Stratovania

Since I've had my mind on water monsters recently, I figured I might as well turn my attention to that pillar of cryptozoology, the Loch Ness Monster. I'm not entirely sure why Nessie would capture the public imagination more than any other monsters that conspiracy nuts claim to have seen, but it has, being right up there with Bigfoot. Nessiemania started in the early thirties, with the Inverness Courier publishing a supposed sighting of the creature in 1933. The following year was when the most famous picture of the monster, known as the Surgeon's Photo, was taken.

In 1994, it was revealed that this picture was a hoax, with its actual subject being a toy submarine with a sculpted head. A faked photograph doesn't necessarily mean that the monster isn't real, however, and some still hold on to the hope that it is. Really, though, how would a monster of that size get to a freshwater lake in Scotland, and continue to thrive there for years? Has it been the same creature the whole time? If not, doesn't that require a family of monsters? When you get down to it, it's an absurd conspiracy theory. But at least it's a FUN conspiracy theory, without the offensive nature of other such theories.

Whether stories of the monster predate the sightings in the thirties isn't entirely clear. There are a few older mentions of monsters in the area, beginning with the account of the sixth century monk St. Columba. Adomnán of Iona's account of this saint's deeds has him stopping a monster on the River Ness by making the sign of the cross. Some people have apparently also tried to tie Nessie to ancient stone carvings in the Scottish Highlands.

Nessie is commonly identified as a plesiosaur, although the pictures and reports of its lifting its head and neck out of the water make this pretty much impossible, even if some plesiosaurs DID miraculously survive into the modern era.

Some have linked the Loch Ness legends to those of kelpies, tricky shape-shifting water sprites from Scottish folklore. Traditionally, the kelpies would fool people by turning into horses and then drowning anyone who mounted them, but I suppose one could turn into a big plesiosaur-like monster as well. In fact, the Harry Potter tie-in Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them identifies Nessie as a kelpie.

If I were to refer to a giant, you'd have a pretty good idea what I mean, right? Or would you? While giants are all big and humanoid, they vary in a lot of ways. Some are only slightly larger than normal humans, while others are truly huge. Goliath's height is given in different versions of the Bible as "four cubits and a span" (about six and a half feet) and "six cubits and a span" (about nine and a half feet). The Nephilim are said in the Book of Enoch to be 300 cubits (about 450 feet) in height. The Gigantes and Hecatonchires were presumably large enough to move mountains. Most of the Norse Jotun didn't seem to be much bigger than humans or Aesir, but their ruler Utgard-Loki had a glove that Thor and his companions mistook for a building, and the primordial giant Ymir must have been planet-sized. When a creature can vary from eight feet tall to positively Himalayan, they're probably not all the same species, are they? Then again, using scientific terminology for beings that couldn't really exist, as the Square-Cube Law means a human frame that big would collapse instantly, might not be the best idea.


So what about ogres? As far as fairy tales go, I don't know that there's a whole lot of difference between giants and ogres. Well, that's not entirely true. It's more that there doesn't HAVE to be a difference. A large being that's basically humanoid but with grotesque features that eats regular-sized humans could be called either a giant or an ogre. The thing is, however, that some giants of mythology and folklore are friendly, helpful, intelligent, and even beautiful. Ogres pretty much HAVE to be mean, ugly, and dim-witted, or they wouldn't be ogres. I guess they could be considered a subset of giants that are less human than their fellows. The Wikipedia page says that the term dates back to twelfth-century French, and gives several possible derivations.


