Olaus Magnus, Map of the Sea (Rome: Antoine Lafréry, 1539). Manuscript map, 52 x 79 centimeters. Web (Library of Congress).
“Sea Pig”
Olaus Magnus (1490-1557) was a Swedish writer and cartographer. This sea pig, which was compared to heretics that distorted truth and lived like swine, lived in the North Sea on Olaus Magnus’s 1539 Carta Marina, a lushly illustrated map that inspired many after it. The monstrous pig was claimed to have been observed in 1537. This speaks to the credulity of people at the time, who were hungry for the monstrous and supernatural and would make up stories of what they saw on their journeys.
The Sea Pig is most likely the “monsterfication” of a dolphin-like mammal called a porpoise. It is depicted with dragon feet, terrifying boar tusks, a pair of eyes in its loins at each side, and a third on its belly.
Nicholas Minutti