Monsters of the Medieval World

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Hello, I'm Matt Lewis. Welcome to Gone Medieval from History Hit, the podcast that delves into the greatest millennium in human history. We've got the most intriguing mysteries, the gobsmacking details and latest groundbreaking research. from the Vikings to the printing press, from kings to popes to the Crusades. We cross centuries and continents to delve into rebellions, plots and murders, to find the stories, big and small, that tell us how we got here.

Find out who we really were with Gone Medieval. Welcome to the realm of dragons, demons. and beasts that lurk in the darkness. I'm Matt Lewis. Not one of those beasts, though, honestly. We're about to pay a visit to Monsterland. Monsters are a fixture in many cultures across the world.

What do they tell us about the fears and beliefs of medieval people? Are they just rip-roaring tales of heroes slaying beasts, or is there more to it than that? How do they differ across the world, and how do some of them... somehow seem to stay the same, almost as though they say more about the listener than the monster. To help us navigate these tales, I'm joined by Nick Jubber, whose new book, Monsterland, a journey around the world's dark imagination.

explores the history of the monster story. Welcome back to Gone Medieval Nick, it's fantastic to have you with us again. Oh, thank you very much for inviting me back.

No, always here for the stories. And we're going to talk about a few in particular from your shiny new book, Monsterland. I mean, who doesn't like a few monsters? So I guess to ease us into this, we're going to talk about three... monsters in particular that you cover in the book. But I wondered if we could start with a slightly more general conversation about why medieval people seemed so...

Fascinated by monsters? Why do they crop up in marginalia? Why are storytellers writing about monsters? What is it about monsters that grips the medieval imagination? Yeah, it does seem that there's a sort of intensification of monsters as you move towards medieval times. And I think that's partly that we have more records of what they set down and they were able to record things in marginalia and to have these wonderful manuscripts full of these.

magnificent creatures and under these sort of tall travelers tales and the stories as well and they were drawing on a lot of the classical monsters as well so you have the sort of greek monsters the cyclopses and the minotaurs but then you also get your monsters that people would have claimed to have encountered in strange places, the skier pods with their huge club foot shielding them from the sun or the blemmies with their eyes in their chests.

But it is an interesting question. I think there's a fertility to the medieval imagination as a whole. There's such a colourful richness to the imagination of the period. And I think that bleeds very much into that sense of monsters. And I think there's a spiritual dimension of an utter terror of what is out there, of what's out there in the dark, in the wild space.

a sense that they're starting to control the wild spaces around them but they haven't got there yet and there's still things to tame things to control monster stories

can also be very useful narratives for asserting territorial control. One of the stories I... talk about early on in my book is from Geoffrey of Monmouth's History of the Kings of Britain, where he writes about the human settlement of Britain by Brutus and the descendants of the Trojans, and how they slew all these giants going around Albion until

Eventually, one of his wingmen, Quirinius, takes on Gog Magog and defeats him and then gives his name to Cornwall. And there's a sense that you have to defeat a monster in order to have the right to the territory. So I think that's another theme that comes in. And there's also this fear of what is to come.

a lot of the monsters that emerge in medieval times and this is i think is it's not only in europe but around the world they're there in in fear of damnation you know we've all seen those sort of last judgments with them magnificent demons ferrying the sinners to hell and you find that not only in european culture but it will come up when we talk about the japanese oni you see that in buddhist hell scrolls as well so i think there are all these elements this this sort of combination of a

flourishing of imagination, but also the spiritual terrors of what might be out there and what is to come. It's easy to forget that they lived in a time when, as you say, the map wasn't fully explored and there could be things out there. almost free to use their imaginations to think what might be beyond the bounds of where people currently know, you know, what might you encounter? And I guess hark back to some of those ancient Greek myths about monsters being places and, you know.

if you've explored so far then the monsters must be just a little bit further but you're going to encounter them eventually when we hear monsters in medieval stories

Do we need to think about what they are in general terms to represent in terms of a storytelling trope? Are they kind of... deployed as tools to help tell a story or should we be taking them quite literally when they talk about monsters? I think we have to be careful not to be seeing them as one thing or the other because it's so easy with any aspect of history for us to project our own way of thinking back into the past so i think with a lot of monsters they do have that representative

quality to them and they are tools for teachers. And we see that sort of idea of the demons that are going to come and eat your soul coming out of the homilies and sermons. But there is always more to them, I think. You know, when you look at the monsters in an epic like Beowulf. They're not there simply to warn us of what we might be afraid of if we sin too much. There's an entertainment value to them. They are very, very exciting monsters.

And they're manifesting something of the darkness outside. You've mentioned about that idea of sort of. going further and you might see the monsters and i think as you say it was something that was a real possibility for people in medieval times you never quite know what what might be out there My first book was about Presto John, the mythical king in the Indies. And I was fascinated by the idea of a medieval messenger who was sent out by the Pope to go and find him.

course he didn't exist but the messenger didn't know that and i loved the idea i was fascinated by the idea that there was this this poor guy who was sent on this sort of chaotic mission that he could never accomplish where might he have gone and what did he imagine he was going to find i mean he must have thought

I'm going to discover the lost tribes of Israel. And I'm going to discover the Schiapods and the Cunicephaly with their dog heads and all these sort of wonderful new beings that I'll be able to come back and tell everybody about. But of course, that didn't quite happen for him.

