Monsters of the Medieval World

Welcome to Monsterland. The Medieval world is a realm of dragons, demons and beasts. Matt Lewis and Nick Jubber step into this murky world to tell the magical tales of the Bavarian Dragon's fire-breathing spectacle, the dark allure of Japan's mischievous Oni, and the hauntingly beautiful legend of Orkney's Selkies. An adventure into the rich tapestry of medieval folklore and what these monsters reveal about human nature and the fears of the past. MORE Monsters of the Medieval Apocalypse https://open.spotify.com/episode/54HitUMboNBFWtOJQhvH3H Welsh Folk Tales https://open.spotify.com/episode/3rNA9vSBAs4MuE1T5X2VRe Gone Medieval is presented by Matt Lewis. It was edited and produced by Joseph Knight. The senior producer is Anne-Marie Luff. All music used is courtesy of Epidemic Sounds. Gone Medieval is a History Hit podcast. Sign up to History Hit for hundreds of hours of original documentaries, with a new release every week and ad-free podcasts. Sign up at https://www.historyhit.com/subscribe. You can take part in our listener survey here https://www.surveymonkey.co.uk/r/6FFT7MK: https://uk.surveymonkey.com/r/6FFT7MK Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy https://acast.com/privacy for more information.

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:01Matt Lewis?

  From long-lost Viking ships and kings buried in unexpected places, to tales of murder, power, faith, and the lives of ordinary people across medieval Europe and beyond. Join me, Matt Lewis, Dr Eleanor Yarnagger, and some of the world's leading historians as we bring history's most fascinating stories to life, only on History Hit. With your subscription, you'll unlock hundreds of hours of exclusive documentaries with a brand new release every week, exploring everything from the ancient world to World War II. Just visit historyhit.com/subscribe.

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  In Our Time is a world-class seminar every week. Why was Jeremy a lonely snail? What were lines doing in York in the 3rd century? I'm Misha Glennie, and every week I'm joined by expert guests to explore the ideas that shape our world.

• 2:07Speaker 05

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• 2:25Matt Lewis?

  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.

• 3:05Matt Lewis?

  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 writ roaring tales of heroes slaying beasts? Or is there more to it than that? How do they differ across the world and how does 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

• 3:46Matt Lewis?

  by Nick Jubber, whose new book, Monsterland: A Journey Around the World's Dark Imagination, explores the history of the monster story.

• 4:00Matt Lewis?

  Welcome back to Gone Medieval, Nick. It's fantastic to have you with us again.

• 4:03Speaker 06

  Oh, thank you very much for inviting me back.

• 4:06Matt Lewis?

  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?

• 4:36Speaker 06

  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 marginality and to have these wonderful manuscripts full of these magnificent creatures. And these sort of tall travellers 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 cyclopes and the minor tours. But then you also get your monsters that people would have claimed to have encountered in strange places. The skia 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.

• 5:20Speaker 06

  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 utter terror of what is out there, of what's out there in the dark, in the wild spaces. 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.

• 6:02Speaker 06

  And how they slew all these giants going around Albion until eventually one of his wingmen, Corinius, 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 not only in Europe but around the world. They're there in fear of damnation. You know, we've all seen those sort of last judgments with the 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.

• 6:45Speaker 06

  So I think there are all these elements, 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.

• 6:55Matt Lewis?

  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. They were 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? They're to represent in terms of a storytelling trope? Are they kind of deployed as as tools to help tell a story?

• 7:39Matt Lewis?

  Or should we be taking them quite literally when they talk about monsters?

• 7:43Speaker 06

  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 in an epic like Beowulf, for example, 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.

• 8:26Speaker 06

  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 bit was about Prester 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. Of course, he didn't exist, but the messenger didn't know that. And I loved the idea, or 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 skia pods and the cunicaeplei with their dog heads

• 9:09Speaker 06

  and 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. You know, 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. And so each community comes up with its own monsters and, and of course, other communities, they are monsters as well. You project all your theories on to just the people who are across the way.

• 9:53Matt Lewis?

  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 they, we encounter them when we get out there. And it's, it's interesting to think, you know, in a thousand more years, when people have explored the farthest reaches of, 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?

• 10:27Speaker 06

  Well, it's going to take them a while to map the whole of space, I suppose. So they've got, they've got a bit of time.

• 10:32Matt Lewis?

  And I guess medieval people thought the same about the world, you know? We keep exploring a little bit further, but there are, there must be monsters out there somewhere. It's, it's interesting what it says about us as people that we, we almost need those monsters to be somewhere. If they're not on this planet, we send them into space. We need a monster.

• 10:47Speaker 06

  Exactly. It's one of the things I think so 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 on to 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 and is, it's a kind of definition of humanity, that need to constantly imagine the freaky, the, the weird, to bring out all the darkness inside us and put it out there and give it a sort of physical form.

