Church was busy at his translation of the Bible into Latin.
In a way the lion is to Jerome what the wolf was later to St Francis at Gubbio: a savage creature tamed by the holiness of the saint. In that way, saints resemble Daniel in the Lions’ Den, a favourite choice for early Christian wall-paintings.
As in the pre-christian versions of the folk-story of the lion with the thorn in its paw, lions really were captured and set on unfortunates in the Roman circus. It was this prospect that St Ignatius of Antioch faced at the end of the 1st century in letters written on the way to martyrdom in Rome: “I am the wheat of God and am ground by the teeth of the wild beasts, that I may be found the pure bread of Christ.” Unlike Daniel, Ignatius was savaged by the lions as he expected. At the 4th-century Soumela monastery near Trebizond on the Black Sea, a powerful wall painting shows him with two large lions.
The lion as an instrument of hell was taken up in the Offertory prayer in the Mass for the dead: Libera eas de ore leonis, ne absorbeat eas tartarus – “Deliver them from the mouth of the lion, may the abyss not swallow them up.” Hell’s mouth itself is depicted in medieval manuscripts as a gaping jaw of a vast lionlike creature, into which the damned throng.
When a lion roared at Samson “the Spirit of the Lord came mightily upon him, and he rent him as he would have rent a kid, and he had nothing in his hand”. It was the honeycomb made by bees in this lion’s carcass that inspired the weird label on Lyle’s Golden Syrup, with its picture of the dead lion and the biblical quotation: “Out of the strong came forth sweetness.”
All in all, lions are a big legend for a jogger to live up to.