Parandrus

Somewhere in the cold scrub north of the Black Sea, a hunting party walks past a thicket and finds nothing in it. There is a smell of wet leaf mould and crushed juniper, and one patch of ground that looks faintly wrong, a shade too much like the rest of the ground. The men move on. Behind them the patch of ground breathes, lifts a heavy antlered head, and walks away.

The beast in the thicket has had two names and two homelands, and the confusion between them is most of its history. It begins as the tarandos, and the first surviving notice of it is a single paragraph in the collection of oddities that circulated under Aristotle’s name, On Marvellous Things Heard. Among the Scythians called the Geloni, it says, there is a beast, excessively rare, called the tarandos, which changes the colour of its hair according to the place it is in. It becomes the same colour as the trees and the ground, and for that reason it is hard to catch. Then the compiler pauses on the detail that actually interests him. Other creatures change their skin, the chameleon and the octopus among them. This one changes its hair.

That distinction is the whole creature. Every later writer repeats it, and every later writer stops in the same place to say that it is the strange part.

Pliny gave it the description that stuck. In the eighth book of the Natural History he sets the tarandrus in Scythia and builds it piece by piece: the size of an ox, a head larger than a stag’s but not unlike one, branching horns, cloven hooves, and a fleece as shaggy as a bear’s. The hide, he adds, is so hard that they make cuirasses out of it. When alarmed it imitates the colours of all the trees and bushes and flowers and places where it lurks, and is consequently rarely caught. It would be surprising enough, he says, that the body should have such variety. It is more surprising that the fleece does. And then, almost in passing, the line that undercuts the whole marvel: when it happens to be its own colour, it looks like a donkey.

Aelian, writing his miscellany of animal lore in Greek, kept the Scythian setting and pushed the transformation further, saying the tarandus adopts so infinite a variety of colours as to bewilder the eye. He also recorded what the Scythians did about it. They covered their shields with its hide and reckoned it a good answer to a spear. There is something bracing about that. The most elusive animal on the northern frontier ends up as a facing on somebody’s shield, its concealment having failed exactly once.

Then, in the third century, Solinus copied Pliny and made two changes. He moved the animal to Aethiopia, and he called it the parandrus. Everything else survives intact in his chapter thirty: the ox size, the cloven prints, the branching horns, the deer-like head, the bear’s colour and equally shaggy hair, and the shifting when it is alarmed, so that in cover it becomes similar to whatever is nearest, white like a stone, green like a thicket, or whatever else it prefers. A continent and a consonant, and the beast was reborn. The initial T slid to a P somewhere in the manuscript tradition and nobody has ever satisfactorily explained it.

The move south was less of a relocation than it looks. Ethiopia in this literature is not a country so much as a direction, a standing label for the place past the edge of anything a European reader could check, and the Getty’s curators of the medieval bestiary have said as much plainly: the parandrus and the yale were both understood to live in faraway places where no European had likely been. Scythia had served the same purpose for the Greeks. The animal simply followed the frontier as the frontier moved.

Under that name it had a long and busy medieval life. Jacques de Vitry, writing his history of the Holy Land around 1220, called it a shapeshifting species and gave it the ox’s height, the deer’s head, the branched antlers and the bear’s dense fur. Thomas of Cantimpré, working through the natural world a few decades later, wrote it up as the pirander and quietly swapped the cloven hooves for a pig’s feet. In the Rochester Bestiary, made in England around 1230, a scribe opened the entry with the flat declarative that its whole tradition had been building towards: Ethiopia emittit bestiam parandrum nomine. Ethiopia sends forth a beast by the name of parandrus. In another English bestiary of about 1200, now British Library Royal MS 12 C.xix, it shares an opening with the manticore and the yale, three animals of nowhere in particular, illuminated with the same care as the ox and the hound.

Most bestiary beasts are made to mean something. The panther prefigures Christ, the hydrus goes down the crocodile’s throat like a harrowing of hell. The parandrus mostly just hides. It is one of the entries the moralists never really got hold of, and it survives on description alone.

