The Unquiet Grave

A corpse isn't buried promptly after its funeral, and a pregnant cat jumps over its unattended coffin.

The corpse returns to life, still dressed in its formal funereal attire. Stiff from rigor mortis, its arms are permanently stretched in front of it, and it can only move by hopping - perhaps a slightly comical sight, but it stalks the night to drain the vital force of the living. The body has become a jiangshi.

The folkloric roots of science fiction

There are a lot of claimants to the title of inventor of science fiction - Hugo Gernsback, Mary Shelley, and more. But although it hasn't always been seen as a distinct, special sort of fiction, telling stories that incorporate an element of presently-impossible technological achievement and imagining speculative worlds has been part of human civilization forever. Many of the early stories, however, are folklore rather than speculation, and so we don't usually consider them when we discuss the emergence of the genre.

Alexander

There's an image that was making the rounds through social media a while back after it appeared on an amusing clickbait list of startling things from medieval manuscripts. It is a depiction, found in an illuminated life of Alexander the Great, that appears to show a woman lying in bed with a dragon, while a crowned man stares at them through a hole in the door.

And that's precisely what it is. To the audience at the time, the story was so well-known they would have recognized, at a glance, that the man is King Philip of Macedon, watching the conception of his son Alexander.

Alexander the Great was one of the most popular figures from the medieval Matter of Rome - the retelling of classical stories, often in a then-contemporary setting. By the third century, a Greek manuscript falsely attributed to Alexander's court historian Calisthenes had appeared which spelled out a somewhat mythologized version of the king's life, and this became the basis for many later accounts. One such version, the Alexandreis (a Latin text from the 12th century) was even directly translated to Icelandic under the title Alexanders saga. The first known epic poem, on the model of the French chansons de geste, in German is the Alexanderlied, also 12th century. The Quranic figure Dul-Qarnayn is also thought to be a mythologized version of Alexander the Great.

As for that image with the dragon? The earlier texts call it a snake, but a legend that appears in many medieval Alexander texts is that King Philip looked on, through a window, while his wife was impregnated by a dragon or serpent.

Jokes of the Ancient World

A student dunce, after dreaming that he stepped on a nail, is bandaging his foot. His colleague asks why, and upon learning the reason, observes, "No wonder they call us dunces! Why on earth do you sleep barefoot?"

 - Philogelos 15, 4th c., William Berg trans.

The "student dunce" is Berg's translation of scholastikos, a university student; by reputation, they weren't especially bright. These characters feature in many of the jokes in the book. Other translations give the term as "egghead" or, playing to modern stereotypes, "professor;" Berg uses "student dunce" throughout.

There are older references to books of jokes, and there are isolated jokes preserved in writing from earlier centuries, but the 4th-century Greek Philogelos, or "Laughter Lover," is the oldest jokebook text which still survives. Some of the jokes continue to amuse, while others serve only to shed light on what cultural commonplaces of the book's own era could be mined for humor. The aforementioned stupidity of students is one, and similar things are said about the people of Sidon. Here are a few more examples: