Some Questions from the Travels

While reading The Travels of Sir John Mandeville, I thought of a few questions, which I've listed below. This may be an indication of my struggle with the text, since my mind was obviously not analyzing and absorbing the information as it should have. Although meant in jest, I did have these reactions to Mandeville's interesting accounts of life abroad:

- Since there are people who have faces on their backs, wouldn't their backs technically be their fronts and their fronts be their backs? (p 137)

- If anyone on the isle of people with only one eye has bad vision, would they get "glass" or "contact" instead of "glasses" or "contacts"?

- Is there an equivalent to being beheaded or hanged on the isle of headless people?

- If the men of great crafts were "bound by a vow to his god that he could show the method to no man except his eldest son" that explains why these crafts no longer exist! Each one must have slowly died out with each man who had no sons, right?

- Do the people in the Great Khan's Empire not eat or breed pigs (157) because they are descendants of Ham (145)?

- Were the Great Khan's philosophers the first people to invent "Simon Says" (151 - be silent, put hand in front of mouth, put finger in ear, etc)

- After eating the fish from the Gravelly Sea, was the meat a little dry (169)? Or maybe if they reach the Gravelly Sea by the river full of precious stones, they tasted more rich?

- Did Prester John only lay with his wife four times a year because he couldn't keep up with her, like Messer Ricciardo in Dioneo's second story in The Decameron, or was he really that pious (170)?

- When Mandeville was describing the isle of Pentoxere and how Catolonabes drew young people into "Paradise" by doing special deeds for him, did anyone else think of pediphilia and maybe another infamous modern day example (171-2)?

- Given the one-footed men and the country covered in darkness (137, 163), I had to wonder if C.S. Lewis read this before writing The Voyage of the Dawn Treader in his Chronicles of Narnia series.

Again, many of these questions are just silly and I hope it was obvious that I am not posing these questions to spur an intellectual debate. I just thought I'd share my musings.