• 11:24Matt Lewis?

  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.

• 11:39Matt Lewis?

  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.

• 11:47Speaker 06

  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.

• 11:57Matt Lewis?

  Yeah, they always seem to need to exist in a medieval parallel world, medieval adjacent world, you know, a fantasy medieval world. What do you think the popularity of dragons says about the medieval mind? And perhaps why are they still popular today?

• 12:10Speaker 06

  Yeah, there are stories about dragons that go back 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 visualized. And I think, you know, around the time you sort of get to the ninth, 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 Feared of Wessex as they march to the Battle of Hastings. So you have this sense of dragons

• 12:52Speaker 06

  being depicted as this very, very visibly recognizable 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 wim. 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. But again, there are questions. 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.

• 13:35Speaker 06

  But I think to try and answer the question, I think that, yes, there is something happening around the turn of the millennium of real obsession with dragons and a lot of stories coming out of it. And I think that's where you see the legend of St.

• 13:48Speaker 06

  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 of the dragon, the one of the great stories, Sigurd the Dragon Slayer, Siegfried, which becomes the Wagnerian legend of from the Nibelunggen and the Volksung saga.

• 14:27Speaker 06

  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 Sigurd the Dragon Slayer that even appear on the porters of Spanish churches on the route to Santiago de Compostela. But then, as you go through the centuries, those are being replaced by Saint George and the dragon. And that's partly to do with the Crusades, I think, the increasing popularity of George as this sort of military saint, the sort of swashbuckling knight saint.

• 15:03Speaker 06

  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 on to the dragon and it becomes the quintessential dragon story that has sort of dominated European culture ever since.

• 15:22Matt Lewis?

  Yeah. And interesting how so many of the dragon stories always focus around the slaying of the dragon, particularly Saint George there being the the main example. But it always seems to be that you have to be the slayer of the dragon.

• 15:32Speaker 06

  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 fifteen ninety. They have records in Firthenbad in in the town archives there, going back as far as fifteen ninety of, I think, a protocol from that time. And then there are receipts of two gilders being paid to the man who performed the night who slew the dragon in sort of the early sixteen hundreds. And sort of various other bits and pieces 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 Two and Covid. But people's reaction to the dragon is very different now because when the dragon

• 16:17Speaker 06

  is slain, 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 Firth and Val, there's a good reason for that because it's a magnificent dragon. And it's huge. It's got a wingspan of 12 metres 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. So 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

• 16:59Speaker 06

  of it, because it has changed, obviously, over time, over the generations, a writer called Alexander Etsor 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. But 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

• 17:42Speaker 06

  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, that, you know, that I think there is that sort of medieval element to our current sort of spiritual anxiety, that we're racking 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.

• 18:05Matt Lewis?

  We can't be too far off the dragon actually winning then at the festival.

• 18:07Speaker 06

  No, no, that's exactly the thing. Like, is it gonna, is that gonna 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 Wolverine or the Navi from the Avatar series, or Shrek in a postmodern sense, you know, that actually we quite like to watch the monsters being the heroes now. So it may well be that that's where the dragon is going.

• 18:28Matt Lewis?

  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 that 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?

• 18:48Speaker 06

  Well, Bavaria does have quite a lot of dragon stories, and 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 Firth and Bowd, 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 Rigveda, they set the waters of life free. In the Chinese myths, often the dragons are the

• 19:33Speaker 06

  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. And you would 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 storms down upon us.

• 20:03Speaker 06

  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 has often, they've often felt like they're sort of out on a wing a bit, that they were ignored by the, 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 Firthenbald. The fortress there getting destroyed and lots of soldiers and armies sort of moving back and forth across into the Bohemian woods,

• 20:45Speaker 06

  which fringes very much on the town of Firthenbald, 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 where 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 and sort of being in the right place, really at the centre of this sort of cult of the dragon itself.

• 21:29Matt Lewis?

  Yeah, it's a really interesting association, isn't it, 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. And the 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.

• 21:48Speaker 06

  Yeah, and they have a pageant in Firthenbald, 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 town and people boo them and sort of call out at them, even though they're their neighbours, you know, who are 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.

• 22:32Matt Lewis?

  And 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?

• 22:44Speaker 06

  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 on to. 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 regalia. So, you know, it wasn't something that you would sort of keeping, keeping away. There was a sort of a pride in connecting that with yourselves.

• 23:26Matt Lewis?

  There's an odd juxtaposition in there somewhere about thinking about dragons as a representation of evil, perhaps an expansion of the biblical snake as the representation of the devil, but also invoking them for protection, you know, where, as you said, the Anglo Saxons are marching to Hastings with dragons on their shields, the Vikings have them on the prow 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?