And in many ways, these stories are doing what now we have science fiction to do, the idea of what is out there in the universe. But for medieval people, it could be out there much closer. It might be just across the sea, which, of course, could be very far. It certainly felt very far.

And it could even just be across the valley. There's a reason given for why Japan, for example, has so many monsters is because it has so many valleys. It has so many mountains and they're divided by different rivers and valleys and mountains and so forth. Each community comes up with its own monsters. And of course, other communities, they are monsters as well. You project all your terrors onto just the people who are across the way.

That's a really fascinating parallel with science fiction that I hadn't really thought about before, that all we've done is actually move our monsters off world as we've explored the map of this planet.

so that we're satisfied there aren't, as far as we know, any monsters lurking anywhere in the corners. All we've really done is take science fiction and move those monsters off world. We've turned them into aliens and we encounter them when we get... out there and it's interesting to think you know in a thousand more years

When people have explored the farthest reaches of space and there's no monsters there, will they look back at us and say, look at these idiots thinking there was aliens out there? Well, it's going to take them a while to map the whole of space, I suppose. So they've got a bit of time. And I guess medieval people thought the same about the world, you know.

We keep exploring a little bit further, but there must be monsters out there somewhere. It's interesting what it says about us as people, that we almost need those monsters to be somewhere. If they're not on this planet, we send them into space. We need a monster. Exactly. It's one of the things I think... fascinating about monsters that we have and especially for in medieval times we had

So many incredible, rich, wondrous things in nature. So many different species to discover. And yet people had to always imagine something else. And we've always had that need to project our imaginations onto nature and sort of mix it up with what... we're seeing out there and imagine something else and that's something that is i think instinctive to humans it is it's a kind of definition of humanity that need to constantly imagine

the freaky, the weird, to bring out all the darkness inside us and put it out there and give it a sort of physical form. Well, the first of the three...

monsters that we're going to focus on from your book today is the dragon, particularly, specifically the Bavarian dragon. So dragons more generally before we get really focused in on Bavaria. dragons are obviously incredibly popular in the medieval period i mean they are still popular you've only got to look at game of thrones and house of the dragon dragons are still everywhere yeah

But it's very much a throwback to the medieval period, isn't it? The popularity of dragons now and Tolkien and that sort of re-engineering of the medieval dragon in particular, I think. Yeah, they always seem to need to exist in a medieval parallel world, medieval adjacent world, you know, a fantasy world. medieval world. What do you think the popularity of dragons says about the medieval mind and perhaps why are they still popular today?

Yeah. There are stories about dragons obviously that go way back and it becomes increasingly difficult to define, is this what we would call a dragon? You have what might be called a dragon in the Rig Veda or in the Babylonian epic of creation, the shining Tiamat who brings forth all these monsters out of the primordial sea. But as you get into medieval times, it seems there is something very specifically dragon in these forms, and we can see it visualised. And I think, you know...

around the time you sort of get to the 9th, 10th century, you've got dragons everywhere. You've got them on the prowls of Viking ships. You've got them on the regalia of Chinese emperors. You've got them on the banners of the Feard of Wessex as they march to the Battle of... So you have this sense of dragons being depicted as this very, very visibly recognisable form. Although, of course, the Chinese dragon and the European dragon, there's a lot of difference between them.

And I think one has to be careful with the terminology because, you know, we use the word dragon, going back to the Latin Draco. Obviously, there's the Germanic wyvern or whim. There's the Chinese lung and so many different terms for dragons. There are the Mesoamerican dragons, which would have been appearing and being carved into sculptures around the same time.

again there are questions do can we define those exactly as dragons is a dragon simply a winged serpent of some kind and then does that mean you exclude the ones that don't have wings which are often defined as being dragons so it can get quite knotty and complicated but i think to try and answer the question i think that that yes there is something happening around the turn of the millennium of real real obsession with dragons

and a lot of stories coming out of it and i think that's where you see the legend of saint george and the dragon really emerging because you have with saint george you have a saint who had died many centuries earlier and had nothing obviously had nothing to do with dragons but he wasn't even the most obvious saint to associate with dragons or the holy figure to associate with dragons i would have thought you know somebody like the archangel michael would be more obvious because

there's a sort of biblical precedent for that. And you've got the dragon of revelations, which has, I think, an impact on the way that dragons are depicted in European mythology. But then you also have these sort of Norse and Germanic tales of the dragon, one of the great stories, Seagull.

the dragonslayer Siegfried which becomes the Wagnerian legend of from the Nibelungen and the Volsung saga so you have these stories sort of joining together and and there's a sort of perfect coordination that happens where the the cult of saint george starts to grow at around the same time that the cult of the dragon is intensifying so you've got these

depictions of Sigour the Dragonslayer that even appear on the portals of Spanish churches on the route to Santiago de Compostela. But then as you go through the centuries, those are being replaced by St. George. and the dragon. And that's partly to do with the Crusades. I think the increasing popularity of George is this sort of military saint, the sort of swashbunkling knight saint. And the idea that he had appeared at the siege of Antioch and many other occasions where people...

believe they had had visions of him. And at the same time, you have these stories of the dragons increasing. And so he sort of gets latched onto the dragon and it becomes the quintessential dragon story that has sort of dominated European culture ever since. Yeah. And interesting how so many of the dragon stories always... focus around the slaying of a dragon, particularly St. George there being the main example, but it always seems to be that you have to be the slayer of the dragon.

