Care of Magical Creatures

Underground Giant
Athanasius Kircher has been described as ‘a giant among 17th-century scholars’. It is fitting that in his work entitled Mundus Subterraneus (‘The Underground World’), he claimed that an enormous skeleton had been discovered in a Sicilian cave in the 14th century.

The giant reputedly stood 90 metres tall, and is shown here in comparison to a normal human, the Biblical giant Goliath, a Swiss giant and a Mauritanian giant.

An Enchanting Siren
Normally a siren is depicted as a creature with a woman’s head and a bird’s body, but in this medieval French manuscript it is shown with a fish-like tail. The siren is said to be violent in nature: she enchants sailors with her birdsong and voluptuous body, before dragging them from their ships to eat their flesh.

On the shore stands an onocentaur, with the body of a man as far as the navel, and the body of an ass below.

A Game Book Mermaid
This delightful little ‘game book’ was possibly made as a love token. Using a series of flaps, different creatures could be created using the body parts of mythical beasts and real animals.

Here is a mermaid, who can be given legs to become a woman or a man’s head to become a fish-man.

Bird-Eating Spiders
Maria Sibylla Merian was a ground-breaking naturalist, the first woman to lead a scientific expedition, to Surinam, in 1699–1701.

It was on that trip that she discovered this giant, bird-eating spider. Sadly, she was denounced as a fantasist by some of her male peers, and it was not until 1863 that this spider’s existence was finally accepted.

Aragog
This preparatory painting by Jim Kay captures every creepy detail of Aragog, the carnivorous spider that Harry Potter and Ron Weasley encountered in the Forbidden Forest.

In the background, hundreds of spiders’ legs become indistinguishable from the spiky trees around them.

The strands of the spiders’ webs gleam white in Harry’s wandlight.

A Knight and his Hippogriff

Ludovico Ariosto was the first to describe the hippogriff, in his epic poem Orlando Furioso (1516).

In this illustration, the knight, Ruggiero, has tethered his hippogriff to a tree. Unbeknown to him, the tree was actually another knight who had been transformed by an evil sorceress.

Buckbeak
This beautiful painting by Jim Kay shows Buckbeak the Hippogriff, lying on Hagrid’s bed, a snack of dead ferrets under its claws. Kay drew the interior of Hagrid’s cabin from the real-life gardener’s hut at Calke Abbey in Derbyshire.

The vibrant blue highlights echo the bluebells growing in the woods at Calke.

A Simurgh
The simurgh was traditionally portrayed with a canine head, pointed ears and a ‘peacock’ tail. In Persian literature, it is usually depicted in flight with fantastic swirling tail-feathers. In this bestiary, the author describes the simurgh as strong enough to easily carry off an elephant, and it is said to lay an egg once every 300 years.

Jim Kay's Phoenix
Jim Kay’s preparatory study captures the brilliant colours of the phoenix’s feathers; the image seems to soar across the surface of the page.

The painting also includes details of the egg, the eye and a single phoenix feather, all of which helped the artist to build up the final composite illustration.

A Lion-Like Unicorn
In mythology, the unicorn came in all shapes and sizes.

A poem by the Byzantine writer Manuel Philes described the unicorn as a wild beast with a dangerous bite: it had the tail of a boar and a lion’s mouth.

Five Species of Unicorn

Pierre Pomet, a Parisian pharmacist, identified no fewer than five species of unicorn, including the camphur (a horned ass from Arabia) and the pirassoipi (a unicorn with twin horns, a contradiction in terms). Pomet stated that unicorn horn was ‘well used, on account of the great properties attributed to it, principally against poisons’.

An Outstanding Owl

This hand-coloured illustration of a pair of snowy owls is found in the enormous Birds of America, which shows at actual size every bird native to North America. The finished volume is just over 3¼ feet (1m) tall and is the most expensive printed book ever sold at auction. Snowy owls are native to the Arctic regions of North America and Eurasia.

The female, at the front in this picture, has more flecks of black plumage.

A Toxic Toad

Toads have featured in magical folklore for centuries. Their uses range from predicting the weather to bringing good luck, and they often feature in folk remedies: for example, rubbing a toad on a wart was said to cure it, but only if you impaled the toad and left it to die.

The cane toad, shown here, is very large and can be identified by its unwebbed hands and feet. Its venom glands produce a toxic milky secretion.