"King of the Children of Pride:" Symbolism, Physicality, and the Old English Whale

The chapter traces the misconception of the malevolent whale to a conflation of concepts and confusion of loanwords within Anglo-Saxon England, where the Old English poetic version of the Physiologus tradition, the Exeter Book 'The Whale', endows the animal with evil intent for the first time. The cultural semantic analysis explores the natural historical and mythological roots for the Cetus and Balenus whale which are ambiguously mapped onto the Old English pair 'hwael' and 'hron'. The study also offers possible real explanations for two of the more outrageous stories that find their way into later bestiaries.