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There is a game coming out in 2021 about this. It's called Inkulinati. They have their own explanation.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Jb_hbTojKvw
(3 minutes)
There is an old nursery rhyme about tailors v. a snail:
https://www.rhymes.net/nursery/602/four-and-twenty-tailors-w...
I think it's just a medieval in-joke. The image of the knight kneeling with his hands in the air before the growling snail made me actually laugh, I'm sure it made them too. Once seen, they copied it and did alterations and plays on it, like a meme.
It's something like the Cool S everyone knows how to draw I suppose.
There was a lot of emphasis on interpreting what the snail represents. I didn't see mention of it possibly being that the snail is just and snail and the imagery is a commentary on the aristocracy being self-important and braggarts. One might imagine a tin-pot knight going on at length about his great battles and duels, with a scribe in the background chuckling to his friends, "the only armored opponent he's ever seen is a snail".
Or that it's a sort of early meme - someone thought it was a funny thing to add and others copied it. Maybe like an early Kilroy image.
It's funny that we assume historical things must be significant, even though in our day-to-day lives there are plenty of things that are just ... kind of silly. I could imagine people looking at us from the future and wondering what the religious significance of Hello Kitty is.
> It's funny that we assume historical things must be significant, even though in our day-to-day lives there are plenty of things that are just ... kind of silly.
No, it's not funny. Literacy was rare and symbolism was literally much more common than text. Imagine how expensive books must be in a society where each book(often in Latin!) must be copied by hand. Who could afford books? How do you express meaning if most people can't read? Historic or mythical events were often shown like a comic book without text, be it on Trajan's column or in any reasonably old European church. Signboards (before shops, taverns etc) were giant pictures too. Pictures have the added benefit they're understood by traveling foreigners and merchants. Hard borders are a modern invention.
These are gigantic snails.
Are they? Or are the knights just that tiny?
Scale and perspective aren't exactly precise in any of these sorts of images
Scale often represented something else, for example how important someone was.
Exactly. I think that fits into my theory. These aren't gigantic (and therefore important) snails. These are tiny knights.
Sir Peter Venkman: "He slimed me. I feel so funky"
How about 'giant snails that attacked villages and kingdoms?' I mean, that would be the cool answer.
We know that medieval knights were skilled and/or numerous enough to have driven several creatures to extinction, including some large ones. Dragons, manticores, unicorns, and ogres are all gone now, living on only in stories and D&D. Why not giant snails too?
Both are armoured.