Yes. And it's a funny thing now, actually, because we've come to a different stage in how we see monsters today. So when I went out to Bavaria, they do a performance of the slaying of the dragon and they've been doing it. Every year since at least 1590, they have records in the town archives there going back as far as 1590 of, I think, a protocol from that time. And then there are receipts of two guilders being paid to the man who performed the night who slew the...

dragon in sort of the early 1600s and sort of various other bits and pieces sort of through the centuries to show how consistently this was performed it seems to have been pretty much performed all the time with the exception i think of world war ii and covid but people's reaction to the dragon is very different now because when the dragon is slaying, there's a sort of collective sigh that breaks out.

Because actually, people have come not to see the hero. They've come to see the dragon. And in the case of this place in Bavaria, in Firfenwald... There's a good reason for that because it's a magnificent dragon. I mean, it's huge. It's got a wingspan of 12 meters and it breathes out fire and smoke and it roars. It was made for 2 million euros by 20 companies, including Magicon, who were one of the companies behind the Harry Potter movie.

It's an absolute spectacle. But the sympathy has moved towards the monsters. We see them, I think, now as a sort of... emanation of something that we are damaging in in nature and i talked to various people who were involved in this performance and one of them was the director and writer of the current iteration of it

because it has changed obviously over time, over the generations, a writer called Alexander Etzel Ragusa. And he talked about how in the past you would have seen the dragon as being a sort of representation of the devil, which I think is very much how a medieval Christian audience would see it.

Every so often that meaning changes so that then in recent times people saw the dragon as representing the beast from the east as they called it it was the idea that it was coming from beyond the iron curtain so it had this sort of political resonance where it was seen to to represent what people feared across the iron curtain in the communist world

And then now it had become a sort of representation of what Alexander called our ecological catastrophe. The idea that the dragon now is sort of expressing its wrath at humanity for what we have been doing to nature. And so it becomes a sort of God that represents the natural world and is punishing us for our sins, which in some ways is quite medieval, actually. I think there is that sort of medieval element to our current sort of spiritual anxiety that we're wracking ourselves.

understandably, for all the damage that we've been doing. And we need that dragon to come out and sort of give us a good burning. we can't be too far off the dragon actually winning then at the festival. No, no, that's exactly the thing. Like, is it going to, is that going to be the next iteration? Because there are so many monster stories now where the monsters.

have become the heroes you know they're now it's a wolverine or the navi from the avatar series or or shrek in a post-modern sense you know that actually we quite like to watch the the monsters being the heroes now so it may well be that that's where the dragon is going

I was just thinking, as you were saying that, the other example is something like Wicked, where we always have to have these backstories for the villains now, in which they're not villains. We have to understand how and why they've become what we consider to be villains, so we can almost feel sorry for them.

Is there anything specific or different that we should know about the Bavarian dragon? Why is that one in particular the focus of your book? Well, Bavaria does have quite a lot of dragon stories. I think it's very interesting sometimes to look at the landscape and the climate and to look at where these things may have particular resonances. In Bavaria, you do have a lot of flooding, a history of flooding, and there's a lot of rivers there and they are flooded a lot.

So the area of Firfenbald where this particular dragon story is told has got a terrible history of being flooded throughout the centuries. And dragons would often be blamed for flooding. They were the creature up in the sky that released the waters. We tend to think of them, associate them now with fire, but actually historically their association is specifically with water. So when you go back to something like the Rig Veda, they set the waters of life free.

In the Chinese myths, often the dragons are the bestowers of water. They are the rain clouds, basically. And if you think of these dark clouds with fire coming out of them in a thunderstorm. that does parallel with a dragon. And you can see why then in the plains of China, you would be very grateful for that.

tell stories that treat that creature as a divine being that has given blessings. Whereas in Northern Europe, where we take our rainfall very much for granted, obviously, we're not so grateful and we go, oh, damn, that dragon up there, bringing these stories.

down upon us and because it's quite close to the alps you get a lot of clouds getting jammed up and so you get this sort of particular intensity of rainfall so there's that i think there's also that it is close to bohemia it's a sort of it's a it's a hinterland and hinterlands are often places where monster stories flourish

That part of Bavaria, they've often felt like they're sort of out on a wing a bit, that they were ignored by the Germanic princes. They were at the prey of the Bohemians. In the 14th, 15th century, there was a lot of fighting with the Hussite rebellions. and a lot of carnage and destruction happening around this area, around Firfenwald, the fortress there getting destroyed, and lots of soldiers and armies sort of moving back and forth across into the Bohemian woods, which...

fringes very much on the town of Firth and Wild. I mean, it's within walking distance of it. So you've got that sort of political turmoil, which again is something that intensifies stories of monsters. You see that in many, many types of monster stories. whether it's in the 1600s in France where werewolf stories manifested a lot during a time of turmoil in the west of France or in the Balkans in the 18th century when you have a lot of vampire stories emerging.

