Hal Johnson's Blog, page 42

“Once on a Time”

John Keats is very specific about when “Lamia” takes place. It’s “before the fairy” had come to the land. It’s “before King Oberon.” In fairy stories, and especially in Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream (ca. 1595), King Oberon and Queen Titania rule a court of fairies, and Keats imagines that the fairies, when they came, “frighted away the Dryads and the Fauns” and “drove Nymph and Satyr from the prosperous woods.”

Dryads and fauns, nymphs and satyrs: these are magical creatures from...

Honorable Mentions VI

A Jackalope, as everyone knows, is a fearsome creature of the American Southwest; but it has literary antecedents in the legends of the Middle East and India, where horned bunnies proliferate (sometimes under the name Almiraj). I found this neat reference to the creatures in an old translation of Sanskrit poetry, A Century of Indian Epigrams, Chiefly from the Sanskrit of Bhartrihari (1898) by Paul Elmer More:

So traveling far a man by luck
May find a hare horned like a buck…

The Tupilak Connection

Knud Rasmussen was as part-Danish, part-Inuit explorer who was born in Greenland. He collected folktales from the Inuit Eskimos there, which were published as Eskimo Folk-Tales (1921). Several of these stories speak of the dread Tupilak, a monster fashioned by a wizard out of the carcasses and bones of people and animals, all stuck together and brought to life by magic. Frankly, Tupilaks sound a lot like the monster from Frankenstein.

Is it possible that Frankenstein’s monster was heading...

Mummy Fuel

Mark Twain claims, in his humorous travel book The Innocents Abroad (1869), that in Egypt “the fuel they use for the locomotive is composed of mummies three thousand years old, purchased by the ton,” and burned instead of coal or wood. The joke is that the mummies of pharaohs burn better, and make the train go faster, than the mummies of peasants.

The idea of mummy fuel was, Twain says, “stated to me for a fact. I only tell it as I got it. I am willing to believe it. I can believe anything.”...

An Old Scottish Ballad

“O was it warwolf in the wood?
Or was it mermaid in the sea?
Or was it man, or vile woman,
My ain true love, that mishaped thee?”

(ain=own)

“It wasna warwolf in the wood,
Nor was it mermaid in the sea,
But it was my wicked step-mother,
And wae and weary may she be!”

(wae=woe)

From “Kempion,” in Walter Scott’s Minstrelsy of the Scottish Border (1803).

Mary Shelley on Ghosts

“I have heard that when Coleridge was asked if he believed in ghosts,—he replied that he had seen too many to put any trust in their reality; and the person of the most lively imagination that I ever knew echoed this reply.”

–Mary Shelley, “On Ghosts” (1824)

What Are They Saying about Dracula?

These are some of the reviews Dracula got when it came out in 1897:

•The Daily Mail: “It is said of Mrs. Radcliffe that when writing her now almost forgotten romances she shut herself up in absolute seclusion, and fed upon raw beef, in order to give her work the desired atmosphere of gloom, tragedy and terror. If one had no assurance to the contrary one might well suppose that a similar method and regimen had been adopted by Mr. Bram Stoker while writing his new novel ‘Dracula.’ In seeking a...

The Book Club of Dorian Gray

Théophile Gautier (see p. 19 of The Big Book of Monsters) was obsessed with mummies. He wrote a novel about ancient Egypt and titled it Romance of a Mummy (1856), and even when he was writing about something completely non-Egyptian, mummies sneak in. Describing a palace in his book of poetry Enamels and Cameos (1852), Gautier says:

Never did Pharaoh where the sad cliffs loom
Make for his mummy any darker tomb.

Not a very pleasant-sounding palace! Anyway, the reason I bring this book up is not...

The Nibelungenlied

The Nibelungenlied is a 13th-century German epic poem that tells pretty much the same story as the Volsung Saga, except its hero’s name is Siegfried instead of Sigurd. One important difference: In the Nibelungenlied, Siegfried intentionally bathes in the dragon’s blood, which (far from killing him) hardens his skin so that he invulnerable to all wounds. When he bathes, though, a leaf that sticks to his back keeps the blood away and leaves one portion of his body vulnerable. (You’ll recognize...

Honorable Mentions V

The Hippogriff from The Worm Ouroboros by E.R. Eddison (1922): A flying steed with the front parts and wings of an eagle and the back parts of a horse.

(Eddison totally swiped it from the Orlando Furioso (1532)—see p. 24 of The Big Book of Monsters).