The Element Encyclopedia of Magical Creatures: The Ultimate A–Z of Fantastic Beings from Myth and Magic. John Matthews
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nephew Culhwch to find the lost hero, Mabon, by following a string of animals who lead to his hiding place through time and memory.
The Brothers Grimm tell a Swiss story of an old man whose only son studies with a master who teaches him how understand what dogs bark, birds sing and frogs croak. His father is incensed at what he sees as a waste of education and orders his son to be killed. The servants merely kill a deer, cutting out its eyes and tongue to give their master a token of the ordered death. Meanwhile the lad continues on his way. He goes among wild dogs that are ravaging the land; learning that they are bewitched into guarding a great treasure, he finds the way to discover it and so stop them barking. Later on he hears frogs discussing the death of the pope and how the cardinals are now looking for a divine miracle in order to appoint a successor. As the hero enters the church where the cardinals sit in deliberation, two doves land on his shoulders and the clergy recognize him as pope. Ignorant of how to say his own papal investiture mass, the hero listens to what the doves coo to him and he echoes their words.
In the ‘Narnia’ books of C.S. Lewis, Prince Caspian lives in a time when people have forgotten that animals once could talk, but he learns how to seek them out and with their help restore his lost kingdom. We are in a similar time. This commonality of language is lost to many of us and we have become estranged from our creaturely kindred. We have become tame and forgotten our animal origins. When magical creatures reveal themselves to us, we are not even sure whether they are permissible, orderly, authorized.
Monsters and the Role of the Monstrous
Some of the creatures appearing in this collection are what many would call monsters. But what makes a monster? A monster is seen to be any creature that deviates from the norm. Grotesque variations of the familiar are abhorrent and scary, as we understand when we view any unfortunate person born with a physical abnormality. We feel pity and compassion, but we are also greatly unsettled. But genetic malformations are in a different category to the true monster. Monsters are not one-off creatures; while they may make solitary appearances, they are actually legion.
Leonardo da Vinci wrote about the creation of imaginary animals,
‘You cannot make any such animal without making its limbs bear some resemblance to those of other animals. If you want your dragon to look natural, then take the head of a mastiff or setter, the eyes of a cat, the ears of a porcupine, the nose of a greyhound, the eyebrows of a lion, the crest of an old cock and the neck of a turtle.’
It is this very likeness to the normal that skews our perception and aesthetic values, giving us the sense of the monstrous.
Monsters have the ability to show the unspoken or unexpressed. Indeed, that is what the word ‘monster’ derives from – a ‘showing’, ‘omen’ or ‘miracle’. What we do not care to look at too closely, and what we gloss over in our own behaviour, is expressed by the monster who reflects our shadow. Indeed, cultures worldwide expressly use the monstrous as a threshold guardian of control, drawing on primordial or cultural monsters to patrol the limits as bogeymen. And fear is the bogeyman’s chief weapon of control.
Any study of magical creatures shows how, with certain exceptions, some of them are automatically seen as monstrous by the Christian world, animals that symbolize evil, emanating from the devil, helping to oppose the lawful order of things. Monsters infest places, destroy crops, waste the land, persecute human inhabitants and threaten life itself. As Jacqueline Borsje writes,
‘Monsters originally represent nonmoral evil, the powers of Chaos. As Christian influence on the texts increases they seem to attain an extra dimension…they also begin to personify moral evil.’
But this is not the primal function of monsters. They are not intrinsically or morally evil in themselves. They have another function.
We may see just how the idea of monsters and the monstrous has continued to invoke a deep response if we consider two of the seminal works of 19th-century fiction: Frankenstein by Mary Shelley and Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde by Robert Louis Stevenson. Both are deeply rooted in the idea of the monstrous other, the aspect of nature that is not of us and therefore horrific. Each makes it clear that to create and let loose the monster within is every bit as terrifying as an encounter with a Black Dog or Dragon.
Monsters as agents of the primal chaos of creation underlie many world myths. Thus, we find Tiamat and her family in Assyrian myth, the Titans of Greek myth, the giants and primeval monsters of Celtic, Polynesian and Australian myth. Without these monsters, there would be no earth, no seas, no rivers, no mountains. These titanic beings are world-shapers who live just below the surface of our imagination. Their function is to watch the by-ways and borders of the ordered world, threatening it with chaos, challenging its fixity with a shimmering power, ensuring that the civilized order is kept flexible and permeable to the changing influences of a creative power that has not yet ceased to flow. Monsters can therefore be seen as guardians of creative power whose purpose is to challenge the self-complacency of the seemingly changeless order that we so like to inhabit. Monsters bring out our heroic side, making us draw deep upon our own animal resourcefulness.
Back in pre-Christian myth, the slaying of the monster is a heroic task necessary to keep safe the boundaries of ordinary living. But while too much chaos can swamp us, too much certainty can also bring life to a dead end. In that perpetual shimmer of contact between our world and the world of monsters is an invisible gateway, an edge of excitement that incites us to quest, adventure and balance. Primarily, monsters help us maintain the balance of the universe.
Whose Account Counts?
In the exploration and classification of magical creatures, who decides what creature is real or unreal? Who observes them, and why? What do they say about an animal? Whose account is authoritative? The poem The Six Blind Men and the Elephant by the 19th-century American John Godfrey Saxe is a children’s favourite, based upon a Sufi fable. As the six blind sages feel the unknown object before them with their questing hands, they try hard to determine what kind of beast it really is. As they each feel the side, tusk, trunk, leg, ear and tail of the elephant, the sages think they have found, respectively, a wall, a spear, a snake, a tree, a fan and a rope. The moral concludes:
‘So oft in theologic wars, The disputants, I ween, Rail on in utter ignorance Of what each other mean. And prate about an Elephant Not one of them has seen!’
Very many of the reporters of magical creatures are often as well equipped as the Six Men from Hindoostan above who have no notion of what they are talking about. Pliny the Elder, writing in the first century is perhaps the most notorious non-eye-witness of them all, relying upon the testimony of others to speak of animals that even the original observers did not linger to describe too carefully. What Pliny and others have observed (or not actually witnessed) is similar to the half-truths and observations that we make about all the animals around us in the natural world. One of the reasons we believe animals behave in certain ways is due to our lack of patience or to the rationalist or fabulist’s fall-back which conveniently explains away why a thing is so. The real observer of the natural world soon learns a better truth, although may still not always understand what is being witnessed.
It is only recently, for example, that scientists have learned that whale-song is not just about communicating with other whales but about the practical ultrasonic mapping of coastlines and sea beds by which whales steer their course. Yet, within our own lifetime, we have heard the most fabulist explanations of whale-song which have inspired composers such as Alan Hovhaness (whose And God Created the Whale includes whale-voices with orchestral backing) or films like Star Trek 4 where the very real environmental concerns of the 1980s impinge on the fictional future of the Galactic Empire.
The sources of this book are varied. Where possible we have gone to the first tellers of tales as much as to the more recent accounts. Many of these early reporters lived at a time when only the known world was mapped. The uncharted regions, as in many mariners’ maps of the sea, sported monsters that kept people at bay. Some cultures maintained a policy of exclusion, allowing no foreigners to step into their territory, much as China did until only