THE SOUNDS OF animals, birds, and other curious creatures who inhabit the world alongside humans offer valuable insights into how we understand the soundscapes of the world around us. Human cultures across the globe teach and nurture the beginnings of linguistic expression in relation to the grunts, gnarls, or grumbles of different species. Patterns of association between human and animal agents are thus developed in young children and adults through sound symbolism at the beginnings of human expression. Whether it be the bark of a dog, the moo of a cow, or the gentle ‘cluck cluck’ of a hen laying an egg, animal sounds filter cultural perceptions of our (more or less) furry and feathered friends in all aspects of our lives that are shared between species: domestication, food supply, observation and enjoyment, medicine and clothing, the list goes on. Animal sounds are therefore not just used for teaching language but participate in the human conceptualization of the natural and the cultural.

It may seem surprising at first, but medieval cultures were not much different: the ‘sounds’ of lowing, howling, and blasting animal figures pop out from the margins of medieval manuscripts; the songs of birds provide a counterpoint to human singing in early lyric; students of Latin learnt their trade through lists of animal noises; medieval fables, saints’ lives, and romances are scattered with animal sounds in the wilderness, offering narrative, symbolic, and thematic signposts to protagonists and textual audiences alike. There is little thinking about sound, especially vocalized sound, in medieval literary contexts that is not in some respects relational to the sounds produced by animals. Familiar and nonfamiliar sounds offer a consistent and probing presence to medieval writers of narratives and theorists of language, in the same ways that they allow contemporary writers and filmmakers to characterize medieval soundscapes. For audiences of medieval texts depicting animal sound, discourse, or language, listening to how noisy creatures communicate with their own ‘tongues’, the challenges posed by animal sound are those of representation and identification. Representations of sound invite questions about the nature of writing and reading, as well as contact between different types of community, as meaning making occurs through a balance between the linguistic and the nonlinguistic.