And it's often people moving around, armies moving around, carnage and turmoil, and people are sort of looking over their shoulders at the strangers in their midst and trying to find an explanation for all the trouble that's brewing around them. So I think it's that mixture of nature and politics. of being in the right place, really, at the centre of this sort of cult of the dragon itself.

Yeah, it's a really interesting association with political unrest and the desire to explain it via monsters. You know, it's almost something unhuman about the amount of violence and upset and political unrest and all of that kind of thing. othering of people you consider foreign as they move around that there must be some some kind of monstrous element to what's going on yeah and they have a pageant in Firfenwald which is part of this show that goes on where

More than a thousand people are dressed in medieval costume and amongst them they have the war wagons of the Hussites. And so the Hussites from Bohemia would travel around in these sort of high-sided wagons.

pulled by several horses and you have them parading down the tower and people boo them and sort of call out to them even though they're their neighbours you know who just dressed up in costume you know it's all part of the fun part of the show but i think it it speaks to a sense of a sort of historical scar still a little bit sensitive that sense of always you know it's them those guys from across the way you know all that trouble they caused us

And yes, it's the easiest thing to do. If you can turn your neighbours into monsters, then it's much easier to kill them. Do we ever get much of a sense in the medieval world of whether people actually really believed? that dragons existed? Were they always a metaphor for this kind of thing or did people genuinely think there were dragons out there?

So I think people believed that there was darkness out there and they believed very much in the devil and that the devil could take many forms. And I think that the dragon really is a sort of magnificent form for evil itself in European culture.

that you can latch that fear of all those terrors onto and that again it's a very different way of seeing the dragon from i think from how we see it now where we tend to be more we admire its splendor and magnificence but i think for a lot of medieval people it was something quite terrifying although on the other hand these things always have nuances because they put dragons on coats of arms and on various regalias so you know it wasn't something that you would sort of keeping keep

away. There was a sort of a pride in connecting that with yourselves. There's an odd juxtaposition in there somewhere about thinking about dragons as a representation of evil, perhaps a... an expansion of the biblical snake as the representation of the devil, but also invoking them for protection, where, as you said, the Anglo-Saxons are marching to Hastings with dragons on their shields.

the Vikings have them on the prows of their ship while also having legends about dragon slayers and things like that. So there is this odd juxtaposition, isn't there, between calling on them for protection, but believing that they're evil and need to be hunted. There is, and I think we should always remember there is that ambiguity in how dragons are being treated. I mean, because they are these fierce...

beings, the idea, well, look, if you're going to come to battle with us, we're going to set our dragon on you. We're going to become a dragon to fight you. There's that element. And yeah, there is, as you say, that fascinating juxtaposition that keeps going on.

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Right, we probably need to move on. We're going to skip to almost the other side of the medieval world, really, and we're going to head to Japan. And one of the other monsters that you focus on in the book is the Japanese Oni. Can you give us a kind of a brief overview, I guess, of what an oni is and how are they depicted in Japanese literature? Yes. Well, first of all, they're depicted as being invisible. Their first appearance is as these sort of invisible shifting...

Spirits, yeah. How do you depict the invisible? And so then because Japanese culture is very, very pictorial and visual, you start to get these fantastically lurid depictions of them where they tend to become extremely consistent. And they tend to have two horns, ox's horns particularly, sort of very large curdling horns bursting out of their heads, big sort of red or blue or yellow or green head. And they wear, and they're sort of ogre-like in their form.

often carrying a club or some kind of weapon and wearing a tiger skin pelt around their waist to save their modesty. And that becomes, from quite early on, that becomes a depiction that you see in Japanese hell scrolls. And then it from sort of from medieval times onwards, it becomes pretty much the standard depiction. There's a museum actually on top of one of the mountains, which is associated with one of the only stories where they have.

sculptures of the Oni because they're often depicted on the ridge lines of the roofs of temples, of Shinto temples, Shinto and Buddhist temples. They're a sort of apotropaic symbol that wards off other... terrifying beasts so if you have your oni on your temple then anything else is going to keep away because they're so ferocious

So you can see them and they're lined up actually by date. So you can see the development of the form and it is fairly consistent. They all tend to have these horns, but as the sculptor's art is becoming increasingly sophisticated, their tusks are getting more and more elaborate. The eyes are sometimes very large or sometimes small. I think by the 19th century, some of them even had moustaches, which makes them look rather dandy-like.

But the really freaky ones are the older ones, actually, the medieval ones, where you can sense the fear of the sculptor and the sense that this is something that might be out there and that we want to be wary of. Yeah, and we've got that similar...

ambiguity that we were just talking about there, where you've got something that is essentially evil, but being used to also ward off other evil, are only basically equivalents to demons. Should we be thinking of them as demons? Well, I think that's how they were originally depicted. So in the... buddhist hell scrolls they ferry the sinners to hell so they have that similar role to what we would see the demons in our last judgments having but then the stories sort of take over and become

increasingly varied and elaborate, and they're often out of control. The idea maybe of our sort of medieval demons is that they're sort of under the aegis of the devil or some kind of sort of evil leader, whereas the Oni tend to... You know, they just go off and do whatever they want, really. So you have a lot of stories where they are driven by their appetites. They love to drink. They love to eat. Sometimes they love to steal away Japanese women and children and other captives.

