Beachcombing's Bizarre History Blog

Chinese Ostriches The Qianling Mausoleum was used for three hundred years (from the seventh to the very early tenth century) by Tang dynasty emperors and their court officials. It includes, in some of its magnificent stone sculptures, a large flightless bird, pictured above. This bird is clearly an ostrich, which begs a number of questions. […]

The half million club is a select group of nine human settlements that managed to break the half million population mark in Antiquity or in the Middle Ages: the biggest cities around before the discovery of the New World. To give some sorts of limit to this exercise six chronological moments have been chosen at […]

It is a WIBT (wish I’d been there) moment from Chinese history. One night in the mid-late eighth century the warriors of the Chinese warlord Ch’Eng-szu (704-778) were preparing a sacrificial feast. Some struck up music to add to the festive atmosphere when suddenly a very strange thing. Dozens of the war horses in the field […]

Mermaid images from medieval Britain and not particularly common. There are quite a few medieval carvings, some explored in an interesting  2013 book Of Sirens and Centaurs by Alex Woodcock. But actual drawings or paintings are rare. This is why this fabulous doodle in a fourteenth-century Welsh manuscript is so exciting. The manuscript in question […]

  Beach has been worrying for a while about  the death of the last Abbasid Caliph in February 1258. The man in question, al-Musta’sim-Billah Abu-Ahmad Abdullah bin al-Mustansir-Billah had had the misfortune, fifteen years into his reign, to be confronted with a massive Mongol invasion under Hulegu. Al-Musta’sim-Billah was not a particularly martial sort and […]

If you are going to carry out massacres then it is important to be able to count how many soldiers (and all too often civilians) that you are killing. From scalping in the American west to the Einsatzgruppen tally sheets on the Eastern Front in the Second World War military organizations have come up with all […]

Different countries, of course, have different shape-shifters. Northern Europe and France have a strong werewolf tradition. Amerindian peoples have a lot of changing into birds. In northern Scandinavia shaman became deer. Early modern Britons did not change into bears, but they often met headless bears that changed into other things: confusing I know. Vampires are […]

Anthony Kaldellis, A Cabinet of Byzantine Curiosities: Strange Tales and Surprising Facts from History’s Most Orthodox Empire (OUP 2017) Between about 1880 and 1960 British and American publishers occasionally brought out curiosity books in small print runs by capable people. These books were on delightful but inconsequential subjects: the eccentricities of Chinese court etiquette; descriptions of […]

The Hundred Years War in France and three damaged people are thrown together by events: the grand-daughter of a witch; a knight with half his face burnt off; and a cowardly young man. The knight leads them on a trail across the burning countryside. He is clearly rushing towards his destruction. The young man and […]

Beach has previously interested himself with winged fairies and today he came across this very early image from the Utrecht Psalter. The Utrecht Psalter was almost certainly created in northern France in the ninth century and has fabulous line drawings that will bring you as close as you will ever come to the early Middle Ages: Beach […]

Early medieval and medieval literature is full of fairies, kobolds, gnomes and other supernatural entities. But when we come to try and understand how our ancestors envisaged these supernatural beasts we run into problems. We don’t, unfortunately, have early illustrations of fairies and their ilk; or at least we don’t have illustrations that can be […]

Norwood was a rural area to the south of London that was sucked into the metropolis in the mid, late nineteenth century. If you want to go and imagine where the nightingale once sang and where Surrey farmers shot rabbits, head off for the mean streets around Crystal Palace, sit down and weep. ‘This is the […]

This weird little passage comes from the thirteenth century Ynglinga saga. It is mainly about the mythic Norse past. But it also includes one of our earliest representatives of a dvergr or dwarf: in this case a rock fairy. The human victim, a Swedish king, is drunk and things don’t end particularly well. Sveigdir went […]

In the rusty old filing cabinet that provides fodder for this blog there is somewhere a file on men being buried upright. However, Beach has failed to find said file for the last three years, so despairing he hands the problem over to his readers. Famous or not so famous people from history who decided […]

Curious about ring legends? This blogger recently went through the international folklore indexes in search of rings so you don’t have to: you can waste a lot of time there… Yes, he found the boring old chestnuts: ring found in fish; ring cut from corpse etc. etc. But there are also some marvelously bizarre and […]