'Yoda' Turns Up in Medieval Manuscript

Lookalike spotted in 14th-century French volume
By Neal Colgrass,  Newser Staff
Posted Apr 19, 2015 4:00 PM CDT
'Yoda' Turns Up in Medieval Manuscript
A rather Yoda-like drawing from the religious manuscript, "The Decretals of Gregory IX with gloss of Bernard of Parma."   (The British Library)

Readers of online medieval manuscripts—whoever you are—may be intrigued to know about a 14th-century image of a guy who looks much like Yoda, wide-spread ears and all, NPR reports. But is it really him? "I'd love to say that it really was Yoda, or was drawn by a medieval time traveler," says curator Julian Harrison, who runs the British Library's Medieval Manuscripts blog. "It's actually an illustration to the biblical story of Samson—the artist clearly had a vivid imagination!" It's from a religious volume written in France in the early 1300s called "The Decretals of Gregory IX with gloss of Bernard of Parma" (so it would fit Yoda's 900-year lifespan, if he had lived today).

Even without the Yoda lookalike, Harrison's blog is doing well, attracting about 36,000 hits a day and supporting his Twitter account's 23,000 followers, reports the Guardian. "We’ve an incredibly international readership,” he says. "We have viewers in Antarctica, Greenland and every country you can think of, with perhaps the exception of North Korea." The blog includes quirky posts like "Ten Things to Know About Medieval Monsters" and "Lolcats of the Middle Ages" as well as more typical, if attractive, entries. "People are often unaware of how beautiful the illuminated manuscripts are and how technically skilled they were in the medieval age," Harrison says. (More Yoda stories.)

Get the news faster.
Tap to install our app.
X
Install the Newser News app
in two easy steps:
1. Tap in your navigation bar.
2. Tap to Add to Home Screen.

X