They even love to play music, which is very unusual for monsters. It's usually, if you think of Grendel in Beowulf, is pushed back by the singing of the Psalms and the music that's going on in Frothgar's Mead Hall, whereas in... some of the japanese stories you hear of music being played in the rashomon gate of kyoto beautifully you know perfectly played and then as the listeners draw closer they realize that it's an oni that's actually playing the music

So they have these different qualities, but they are mostly driven by... evil by wanting to capture and kill. So the main story that I focused on in my book Monsterland is one about a hero called Raiko and he's sort of one of the prototypes for the samurai.

who is sent off on a mission to capture or to defeat the Oni of Mount Oe, which is outside Kyoto. And because several people have been kidnapped, and there's an Oni called Shutundoji, who is lording over a place called the Iron Palace on the top of this mountain. The story goes that a seer, Abe Nils-Semai, who's one of the great seers of...

Japanese medieval culture has identified where the Oni is and has sent the warriors out to find him. But along the way, they meet some mountain priests who accompany them, and they bring along with them several jars of sake. which is, of course, a very good idea whenever you're going on a long journey. And so they arrive at this iron palace, which is ruled by these creatures, these oni, and they present them with the sake.

And so the Shuten Doji, the leader of the Oni, ends up getting drunk on it and passes out. And then they're able to sweep around the palace, kill off all the Oni and release the captives. and finally decapitate the evil Shoten Doji in his bedchamber. Although because he's such a ferocious, only he's 50, I think 50 meters long and his head.

rises up even after it's been decapitated into the sky and then reiko the hero has to chop him down and very nearly gets bitten by this flying head in a very sort of beautifully sort of lurid final scene before finally defeating the head and then they carry it down and there's actually a temple or a shrine on the edge of Kyoto where the head is said to be buried.

which is still a place that can be visited for people who are suffering from head issues, I think particularly some issues of the neck and such problems. And so people leave certain offerings there and they actually, it said you should. or a little bit of sake when you go there over the burial place as a sort of offering or act of respect. How important was...

medieval Kyoto to these stories and the development of these stories? Because I'm struck again that we're talking about Kyoto is in a fairly mountainous region, similar to what we talked about in Bavaria. Does that play into the development of these only stories as well? I think with Kyoto, you have this, it is at the heart of so many of the great medieval Japanese stories because it's such a dominant imperial capital. It was the capital until I think the 19th century. So it has this huge...

cultural dominance and it was a spectacular place. I think in some ways it's difficult to see that now because so much of it has been destroyed in the intervening centuries. But on the other hand, Kyoto today is in many ways a sort of mirage that is trying to replicate the visual beauty of medieval Kyoto. So a lot of the temples are built on the same.

form or shape or appearance that they were supposed to have according to records from earlier times before being burnt or destroyed in war. So there's a sense of Kyoto as this perfection of human civilization. but surrounded by, as you say, by the mountains and by such a richness of landscape. You also have the problem that Japan has, that it is afflicted by every possible disaster that you can have. tsunamis and earthquakes and volcanoes and all these different kind of phenomena so

Stories were invented to explain these things. And all over the world, people would explain these natural disasters through stories of monstrous creatures of some kind. And they only are especially associated with... eruptions on the mountains with avalanches and and so forth in fact i think in the story shooting doji even claims credit for

causing avalanches that have taken people's lives actually as it happens shooting doji himself was believed by many people to not be a figment of fiction but to actually have been a real life figure so there's a 17th century writer whose name I think it's Kaibara Eken who described Shuten Doji as being a sort of gangster who was operating in the mountains and who was acting as one of these demonic figures, even possibly wearing a mask.

to frighten the people in the town in in the city and there are lots of stories about people outlaws living out in the mountains who would then become in the folklore they would then become monsters and that goes

way back over the centuries so you have i think it's the earth spiders who are another sort of monster that appears in a lot of japanese stories and the word that was used to for that has a connection with a word for one of the tribes that was overtaken by the people who ended up becoming So you have a lot of these stories where there are these sort of roots in a blurred version of history, where gradually as they get told and retold and spun into tales, the monster becomes clarified.

if you can sort of tease them apart, you can see there's actually more of a human conflict that's going on at the heart of it. So in some ways, that story of Raiko and the Onish Shuten Doshi... like many of the only stories, is the story of the people, the elite, who had control of civilisation against the outsiders who lived in the countryside, who lived in the mountains and around the rivers. And I guess in that there's almost a literary...

comparison to be made for Beowulf in that, you know, essentially that's about the monster that lives outside that isn't... in the inner circle, isn't in the mead hall enjoying the warmth of the fire and the hospitality. If it's external, it's a monster and it should be feared. And it sounds like maybe the Japanese had the same idea that people who were outside of the civilised... areas of japan people who didn't behave as they should do outlaws i guess effectively become monsters

