April Fool’s Day

The Travels of Sir John Mandeville

This strange book has been called the first travel narrative. In fact, scholars believe it to be a compilation of materials from various medieval sources. One acerbic critic said that the farthest point Mandeville reached was the nearest library.

The writer calls himself Sir John Mandeville. He claims to be a knight who traveled the Holy Land and North Africa. He confidently asserts that he advised a sultan and otherwise hobnobbed with the Great Khan. He describes bizarre creatures and weird human animal hybrids.

The reader is a dupe who looks to this short classic for genuine history or geography. The attraction of this book is the writer’s style and wit in stitching together information from various sources as a record of his own journey. With deadpan humor he implies that non-Christians aren’t half bad and that Europe may not have the market cornered in scholarship and civilization. The writer is matter-of-fact as he simultaneously tells stretchers himself and warns us against believing things he hasn’t seen with his own eyes. He’s comically skeptical. He’s engaging.

His hoaxing appeals to us readers who like putting on spouses, siblings, parents and friends. I know of a kid who tied a rubber band around his tongue when he noticed that doing so made his speech sound weird. He then went to his mother, garbling, “Ma, I don’t feel so good, My head hurts.” Thinking he was having a stroke, the mother held the little prankster to her breast, saying “Oh, honey, we’ll get help. Don’t worry.” The poor woman still tells this story on the embarrassed son who has no recall of such an incident. Anyway, if you find pranks like this and tall tales amusing, you the kind of hoaxer and trickster who will like this book.

Read it an edition in modern English, such as the edition published by Penguin Classics, translated by W.R.D. Moseley.