It did escape the manuscripts once or twice. In an English passion play written around 1440, a tormentor spits the word at his prisoner, and that line is the earliest recorded use of the name in English. It is not a compliment. A little over a century later Rabelais gave the creature its best scene. A Scythian presents Pantagruel with a tame tarand, tractable and easily kept as a lamb, and aboard ship the animal quietly betrays everyone’s wardrobe. Beside Panurge in his coarse kersey coat its hair turns grey. Beside Pantagruel in his scarlet mantle it goes red. Beside the pilot, dressed in the Egyptian manner, it turns white. Left alone and frightened of nothing, its coat settles back into the colour of the donkeys of Meung.

Read Pliny’s list once more without the marvel attached. An ox-sized animal in the far north with branching antlers, cloven hooves, a heavy shaggy coat and a hide tough enough to make armour from. That is a reindeer, described by a man who had never seen one, reported at third hand from people who had. Cuvier eventually took up the question of whether the tarand had ever been a real animal at all. The zoology reduces cleanly. The colour is the part that will not.

What the parandrus can do amounts to a single trick performed absolutely. Its concealment is not a change of skin but a change of pelt, which no other haired animal in the ancient catalogue manages, and it is complete enough that hunters walk past it. Its hide is armour. That is the entire inventory. What it cannot do is more interesting. The trick only works when the animal is frightened and already in cover, which means it is useless in the open and useless in a fight. Nothing in the whole record has it bite, charge, or harm anybody. It is excessively rare, which protects it and also means it has no numbers to fall back on. Its own colour, when nothing is frightening it, is the dull brown-grey of a pack animal. And the pelt that saves it is precisely the thing worth killing it for, the one part of itself its camouflage cannot take off.

Every writer who described it, from the Greek compiler to the Rochester scribe, was describing something he had been assured is almost never caught. The record of the parandrus is a record of an absence, kept in unusual detail: the height, the hooves, the branch of the antlers, the depth of the fleece, and then the animal itself gone into the thicket, the exact colour of the thicket.

Frequently Asked Questions

What is the Parandrus?

The Parandrus is a legendary ox-sized beast of Greek, Roman and medieval bestiary tradition, best known for changing colour to match its surroundings. It has a deer-like head, branching antlers, cloven hooves and a shaggy bear-coloured coat. Unusually, the colour change affects its hair rather than just its skin, which is the detail ancient writers found most remarkable.

Are the Parandrus and the Tarandus the same animal?

Yes. The creature first appears in Greek sources as the tarandos or tarandus, living in Scythia among the Geloni, and is described that way by Aristotle’s compilers, Pliny and Aelian. In the third century Solinus relocated it to Ethiopia and called it the parandrus, and the medieval bestiaries followed him. The change of name appears to be a corruption of the initial letter rather than a description of a different animal.

How does the Parandrus change colour?

The Parandrus changes colour when it is alarmed and taking cover, matching whatever is nearest to it. Solinus described it becoming white like a stone or green like a thicket, and Pliny wrote that it imitates the colours of the trees, bushes and flowers among which it hides. Because the change extends into its shaggy hair rather than only its skin, the animal was said to be very difficult to catch.

Was the Parandrus based on a real animal?

Pliny’s physical description matches a reindeer closely: an ox-sized northern animal with branching antlers, cloven hooves, a thick shaggy coat and a hide tough enough to make body armour from. The naturalist Georges Cuvier later examined whether the tarand had been a real creature. The colour-changing ability is the element that has no natural counterpart in the account.

Where does the Parandrus appear in medieval art and literature?

The Parandrus appears in Latin bestiaries including the Rochester Bestiary of about 1230 and British Library Royal MS 12 C.xix of about 1200, where it is illustrated alongside the manticore and the yale. It is also described by Jacques de Vitry and by Thomas of Cantimpre, who called it the pirander. Outside the bestiaries it turns up as an insult in an English passion play of about 1440 and as a tame shipboard pet in Rabelais.

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