Yes, I think it happens in almost every culture. I think that we have that in British culture, I think, with stories of the wood woesers and other sort of creatures that lived in the woods. Sometimes we turn them into folk heroes like Robin Hood, but sometimes they became our goblins and sprites and other.

sort of creepy things that were out there in the woods I think it's part of the human instinct to monster the other and as you say it's that sense of the outsider which I think Grendel in Beowulf to me is such an epitome for that idea that the monster is this

this being who is outside and just isn't let into elite society. I mean, to be fair, if somebody is going to come into your home and start munching on your friends, you're not going to want them in your society, but still, and it's the same. sort of idea i think with with shooting doji although interestingly in this one he has his own palace so that may be saying something that the monsters you know he has a form of his own civilization in this particular tale and

There's often quite a splendour to the way that the only are depicted. And when you see them in some of the medieval scrolls, there's a marvellous scroll depicting this particular story that's on display in one of the museums. the name of which is obviously going to escape me right now but it depicts in magnificently beautiful colored detail

the court of Kyoto, and then the court of the Oni, which is splendid. It's sort of barbaric and gushing with blood, but it has a sort of splendor of its own. And it's also very detailed in depicting the jars of Saki as well, with sort of wonderful inscriptions along them. And perhaps they are the ultimate symbol of civilization.

this rather lovely drink that is ultimately the undoing of the monsters. And do we see traditions springing up around the Oni, maybe to keep them away, to ward off evil? And do any of those traditions persist until today? Well, there are some wonderful traditions that have indeed continued over the centuries. So with a lot of monsters, there's some weak spot. There's some way that you can defeat them. It's not necessarily what you expect.

So with the Oni, yeah, you have stories of them suddenly appearing. They'd come out of the spirit world. And in a lot of the Japanese stories, they can appear out of nowhere because they're coming from a sort of other world. It's a bit like the Celtic other world, I think, in some ways. And they're appearing amongst people and they'll especially appear in the mountains. So amongst monks who are hermits, which in Japanese culture you have.

a lot of stories of the monk who's a hermit on the mountainside, and then the Oni suddenly appears as they're praying, and how do they defeat them? And in one of the stories, which goes back to medieval times, to what's called the Muramachi period, The monk has, he's got no weapons on him. So all he's got is he's been roasting some beans. So he hurls the beans at the Oni and then the creature sort of screams and is blinded by these roasted soya beans and disappears back into the other world.

and so that's how he manages to survive and that was then taken on as a tradition during the sort of 14th, 15th century or so, during medieval times, and it became a court ritual. And it's now a sort of public ritual. So when I was in Kyoto around this time, and it's specifically at a time known as Setzabun, which is the tradition. in the traditional Japanese calendar. It's the time of the new year. It's as spring is coming.

through and people gather in the shinto temples and there are people dressed as the oni in wonderful masks some of them incredibly elaborate sort of with their horns very high elaborate horns and magnificent sort of military costumes and huge boots and so forth. You have arrows being shot to the four corners of the temple as a sort of form of psychic protection, but then they only burst in.

and then the soya beans are thrown and everybody hurls their soya beans at the monsters and eventually they are expelled And it's one of those rituals that everybody really gets involved in, becomes quite anarchic. And, you know, it's a big crowd of people herding the beans everywhere. And there's also you have the beans being... given by the temple priests, the Shinto priests. And so there's a sense there also of the authority of the temples over the whole of the ritual.

very much taking place under their aegis. And you have verses being recited by some of the priests as well. And there are all sorts of elements in it. In one of the temples that I went to, they had the Onia pier. It was just as darkness had fallen. So there was a sort of eerie aspect to it. But you also had a character called the Hososhi, who looks a bit like an Oni because he looks kind of monstrous. He's got, I think, a single horn, but a sort of monstrous mask on.

But he is a shamanic figure and he leads a group of acolytes and they go around the temple and eventually he dispels the Oni. So in that case, it's not the beans that dispel them, but the shamanic figure of the Hososhi, which is the title for a particular... court shaman of those times and so he becomes the person or the figure who drives the only out of the temple

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For our last monster that we're going to focus on, we're going to head all the way west again. We're going to go past Bavaria. We're going to go north a little bit as well. And we're going to get to the Orkney Islands. There we have a case of the Orkney selkies. So what is a selkie? Well, a selkie, it is literally a seal. It is the old word for a seal out in the north in Scotland and Orkney and so on.

But in the folklore, the selkie is a seal that comes to shore and sheds their skin. So the seal skin is shed and then they turn into human form. And in a lot of the traditional tales, it would go something along the lines of this. The Selkies arrive at the shore under the moonlight in darkness. They shed their skins and then they start dancing under the moonlight. It's a sort of fairy dance.