• 23:58Speaker 06

  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.

• 24:29Speaker 03

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• 26:23Matt Lewis?

  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?

• 26:42Speaker 06

  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, curling horns bursting out of their heads, big sort of red or blue or yellow or green head. 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.

• 27:26Speaker 06

  And that becomes, from quite early on, that becomes a depiction that you see in Japanese hell scrolls. And then 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 oni 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.

• 28:11Speaker 06

  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.

• 28:37Matt Lewis?

  Yeah, and we've got that similar... Ambiguity that we're 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?

• 28:51Speaker 06

  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 judgements 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.

• 29:34Speaker 06

  They even love to play music, which is very unusual for monsters. It's usually, if you think of Grendel is in Beowulf, is pushed back by the singing of the psalms and the music that's going on in Frogr'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 realise 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 bit of 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

• 30:17Speaker 06

  to capture or to defeat the oni of Mount O, which is outside Kyoto. And because several people have been kidnapped and there's an oni called Shuten Doji, who is lording over a place called the Iron Palace on the top of this mountain. The story goes that a seer, Abe no 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.

• 30:57Speaker 06

  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 Shuten Doji in his bedchamber. Although because he's such a ferocious oni, he's fifty, I think fifty metres long. And his, his head rises up even after it's been decapitated into the sky. And then Riker, 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.

• 31:40Speaker 06

  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, they actually, it said you should pour a little bit of sake when you go there over the burial place as a sort of offering or act of respect.

• 31:59Matt Lewis?

  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 oni stories as well?

• 32:12Speaker 06

  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. You know, 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.

• 32:57Speaker 06

  So there's a sense of Kyoto as this perfection of human civilisation, 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 so forth. In fact, I think in the story, Shuin Doji even claims credit for causing avalanches

• 33:42Speaker 06

  that have taken people's lives. Actually, as it happens, Shuin 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 Kibana Eken, who described Shuin 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 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,

• 34:25Speaker 06

  who are another sort of monster that appears in a lot of Japanese stories. And the word that was used for that has a connection with a word for one of the tribes that was overtaken by the people who ended up becoming dominant in pre-medieval Japan. 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. But 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 Oni Shu Tendoji, like many of the Oni stories, is the story of the people, the elite, who had control of civilization against the outsiders who

• 35:08Speaker 06

  lived in the countryside, who lived in the mountains and around the rivers.

• 35:11Matt Lewis?

  And I guess in that, there's almost a literary comparison to be made for Beowulf in the, 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 civilized areas of Japan, people who didn't behave as they should do, outlaws, I guess, effectively become monsters.

• 35:41Speaker 06

  Yes, I think it happens in almost every culture. I think that we have that in British culture, I think, with stories of the woodwoes 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 being who is outside and just isn't let into elite society. I mean, to be fair, if somebody's 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 Shu Tendoji. Although, interestingly, in this one, he has his own palace. So that may be saying

• 36:26Speaker 06

  something, that the monsters, you know, he has a form of his own civilization in this particular tale. And there's often quite a splendor to the way that the Oni are depicted. And when you see them in some of the medieval scrolls, there's a marvelous 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 coloured 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 sake as well, with sort of wonderful inscriptions along them. And perhaps they are the ultimate symbol of civilisation, this rather lovely drink that is ultimately the undoing of the monsters.

• 37:11Matt Lewis?

  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?

• 37:20Speaker 06

  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 the, what's

• 38:03Speaker 06

  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 a time known as Setsubun, which is the traditional, in the traditional Japanese calendar, it's the time of the new year, it's as spring is coming through.

• 38:45Speaker 06

  And people gather in the Shinto temples and there are people dressed as the Oni in one Wonderful masks, some of them incredibly elaborate 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 the oni bursts 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 hurling the beans everywhere. And there's also you have the beans being given by the temple priests, the Shinto priests.

• 39:27Speaker 06

  And so there's a sense there also of the sort of the authority of the temples over the whole of the ritual and it's 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 oni appear. 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 is, who looks a bit like an oni because he looks kind of monstrous. He's, he's got a, 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, the shamanic figure of the Hososhi,

• 40:10Speaker 06

  who, which is the title for a particular court shaman of those times. And so he becomes the person or the figure who drives the oni out of the temple.

• 40:31Speaker 03

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• 41:54Matt Lewis?

  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, and we're going to go north a little bit as well, and we're going to get to the Orkney Islands. So there we have a case of the Orkney Selkies. So what is a selkie?

• 42:13Speaker 06

  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's 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.

• 42:54Speaker 06

  And the selkies are, they can be both male and female. There's a certain gender dynamic in a lot of these stories where they're a group of beautiful, young females dancing under the moonlight. And he grabs hold of one of their skins and holds on to it so that when they're all disturbed by 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, you know, he's in love with her, he's fallen in love with her radiant beauty, and he wants her to come and live with him in his crock. 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.

