Travelers’ tales collapsed observation into legend for over a millennium

Evidence

Perhaps the most fertile source of information was travelers’ tales—a discourse where description faded imperceptibly into legend. The following fifteenth-century German text summarizes more than a thousand years of travelers’ tales, which themselves often drew on religious and classical authority: In the land of Indian there are men with dogs’ heads who talk by barking [and] … feed by catching birds.… Others again have only one eye in the forehead.… In Libya many are born without heads and have a mouth and eyes. Many are of both sexes.… Close to Paradise on the River Ganges live men who eat nothing. For … they absorb liquid nourishment through a straw [and] … live on the juice of flowers.… Many have such large underlips that they can cover their whole faces with them.… In the land of Ethiopia many people walk bent down like cattle, and many live four hundred years. Many have horns, long noses and goats’ feet.… In Ethiopia towards the west many have four eyes … [and] in Eripia there live beautiful people with the necks and bills of cranes. — Stuart Hall, Essential Essays, Volume 2, 601

Categorization

• FICTION: The monstrous-human catalogue (dog-headed men, one-eyed people, four-hundred-year lives) is a ready-made bestiary for a fantasy or worldbuilding setting.