There is, perhaps, even more confusion over trolls. These creatures of Norse mythology are often more or less interchangeable with giants and ogres, but other traditions say that they are essentially human-sized dwellers of forests and underground caves. Trolls are generally considered to have magical powers, and in some parts of Scandinavia, the stories told about them were similar to ones about fairies in other parts of Europe. Modern popular culture still provides several different takes on trolls. The Scandinavian folk tale of the Three Billy-Goats Gruff makes its troll a ravenous creature that lives under a bridge and is easily fooled, which would make it not all that different from your typical ogre. But we also can't forget the troll dolls that gained popularity in the early sixties and have enjoyed occasional resurgences since then. I remember them being big in the mid-nineties, when I was in high school. These trolls are hardly ogrish brutes, but instead cute creatures with brightly-colored hair. Tolkien's trolls are large and uncouth humanoids that turn to stone in the daylight, a trait that he probably took from tales of the Norse dwarves. Terry Pratchett's Discworld series expands upon this idea of Tolkien's by having trolls made of rock, and saying that they freeze up in the daylight because they can't handle the heat. Their silicon-based brains are similar in operation to computers, so trolls in warmer areas tend not to be very bright. Sunscreen and devices like the cooling helmet Sergeant Detritus wears have enabled trolls to function more smoothly in cities. Oh, and for what it's worth, the term "troll" for an Internet agitator presumably comes not from the monsters but from the fishing term, although it works pretty well with both definitions.

While L. Frank Baum's mythology either replaced or subverted a fair amount of the classical stuff, he did reuse some popular legendary characters, mostly ones who had become ingrained in popular culture. Santa Claus and Jack Frost are two of the most obvious, but there were a few others as well. One is Father Time, who plays a major role in one of Baum's American Fairy Tales, aptly titled "The Capture of Father Time." In this tale, a young cowboy named Jim ropes Time with a lasso, which results in time being stopped entirely until Jim releases the old man. Jim takes advantage of his situation to play several pranks, an idea that would appear in other stories about time stopping or slowing down. Father Time appears in his traditional guise, with a long beard, bald head, hourglass, and scythe. He explains that, whenever he swings his scythe, a mortal dies. Contrary to rumor, however, he doesn't fly, but instead takes his time. While the American Fairy Tales aren't directly linked to the Oz universe, some of them contain connections, so I tend to think of them as part of the same world. And perhaps I'm not the only one, as Father Time also shows up in Jeremy Steadman's Time in Oz. He actually dies during a complicated plot to unravel time, and is succeeded by his son Timano. I'm currently reading Ruth Plumly Thompson's Wonder Book, and I noticed that she used Father Time as a character in a short play.


While Baum's conception of Father Time is associated with death due to his life-ending scythe, the Spirit of Death actually makes an appearance in The Life and Adventures of Santa Claus. It's a small role, consisting simply of Death hovering over Claus's bed and then angrily leaving when the immortals show up with the Mantle of Immortality. There's no physical description of Death, but Baum writes of the spirit as female. While the Grim Reaper personification is generally thought of as male, Death in Slavic lore is a woman in a white robe, which is pretty close to what Mary Cowles Clark draws in her illustration of this scene. Her Death actually wears a gray robe, though, to fit in with the somber tone of the picture. Also, while I've never read Neil Gaiman's Sandman series, I know that his Death is also female, but a younger and more attractive female.


Speaking of the Sandman, he also has a place in the Oz universe. I don't know that Baum himself ever specifically used the character, but he did name the Sleep Fays as a type of immortal in Life and Adventures. According to the description of their king, he "carried a wand from the end of which a fine dust fell all around, so that no mortal could keep awake long enough to see him, as mortal eyes were sure to close in sleep as soon as the dust filled them." The idea of sleep being a result of sand or dust in a person's eyes makes me wonder what happens when a person falls half-asleep, or only sleeps for a few seconds. Does the Sandman just graze them? Anyway, the Sandman appears under his own name (well, title, anyway) in Thompson's Kabumpo in Oz. When Ozma's palace is temporarily perched on top of the giant Ruggedo's head, the Sandman mistakes it for a dream castle, and attempts to jump through it. He hits a window setting and spills his sand, putting everyone in the castle to sleep, except the few inhabitants who never slept. He then goes to tell the story to his wife, and Peg Amy later reports that she'd heard the Sandman lived near there. How she would know this isn't clear, but since Ruggedo and the palace are in Ev at the time, it's not at all unlikely that the Sandman's home is the nearby Kingdom of Dreams. This mysterious location is displayed on the map on the Tik-Tok endpapers, but never explored in the Famous Forty. In Gnome King, Scraps and Peter Brown come across the Sandman's Nap Sack in a pile of items for mending in the castle of Patch, and it turns out to put anyone wearing it to sleep. The Sandman doesn't actually appear, but perhaps he dropped off the sack for repairs. Our sleep-inducing friend shows up again personally in Jane Albright's short story "A Christmas Tree for Dorothy" (a Santa/Christmas Oz story that I forgot about when writing this post), and reveals to the Scarecrow and Tin Woodman that the Wizard of Oz had supplied him with a magic mistake bag to prevent more accidents of the sort in Kabumpo. I suppose the Sandman would count as one of Baum's Sleep Fays, but whether he's the king or a lower-ranking member of the band isn't clear.