• 43:36Speaker 06

  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 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 rivlin 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 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 is restored to her form. And then she has the heartbreaking decision of leaving her child,

• 44:20Speaker 06

  uh, all her children and going back to the sea because that's where she's really from. And so she goes back into seal 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, you know, 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 in many of the islands out there. Uh, 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.

• 45:03Matt Lewis?

  And how significant is the selkie in Arcadian literature? Because I guess, you know, they're even more tied to the sea than we might think of in most of the rest of the British Isles. So is it, 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 to build a connection with the sea?

• 45:26Speaker 06

  Absolutely. I think Orkney does have a lot of 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 appear with no sort of story behind them.

• 46:11Speaker 06

  Who are they? Why have 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 behaviour. And they do have, they are very complicated creatures. One of the marine biologists I spoke to talked about the variety of maternal behaviour 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'd get that sense of having very different kind of personalities. So I think all those kinds of things, if you think of the sort of the fishing communities

• 46:56Speaker 06

  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 honourable 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 Selke 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 Dennison, who's one of the core figures in Orkadian literature.

• 47:37Speaker 06

  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 Norse speaking. Communities, you know, some scotters 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, you know, 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 Bert Neot, they travel out to Orkney. You find fleets from Orkney, the Earls, Giles of Orkney, travelling across

• 48:19Speaker 06

  to Ireland in some of the core battles of medieval times, fighting the High King Brian in, over in Ireland at Clontoff, for example. So you have a lot of these, a sense of Orkney 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, the play of the Lady Odevere, and it's got wonderful sort of medieval textures to it, it's about a crusader, he's called Odevere, 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, you know, 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, you know, handsome, a tall, handsome, dark stranger who comes

• 49:02Speaker 06

  in, obviously he's 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 this selkie child will not thrive in human society. And so the child is taken by the selkie back to his kingdom of Sulskerry, 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 crusade, he's come back from, they say, feasting in Mikelgarf, which is what they call Constantinople in these stories, having a high old time in between the battles. And eventually he's

• 49:46Speaker 06

  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 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 anything at all. And then when he comes back to the island, his wife has disappeared.

• 50:30Speaker 06

  She's been rescued by her beloved and taken to the mysterious Isle of Solskjaer.

• 50:35Matt Lewis?

  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? There's, 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.

• 51:12Speaker 06

  Well, yes, I mean, I probably wouldn't call a selkie a monster. It does, 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, 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 Bisclevery, the werewolf story from Marie de France, where you have a, quite a sympathetic depiction of another kind of shapeshifter who shapeshifts into a wolf. But he is the character who, who the reader sort of identifies with. So I think that medieval writers were not necessarily always.

• 51:55Speaker 06

  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 shapeshifting. I think that medieval culture had a real fascination for shapeshifting 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.

• 52:25Matt Lewis?

  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.

• 52:50Speaker 06

  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

• 53:32Speaker 06

  story, but it seems like it's a story that resonates in Arcadian 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 your, 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 Arcadian mythology.

• 53:56Matt Lewis?

  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.

• 54:17Speaker 06

  Oh, you're welcome. It's been really fun chatting about them all.

• 54:20Matt Lewis?

  It's been great. Thank you very much, Nick.

• 54:24Matt Lewis?

  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 instalments 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 Hit's podcasts ad free. Head over to historyhit.com/subscribe right now.

• 55:09Matt Lewis?

  Anyway, I'd better let you go. I've been Matt Lewis and we've just gone medieval with History Hit.

• 55:28Speaker 03

  Hey, it's Adam Grant from TED's Rethinking Podcast. As businesses scale, success depends on how well knowledge is captured, shared and kept up to date. Camtasia Pro turns teams' expertise into engaging training, onboarding and documentation. No professional editing experience required. With the industry's best screen recording, video editing and AI-powered workflows, you can train faster and boost operational efficiency. Get over $100 off your first year at camtasiapro.com and start building a smarter way to educate customers, onboard employees and ensure valuable expertise is shared across teams.

• 56:02Speaker 04

  In Our Time is a world-class seminar every week. Why was Jeremy a lonely snail? What were lines doing in York in the third century? I'm Misha Glennie and every week I'm joined by expert guests to explore the ideas that shape our world.

• 56:17Speaker 05

  It's one of the first times really that you consistently see someone painting teeth. I know that sounds bonkers.

• 56:22Matt Lewis?

  If I was going to define mathematics, I would say it's the study of structure.

• 56:26Speaker 04

  In Our Time, listen on bbc.com or wherever you get your podcasts. Tea or coffee? Love a cup of tea.