D&D Monsters in Fantasy Literature: What's Where?

gloomymarshes said:

sphinxes come from egyptian/ancient grecian myth of course.

The Banshee is from irish folklore, and half the celestial and infernal hosts (devas, erinyes) are from christian legend. The balor however, is tolkien's Balrog.

Dryads/nymphs/pixies/nixies/undine/gnomes and dwarfs are all from english/irish/scottish folklore.

The worgs are tolkien's wargs.

Click to expand...

(Evil) Devas are Persian/Zoroastrian, the Erinyes are the Furies of Greek mythology, a.k.a. the Eumenides.

Dryads and nymphs are ancient Greek, nixies are German (see the Bros. Grimm)(as well as being a type of digital display and US Postal slang for undeliverable mail), dwarves were common currency of Germanic folklore, and the undines and gnomes are largely from medieval alchemy.
The pixie is British though.

"Warg" is just from an alternative Germanic root for "wolf" - Tolkien modeled them closely on Norse folkloric concepts.

Wippit Guud said:

Here's a few more...

Leucrocotta - Indian myth, described in the 4th century as "a wild beast of great swiftness, the size of the wild ass, with the legs of a stag, the neck, tail, and breast of a lion, the head of a badger, a cloven hoof, the mouth slit up as far as the ears, and one continuous bone instead of teeth; it is said, too, that this animal can imitate the human voice."

Click to expand...

Leucrottas are a medieval garbling of the spotted hyena - literally the term means lion-hyena, a hybrid of the two, but medieval commentators were hopelessly confused as to what was a hyena (crocuta, crotta) and what was a leucrotta. The anatomical peculiarities of spotted hyenas, which to the casual observer all appear to be male, led to some strange theories as to how they reproduced and what they might reproduce with.

Bloodstone Press said:

About Cujo, as per my horror lit professor in college:

Stephen King wrote a number of stories where he took classic archetypes of horror and rewrote them for modern readers. Carrie is a retelling of the classic ghost story. Cujo is a retelling of the classic Wolf-man story. Pet Semetary is a retelling of the zombie or living dead story. And of course, my favorite, Needful Things, is about the devil.

Click to expand...

On the same subject, I've heard that Stephen King's novel "Salem's Lot" is a retelling of Dracula.