Well, as you all know well, my ramblings take me to all sorts of corners of the internet. This time I wanted to know about dragons in the Mont Cenis area of the Alps in France. Which is how I came upon the above illustration. I’d seen it before but hadn’t known exactly what it depicted. Now I know. It’s the taming of the fierce tarasque monster by Saint Martha. Not Mont Cenis exactly, more the Rhône, but it turned up in my search.
Medieval monsters take many forms, but the tarasque is the first one I’ve come across that was supposedly half tortoise, although not in the above illustration, in which it seems to be an overweight wingless dragon. The tarasque of Mont Cenis is the one that’s half tortoise, see below.
Just how fearsome can such a creature have been? Well, given that it also had the head of a ferocious lion and six legs, perhaps it could move a little faster than the unwary might expect. Certainly faster than the unfortunate man whose legs stick out of the creature’s mouth in the top illustration!
There are many other descriptions too, of course, (including a fish with what looks like the front half of a boar!) but the tortoise part certainly caught my attention.
An image search online will turn up countless representations of the legend and the tarasque, and you can also find many sites concerned with the story of the tarasque, but here are four informative links.
(1) https://folklore-society.com/resources/tarasque/
(2) https://curiousrambler.com/saint-martha-and-the-tarasque/
(3) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tarasque
(4) https://aleteia.org/2019/07/29/did-you-know-st-martha-became-a-dragon-slayer/
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