And there's a lone farmer. There's always a lone farmer in these stories who's been living on his own too long. And he sort of hides behind one of the rocks. And the Selkies are... They can be both male and female. There's a certain gender dynamic in a lot of these stories where there are a group of beautiful young females dancing under the moonlight and he grabs hold of one of their skins and holds onto it so that when they're all disturbed...

the noise of him approaching. They all go back into their skins and go back into the sea, but one of them can't because he's holding her skin. And so she has to go and live with him in his croft. And he says he's in love with her. He's fallen for her radiant beauty. And he wants her to come and live with him in his croft. And so she then has to live with him. And she lives with him for many, many years, brewing the best beer in the island.

often singing beautiful songs and giving birth to several children. But of course, she's always hankering for the sea because that's her natural form. That's her natural state. But she doesn't know where he's hidden her seal skin. He's hidden it usually in some kind of casket or chest or coffer, which is out of the way. She doesn't know where it is. But then eventually one day. one of the children has hurt their foot and she needs to make a sort of riveling around the foot to heal them

And the child has seen where the skin is hidden and says, I remember there's a place where daddy hid that skin. That would be perfect for it. Where? Where is it? Oh, it's just over there, you know, under the bed or in the barn. And the husband and the other children have gone off to the fair that day. And so she brings it out, she brings out the skin and she's restored to her form. And then she has the heartbreaking decision of leaving her child.

all her children and going back to the sea because that's where she's really from. And so she goes back into sealed form. And although the children have then lost their mother, they have a protector out at sea. So whenever they're in their fishing boats and they're about to get drowned or a terrible storm is coming on. there's always a seal and often many seals to protect them and help them along the way. So it actually sort of turns out to be kind of a bonus, depending on how you interpret it.

That's the sort of classic Selkie narrative that people have been telling over the centuries in the north of Scotland, in Orkney, in the Shetlands, in many of the islands out there. The ones that I particularly focused on were in Orkney, where I travelled to met a few of the storytellers there.

And it was amazing to find out how far back these stories go, because they do go right back to medieval times. And how significant is the Selkie in Orkadian literature? Because I guess, you know, there are even more...

tied to the sea than we might think of in most of the rest of the British Isles. So does it reflect this desire to this almost dual... personality of living on land but being so connected to the sea of wanting a protector at sea as you say does it reflect this desire to build a connection with the sea Absolutely. I think Orkney does have a lot of stories about different creatures that come in from the sea. And it's that sense that it's a place where anything might turn up because.

especially in past centuries, you never quite knew who or what was going to wash up. And there are lots of real life stories of shipwrecks and of people from all kinds of places around the world who'd end up living on one of the islands of Orkney for a generation, maybe for the rest of their lives, because they happened to be passing when the storm struck and they ended up on that particular island.

So that it does feed into that reality of what it is like to live on this archipelago of small scattered islands where there is all that movement going on between them. And it's very easy for the stranger to suddenly. pier with no sort of story behind them who are they why why they suddenly come out of the sea like that and then it's also an island that does have a lot of seals they are a real phenomenon there and so when i was researching that

part of the book i was talking to the storytellers but i also talked to marine biologists about the phenomenon of seals because it's one of the best places in the world to go to watch seals and to watch their behavior and they do have they are very complicated creatures One of the marine biologists I spoke to talked about.

the variety of maternal behavior in seals where some of the mother seals you would see them being very devoted to their children others you would see them sort of pushing their children back and you get that sense of having very different kind of personalities

so i think all those kind of things if you think of the sort of the fishing communities that would have lived amongst these seals over the generations you can imagine how these stories would have developed but a lot of the stories are also about being kind or at least being

honorable to the sea, treating the sea with respect and treating the creatures of the sea with respect. So you have a lot of stories about the fisherman who takes too many seals, who hunts the seals and then ends up getting punished for it. And in fact, one of the oldest stories, I think the oldest known Selkie story, which is also my favourite, is called The Tale of the Lady, or the Play of the Lady Odevere. And it was collected.

Scraps of it, fragments were collected by an amazing folklorist called Water Trail Denison, who's one of the core figures in Orkadian literature. And he pulled it together in the language of this poem. There's a lot of Norse language in it. So it echoes back into the connections that Orkney had with the Norse kingdoms, the sense that Orkney was part of a much... wider sort of empire of of norse speaking

communities you know some scholars have talked about it being that it was the venice of the north sea you know we now think of it as this sort of place out there at the back of beyond but it was it was very much at the heart of a lot of things that were going on and so you see

Orkney in a lot of the Icelandic sagas. It's characters in the most famous of the Icelandic sagas, like the saga of Burt Nýr, they travel out to Orkney. You find fleets from Orkney, the Earls and Giles of Orkney, traveling across to Ireland in some of the core battles.

of medieval times, fighting the High King Brian over in Ireland at Klontarf, for example. So you have a lot of these, a sense of Albany being part of something much, much, much bigger than perhaps we see it as being now. And so these stories...

play their part in echoing that. So in the story of the play of the Lady Odavir, and it's got wonderful sort of medieval textures to it, it's about a crusader. He's called Odavir and he's married this woman, but he leaves her to go on crusade and he sort of sets her up in his big castle on one of the islands.

And then he heads off to go and fight the infidel and bring back glory. But he doesn't come back for a very long time. And she's there on her own on the island until a selkie appears. And he's a handsome, a tall, handsome, dark stranger who comes in.