Finally, while I already mentioned that Thompson's The Curious Cruise of Captain Santa isn't identified as an Oz-universe story, I suppose it's close enough that I can mention a character from classical mythology who makes an appearance in it. This is none other than Neptune, King of the Deep, who's portrayed as an old man with long green whiskers. Although not described in the text, John R. Neill also gives him his traditional trident. Thompson's version of Neptune is a rather eccentric man who lives in an undersea dwelling with a water place and smokes a water pipe. When Santa drops down his sea chimney and pays him a visit, he gives the sea king some gumdrops and a harmonica, which Neptune happily uses to play sea tunes.

As I mentioned in my last proper post, belief in elementals has persisted over the centuries, and one philosophical system that included such belief was Theosophy, an occult movement founded by Helena Petrovna Blavatsky in the late nineteenth century. So what, exactly, did Theosophists believe? Well, I can't be entirely sure, as Blavatsky and her followers were apparently fond of the typical occult trick of making things seem mystical by writing about them in convoluted ways. At its heart, it seems to be a syncretic belief that all religions contain some truth, and many different cultures had Adepts who were skilled at discerning spiritual truths about the universe. It incorporates elements from many different religions, as well as folklore and philosophy. The great chain of being, multiple lives of souls, history being cyclical, and humans evolving from weird proto-human creatures were all parts of Theosophy; as were the lost continents of Atlantis, Lemuria, and Hyperborea. In other words, it was sort of a catch-all with some new ideas added in. Blavatsky believed in the consciousness of the entire universe, and the elementals were basically the conscious spiritual forms of various natural forces. She wrote, "Under the general designation of fairies, and fays, these spirits of the elements appear in the myths, fables, traditions, or poetry of all nations, ancient and modern. Their names are legion--peris, devs, djins, sylvans, satyrs, fauns, elves, dwarfs, trolls, norns, nisses, kobolds, brownies, necks, stromkarls, undines, nixies, goblins, ponkes, banshees, kelpies, pixies, moss people, good people, good neighbours, wild women, men of peace, white ladies--and many more. They have been seen, feared, blessed, banned, and invoked in every quarter of the globe and in every age. Shall we then concede that all who have met them were hallucinated?" Yeah, pretty much the same basic argument that the alien astronaut theorists use. "A lot of people have reported seeing kind of similar creatures, and you can't prove they AREN'T real!" It doesn't hold a lot of water (or undines, for that matter) when you get right down to it, but I can see the appeal.


One known member of the Theosophical Society was none other than my favorite author, L. Frank Baum, which is largely why this kind of thing interests me in the first place. There have been some studies on how Theosophical beliefs affected Baum's writing, with this page detailing some of them. Honestly, I think most of the references are more subtle than people like the compiler of said page prefer to think, but there are some significant similarities. Baum refers to Adepts in Glinda of Oz, and to the ancient Greek idea of demons being spiritual guides in The Master Key. And yes, the idea of elementals appears here and there as well, most prominently in Baum's own Nomes, described as "rock fairies" and "underground elves." The idea of underground creatures capturing humans, as occurred in many of Baum's own Nome stories (the royal family of Ev in Ozma, the Shaggy Man's brother in Tik-Tok, the King and Queen of Pingaree in Rinkitink), is a common one in fantasy, what with gnomes kidnapping a human girl in Zauberlinda the Wise Witch (a book that owes much of its style to The Wonderful Wizard of Oz, and which Baum himself quite possibly borrowed from in turn) and George MacDonald's princess-napping goblins. Still, I think the idea that Nomes are the keepers of rocks and gems ties Baum's creations in with the elemental concept. One of the first mentions of the Gnome King (Baum hadn't yet changed the spelling at this point) was in The Life and Adventures of Santa Claus, in which he's one member of a council of immortals that watches over various aspects of nature. This council also includes the Queen of the Water Sprites and the King of the Wind Demons, and later books set in the same expanded universe bring in sea and sky fairies, the former being the mermaids of the book simply called The Sea Fairies, and the latter including the Daughter of the Rainbow. It doesn't seem like he really involved fire fairies all that much, though. I believe The Annotated Wizard of Oz suggested a connection between Tititi-Hoochoo's subjects from Tik-Tok and fire, presumably based on the fact that the ruler's title is the Great Jinjin, and jinn are associated with fire. Aside from one of the maidens attending the Queen of Light being named Firelight, however, I don't really see this. Also perhaps somewhat telling is that one of Button-Bright's many middle names is Paracelsus.


