Bizarro World History 101: Monster Origins

[Scarbonac]

Re: Poul Anderson Trolls- Yep, Three Hearts And Three Lions and The Broken Sword both feature what has become the D&D Troll -- on an icky note, in TBS, an Elf-Lord creates changelings by raping a captive Troll-Princess (Gah! I can still see it when I close my eyes! The horror, the horror...).


When I read the description of Poul's Trolls for the first time, my jaw dropped and the phrase "Sonofabitch!" was heard echoing through my apartment.

 

[tarchon]

If i'm not mistaken i belive the whole werewolf legend was started during the dark ages because of mass hysteria and hallucinations caused by a fungus (primitive form of the fungus used to make LSD) that was growing on rye bread. The bread was baked and eaten with the fungus in it. Thus as the fungus spread across europe so did the hallucinations.

I've seen the ergot theory proposed to explain a couple of celebrated lycanthropy "outbreaks" and more prominently various incidents of witch hysteria, but I don't think ergot is really necessary to explain large numbers of people getting caught up in stupid panics over the most absurd notions - perfectly healthy people do it rather readily.
The idea of werewolves goes back to classical times at least though. Pliny recounts a well-known werewolf story, referring to the creature as a <i>versipellis</i>, or "turn-skin" and he was just passing it on from an even earlier Greek source.

 

[demiurge1138]

Herodotus wrote a TRAVEL GUIDE? Wow. That's a new way to define the first work of anthropology/history in the Western world...

You've never heard it referred to as a travel guide? Hmm. Ah, well.

And I knew there was some non-Tolkien author who "created" DnD trolls, but I couldn't remember his name. And the Tolkien trolls are kind of an intermediate between the Nordic and Anderson/DnD trolls.

Demiurge out.

 

[BrooklynKnight]

I've seen the ergot theory proposed to explain a couple of celebrated lycanthropy "outbreaks" and more prominently various incidents of witch hysteria, but I don't think ergot is really necessary to explain large numbers of people getting caught up in stupid panics over the most absurd notions - perfectly healthy people do it rather readily.
The idea of werewolves goes back to classical times at least though. Pliny recounts a well-known werewolf story, referring to the creature as a versipellis, or "turn-skin" and he was just passing it on from an even earlier Greek source.

Oh. There was another contributing factor.
There is a medical condition where the human body grows extremly thick amounts of hair. So much in fact that its actually fur. (though biologically all human hair is in fact fur.) It covers the entire body including the face. A pair of twins and a family somewhere in South America has this disease...well..i wouldnt call it a disease. It cant be cured. Its simply a genetic thing. Anyway. This "condition" is supposedly hereditary passed down genetically and has been around even back during the middle ages. People afflicted with this were classified as lycanthropes or werewolves and chased out of villlages and towns.

Man, you gotta love Discovery/Learning/History channel.

 

[tarchon]

Sylph - a spirit of the air, just as dryads were for trees, naiads for rivers, and oreads for mountains. I think that "sylph" is the Roman version whereas Dryad, etc. are Greek.

A popular and now dominant version of the 4-element theory assigned sylphs, gnomes, undines, and salamanders respectively as the spirits of air, earth, water, and fire. The names of the associated spirits are for the most part a late addition to it, by the alchemist Paracelsus (16th century), which you can kind of tell from that strange hodgepodge of names. "Sylph" is probably form the Greek <i>silphe</i> (Latin words don't use "y" or "ph" as a rule), originally denoting an insect, while Paracelsus seems to have associated the term with butterflies, though Liddel and Scott say it referred to the lowly cockroach. The naiads, dryads, and oreads are part of a much older concept of nature spirits prevalent in Classical Greek mythology. It's not uncommon to lump them all together under the general category of "nymph."

 

[tarchon]

Oh. There was another contributing factor.
There is a medical condition where the human body grows extremly thick amounts of hair. So much in fact that its actually fur. (though biologically all human hair is in fact fur.) It covers the entire body including the face. A pair of twins and a family somewhere in South America has this disease...well..i wouldnt call it a disease. It cant be cured. Its simply a genetic thing. Anyway. This "condition" is supposedly hereditary passed down genetically and has been around even back during the middle ages. People afflicted with this were classified as lycanthropes or werewolves and chased out of villlages and towns.

Man, you gotta love Discovery/Learning/History channel.

Hypertrichosis; porphyria and rabies have also been proposed. I don't really buy any of them either, but the Discovery Channel has to show something.

 

[green slime]

There was also an old beastie from Norse myth called a wearg or a wyrg or something, IIRC.

Umm... Actually "varg" or "warg" (the Swedes do not differentiate v from w, they both are pronounced as a "v") is Swedish for wolf. Non-mythical creature.

Tolkien was a professor of Scandinavian languages.