The Most Unusual of Miracles

A few days ago I came across a manuscript — Gestes des Saints de Redon — from 9th Century France which made an explicit reference to an oil lamp fueled by whale blubber. It took a few readings to determine that I in fact was no hallucinating. How then could the monks have procured oil from whale blubber if whaling did not exist in Western Europe at this time? I searched and searched for anything that might explain this anomaly that I had discovered. Finally, I found it: the abbot Ermentaire of Saint Philbert mentioned in one of his manuscripts, Vie et Miracles de Saint Philbert, that God had bestowed the most wondrous of miracles on the monks on the abbey in Noirmoutier. A beached whale had appeared on the northern coast of the island. Immediately, the monks rushed to the carcass and pulled it apart. They used the meat for food, the bones for tools, and the blubber was refined into oil for their lamps. One never evokes 9th century Breton monks as having a whale economy, but it turns out they depended on the regular beaching of whales (about one ever two or three years) for a variety of uses, including the lighting of their oil lamps.