Obviously, he shed his brown seal skin, but has something of the sea about him and something of the sort of the mystery and enticement of the sea about him. And so she... takes him into her chamber and and the inevitable happens and she she gives birth to a selkie child but she knows that the selkie child will not thrive in human society and so the child is taken by the selkie back to his kingdom of sulski

which is one of these sort of legendary islands where the Selkies would go and congregate. And then eventually when her husband comes back, He's come back from the Crusades. He's come back from, they say, feasting in Mikkelgarf, which is what they call Constantinople in these stories, having a high old time in between the battles.

and eventually he's come back brought lots of treasure back with him but of course he can't stop hunting so he goes off to hunt down the whales and the seals and then he comes back from the hunt with a seal who has a golden chain around his neck which the mother put around the chain of her

of her son when she handed him over to his father and so she knows that her son has been killed and she's of course terribly distraught but that gives her away to her husband who then has her locked up in one of his towers says well she's going to have to be killed because she has betrayed him but then

Suddenly there's the sound, the tumult of all kinds of creatures at sea. And he thinks, oh, I could go and catch some whales now. I could go and really hunt some big quarry out there. So he goes off to hunt them and isn't able to catch them. anything at all. And then when he comes back to the island, his wife has disappeared. She's been rescued by her beloved Antigon to the mysterious Isle of Sul-Sgeri. And I guess compared to our other two stories, at least...

This one sticks out because here we have a monster who, rather than people being afraid of them, people are attracted to them. You know, the lonely farmer wants to marry a selkie. The lonely wife will take a selkie into her house. And I guess...

It almost goes back to what we were saying about the Bavarian dragon, about the dragon becoming almost the hero of the story, that there is this kind of two elements to the monster, isn't there? It's always an other, but we can be scared of it or we can be attracted by it, enticed by it.

And I guess it's where that balance sits, whether we call it a monster or something friendlier than that. Well, yes. I mean, I probably wouldn't call a Selkie a monster. That does seem sort of too much. But then I also wanted to include it in... a book called Monsterland to sort of challenge the definition of what a monster is. And also, I think to point out, because I think it's not an isolated example, there's quite a strain in medieval literature.

of the supernatural creature being in some ways the hero or at least a sort of point of identification. I mean, you have stories, you probably know Bisque Leveret, the werewolf story from Marie de France, where you have quite a sympathetic depiction of another kind of shapeshifter who shapeshifts into a wolf, but he is the character who the reader sort of identifies with.

So I think that medieval writers were not necessarily always depicting the shapeshifter, the non-human as being the outsider and the evil antagonist. There are a lot of varieties to how they... perceived these creatures especially with shape-shifting i think that medieval culture had a real fascination for shape-shifting and it really seems that those sort of stories come into their own in that period

which I think is something quite telling about medieval times and that sort of recognition of the wildness inside us and that we all perhaps have something, that sort of potential to become something different. Yeah, I think it's an interesting reflection of the sophistication of the medieval storyteller's mind though, isn't it? That a monster can be something you're afraid of, but it can be something that you sympathise with. Should we hunt monsters or...

Should we be more sympathetic to monsters? There can be things that you might consider monsters that are actually very, very attractive. It's almost less to do with the monster or more to do with the human response to the unknown or the unexpected. Yes, exactly. I'd agree with that, that I think it's about how we are responding to that sense of the weird and the inexplicable, the strange and what that does to us. That's part of what gives these stories that tremendous power when you read them.

I think a few years ago, I would not have expected to read these kind of stories as being medieval tales, I mean, handed down over quite a few generations. But I think having that medieval source to the narrative in them. But now I think, you know, I've seen quite a few of these and it's something I think is so exciting about medieval literature that it does have such a range and that medieval storytellers, like you say, they were incredibly sophisticated.

I think also with this particular story, the Selkie story, it's a sort of anti-hunting story. And it seems like it's a story that resonates in Orkadian literature. So I think it's a story that does resonate and has resonated. And there is quite a strain also of these sort of stories with that.

That message of, you know, be careful about overhunting, you know, overuse of the resources of the sea that comes out in a lot of the Selkie stories and then a lot of the other stories that are told about the other creatures in Aegean.

mythology yeah yeah fascinating i mean this has been incredible nick we have barely scratched the surface of monsterland there is so much more in the book for people to go and find their way around but thank you for

for explaining a bit about Bavarian dragons, Japanese oni and Orkney selkies to us. It's been really interesting to think about what they meant to the medieval mind. Thank you for taking us on those trips. Oh, you're welcome. It's been really fun chatting about them all. That's been great. Thank you very much, Nick.

I hope you enjoyed this voyage into Monsterland. You can discover more stories in Nick's book. And you can also catch Nick's last visit to Gone Medieval to talk about the medieval origins of fairy tales in our back catalogue. There are new installments of Gone Medieval every Tuesday and Friday, so please come back and join Eleanor and I for more from the greatest millennium in human history.

Don't forget to also subscribe or follow us on Spotify or wherever you get your podcasts and tell all of your friends and family that you've gone medieval. You can sign up to History Hit to access... Hundreds of hours of original documentaries with a new release every week and all of History Hits podcasts ad free. Head over to historyhits.com forward slash subscribe right now. Anyway. I better let you go. I've been Matt Lewis and we've just gone medieval with History Hit.

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