Come closer, ladies and gentlemen, today we’re freaking out!
Finally, it is not necessarily more frightening than this beginning of the year 2022. At the beginning of March 1496, an incredible thing happened in a small village of Sundgau, south of Mulhouse, between Dietwiller and Neder-Steinbrùnn, Steinbrunn -le-Bas, in Landser. Landser, where one morning in March 1496 a sow gave birth to a strange litter.
Among the piglets, one of them had two tongues and four ears, two bellies and eight legs. I don’t know if you can imagine the thing. It’s as if two pigs were fused at the shoulders, with four hind legs, two forelegs, and two on the back, like wings that don’t belong there.
This is how the Strasbourg resident Sébastien Brant, then dean of the University of Basel, described and drew it. He was interested in the “miracles of nature”, well rather in the horrors, for once, and went to see the beast in Landser. The famous artist Albrecht Dürer even represented it, inspired by the sketch of Sebastian Brant and a stuffed pig which was shown in Nuremberg at Easter 1496, without it being known whether it was the real pig of Landser or a replica. Besides, we don’t know if the Monstrous Hog survived for long.
But since I’m telling you that we don’t know. Albrecht Dürer’s burin engraving has traveled a lot, it is exhibited at the Portland Museum of Art, in the United States. It is to say if this malformed pig of Landser marked the spirits. I will put Dürer’s illustration on the francebleu point fr website so that you can admire it or shiver in front of it!
Landser’s Hog Wikipedia page.