Lord of the Rings: The Animated Musical | Folklore: Man-Eating Beasts
This week, I take a deep dive into the folklore of man-eating beasts based on a line in “The Shadow of the Past”. Gandalf told Frodo of a rumor he heard from the Woodman: “some new terror abroad, a ghost that drank blood”, allegedly Gollum. To be clear, in the era before CCTV, nobody saw or recorded Gollum eating a baby animal or baby Woodman, and any statistician knows correlation does not equal causation. Neither the Woodmen nor the Wood-elves nor Gandalf would deliberately lie about a dangerous creature in Mirkwood. Something was certainly eating the contents of nests, holes, and cradles, but whether it was Gollum is not provable.
The concept of a man-eating or blood-drinking creature is nearly universal folklore, from ghosts and vampires representing the undead remains of a restless human to human-like monsters stalking the borders of a community to hungry wolves terrorizing medieval villages. I take a look at each of these concepts, as the works of Tolkien drew inspiration from all three.
A Ghost that Drank Blood
Bloodthirsty ghosts have long been a part of folklore. In Thompson’s Motif Index, the bloodthirsty revenants (E250). include the vampires that suck blood from around the world (E251.3.3) and wandering ghosts in Celtic, Scandinavian and Eastern Russian folklore (E261), while several kinds of cannibals (G11) eat humans.
The concept of a ghost is fairly vague. In Ghosts: A Haunted History, award-winning paranormal historian Lisa Morton notes the proliferation of ghosts in ancient literature, including the ghost of Enkidu in the Sumerian Epic of Gilgamesh, the ghost of Tiresias the prophet in the Odyssey, and the Witch of Endor summoning the ghost of Samuel (1 Samuel: 3–25). Belief in ghosts outside of the West include the bhoota in India and gui in China. Previously discussed wraiths and wights are even more variations of ghosts that arose in Western Europe during the medieval period. To be categorized as a ghost, the creature must have two traits: it was the spirit of a once-living thing, and it must be appeased in some way. While the residents of Mirkwood feared a bloodthirsty ghost in their forest, if the creature stealing babies from the cradle was indeed Gollum, he did not actually fall into this category, since he was not dead.
On the vampire side, The Vampire Encyclopedia by Matthew Bunson compiles over two thousand vampires, including the loogaroo from the Caribbean, the ekimmu or edimmu of ancient Assyria, and the aswang of the Philippines. Vampires tend to be gendered depending on their region of origin. Those associated with the African Diaspora are more likely to be female, while vampires of Eastern Europe that later spread throughout the West were traditionally male. Once incorporated into Old Norse and Old Icelandic sagas, these monsters became known as draugar, a word so common that it was used for Nazgul in Ringdrotten, the Nynorsk or modern Norwegian translation of The Lord of the Rings. The word is superficially similar to the name Dracula from the 1897 novel written by Bram Stoker, as that name literally means “son of the dragon” in Romanian. Interestingly, draugar do not drink blood as other vampires do and arguably do not belong in the category. Meanwhile, modern portrayals of vampires are shaped by The Silmarillion especially Sauron’s messenger Thuringwethil. The lore involving blood-drinking ghosts is increasingly circular.
Border Stalkers
The term “border stalker” is the modern English translation of mearc-stapa or mearcstapan. Other translations include boundary-stepper, mark-stepper, marked wanderer, border-crosser, border-wanderer, heath-walker, and moor-stepper. The term is special for English language experts and linguists because it appears twice in Beowulf and nowhere else, making it a hapax legomenon, a Greek term meaning “said once”. Anglo‑Saxon literature isn’t the only place where these types of confusing words appear. As the world’s most widely translated book, the Bible has many examples. One is gopher (Genesis 6:14), sometimes translated to “cypress wood”, other times called “gopher-wood”, and of no relation to the rodents. Another is lahaqat (1 Samuel 19:20) translated to “a group of” in the New International Version. Translators view these solitary words as special challenges, and their translation decisions range from traditional to avant-garde.
Back to mearc-stapa, the word is discussed ad nauseam as a metaphor for outcasts who live at the fringes of a society. The monster Grendel is the original mearc-stapa referenced in the text, and the term is extended to his mother who is never given a name. PhD candidate Richard Fahey of the University of Notre Dame has argued for undocumented immigrants being considered the mearc-stapan of modern America, while Denis Ferhatovic describes the treatment of mearc-stapan in the translation produced by American post-colonial feminist writer Meghan Purvis, one of the few women permitted to translate the work.
In this vein, Gollum is a mearc-stapa not only from being cast out of his family smial by his grandmother but also because he is a human who acts like a monster. Grendel and his mother were not shaped like aliens or dinosaurs, despite what the delightful 1981 Australian animated musical Grendel Grendel Grendel would lead you to believe. They looked like a twisted form of human, stronger than average cannibals rumored to be the descendants of Cain, a Biblical character known for inventing murder (Genesis 4:1–16). Their shared ancestry made their crimes against humanity seem worse than those of a mere animal. In the same way, Gollum’s alleged taste for Man babies and Orc imps was deplorable because he was of hobbit-kind, a type of human just like infants he was alleged to eat.
Medieval Wolves
Not all bloodthirsty beasts were shaped like humans. Wolves were often the scariest animal in the medieval imagination. In the early 15th century, when Paris was little more than a village, wolves would enter the cemeteries to dig up corpses along with hunting living people. Among the best known of these wolves was Courtaut who had an unusually short or missing tail. Wolf attacks continued through the 17th century, when the Beast of Gâtinais attacked and killed a recorded fifty-eight villagers living south of Paris, while the Yveline Beast and other wolves killed almost two hundred people near Versailles. Post‑medieval wolf attacks ended in the 17th century with the eradication of the Beast of Bailleau, although a wolf or pack of wolves known as the Beast of Gévaudan killed an estimated 116 people between 1764 and 1767. Wolves lived in France and occasionally attacked humans until 1918 when they were eradicated. Within a few decades, the relationship between humans and wolves changed for the better. Wolves returned to France via Italia beginning around 1992 and are now beloved animals for much of the general public.
Wolves appeared in French medieval romances, especially as shape-shifters or werewolves. This may have been due to theology put forth by Augustine of Hippo in his book De civitate Dei [The City of God], where he emphatically stated that “beasts” do not have souls, while humans do. To become a beast, therefore, meant one’s soul was at risk of nonexistence, and accordingly no eternity in Heaven. This was perhaps the greatest fear in medieval Europe, even worse than the fear of wolves themselves.
After learning of this dark theological belief, one might think werewolf stories were likewise dark. In fact, they tended to be pretty funny, at least to the modern reader. My favorite is “The Lay of the Were-wolf” by Marie de France. In this folktale, an otherwise nice man became a wolf name Bisclavaret while in France or Garawal while in Scandinavia. This happened for about three days every month, and he wore special clothes to become a man again. Unfortunately, his wife decided to cheat on him with a local knight and hid his clothes to trap him in wolf form. The King found the wolf and kept him for a pet, implicitly giving him hugs and kisses like some people do with their dogs. The pet situation went well until the ex-wife visited the King, and the wolf bit off her nose, which she arguably had coming. After some explanation, the nose-less ex-wife gave the clothes back, the wolf turned into a man, the King gave the man hugs and kisses like he was still a pet, and the ex-wife was kicked out of the country with her local knight following along. Whenever I think my own stories are too far-fetched, I read medieval folktales to feel better about myself.