QUINOTAUR, MINOTAUR, EQUINOTAUR:SOME REFLECTIONS ON A PASSAGE FROM FREDEGAR’S CHRONICLE BY CARLO FERRARI
The historian Fredegar tells a bizarre story about the eponymous ruler of the Merovingian dynasty: Merovech was born from the union of Chlodio’s wife with a sea beast “similar to a Quinotaur. ”Scholars have almost always assumed that Quinotaur was a mistake for Minotaur and have interpreted the tale either as a myth concerning the divine origins of the Merovingians or as a fable invented from scratch. In this article, I attempt to demonstrate that Quinotaur is actually a mistake for Equinotaur and that Fredegar’s tale preserves the memory of a sacred marriage with ahippomorphic deity.
