In discussing the archaeological record, art, place-names, historiography and literature, the essays in this volume highlight the coexistence of people and animals in early medieval England. The Germanic tribes and few stray Celts who inhabited it lived in close proximity to a range of domestic and wild animals, the former category including cats and dogs, chickens and geese, horses and asses, cattle and pigs, sheep and goats, while the latter included fish, sea mammals, snakes, birds, deer, otters, badgers, rabbits, hares and all kinds of animal pests; particularly notable among the wild species were wolves, ravens and eagles – the three iconic beasts of battle commemorated in heroic poetry. Yet whereas most Anglo-Saxons would have been familiar with these nytenu and deora, including dragons (as the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle reminds us), it would be a stretch to assume that this familiarity extended to exotic animal species, such as camels, elephants, lions, phoenixes and scorpions. The Bible, the Physiologus, the Medicina de quadrupedibus and other non-Germanic sources testified to the existence of these animals in far-away corners of the world, and readers of the Wonders of the East would have encountered descriptions and depictions of fabulous beasts with eight legs, two heads and Valkyries’ eyes, of lertices with asses’ ears, sheep's wool and birds’ feet, and many other ungefregelicu deor (‘extraordinary beasts’). However, these written sources represented a world that was utterly different from Anglo-Saxon England, and they targeted highly educated audiences that were presumed to have been able to put these strange beasts into context.

Even though early medieval ideas about the natural world are far more integrative than modern attempts to categorise that world into discrete taxonomic ranks, there would seem to be a divide between the animal world that Anglo-Saxons could readily observe and the beasts that they knew only through religious and learned sources from the Mediterranean and the Near East. While indigenous creatures were domesticated, processed, hunted, avoided, feared or venerated, exotic animals were read about and marvelled at, and their absence from the Anglo-Saxon natural world led to their becoming the subject of metaphor and allegory. Animals, therefore, could be understood either as the output of God's creation, or as the input for symbolic thought.