If I remember correctly, the nasty Wizard of Oz from Wicked was a direct follower of Blavatsky, and was perhaps intended to highlight some of the less palatable aspects of Theosophy. Gregory Maguire's Wizard rules Oz as a Hitler-like dictator, and the superiority of the Aryan race was espoused by Blavatsky. She did not advocate genocide, instead assuming that the Aryans would simply be favored by natural selection, but Theosophy was cited as an influence on the founders of the much more blatantly racist Ariosophy. Blavatsky's teachings included something about the Aryans originating on Atlantis and eventually being replaced themselves by the sixth root race, a far cry from gassing Jews in concentration camps. In other words, I guess you could say it was an example of RACIAL thinking, but not necessarily RACIST thinking. Still not good, of course, but I have to suspect from the admittedly little I've read about her that Blavatsky wouldn't have actually supported the Wizard's systematic persecution of talking animals.

Yesterday, vilajunkie alerted me to a kind of magical black cat that I had omitted from my recent post, the Cait Sith of the Scottish Highlands. From what I've seen, this is pronounced "cat shee," and hence has no connection to the Sith from Star Wars. Then again, I've read that a giant green rabbit is a significant character in the comics based on the franchise, so I suppose a feline Dark Lord wouldn't be out of place. But I digress. The Cait Sith is a fairy cat, distinguished from an ordinary black cat by its size and a white spot on its breast.


(Okay, maybe Reagan is too small to be a Cait Sith, but she DOES have the correct marking.)

The general consensus online seems to be that the Cait Sith could be dangerous and ferocious, but I can't find much about what they were actually thought to DO. But a few tidbits I was able to pick up included that the Cait Sith was sometimes thought to be a transformed witch, that some Scots also believed in a demonic cat called Big Ears that could be summoned by burning other cats, and that the canine equivalent is a typically silent green dog known as the Cu Sith. It seems that the legend of the fairy cats probably came from the Kellas Cats, Scottish hybrids between wildcats and domestic cats.



Nowadays, the name Cait Sith is more likely to be associated with a character from Final Fantasy VII, a robotic cat with a megaphone that rides around on an animated stuffed Moogle. It turns out that the cat is actually under the control of Reeve, head of Urban Development for the Shinra Corporation, who is operating as sort of a double agent. This Cait Sith differs from its namesake in that it has an entire white underbelly instead of simply one white spot, but it DOES sometimes speak with a Scottish accent. A few other Final Fantasy games have either a generic enemy or a summoned creature called Cait Sith. In the original English translation of Final Fantasy VI, the summoned Cait Sith was translated simply as "Stray."

Happy birthday to everyone's favorite fictional monarch, Ozma of Oz! Okay, she might not be EVERYONE'S favorite. I would imagine, for instance, that King Arthur is more popular. Of course, whether he was real or not is still up for debate, but all the stuff about the sword in the stone and the Lady of the Lake was almost certainly fictional. Hey, do you think the Lady of the Lake might be related to Ozma?

Anyway, how do I know it's Ozma's birthday? Well, Dorothy says it's August near the beginning of The Road to Oz, and the King of Foxville later states that Ozma "is to celebrate her birthday on the twenty-first of this month." That assumes that Oz and the United States use the same calendar, something I'm not sure L. Frank Baum ever addressed, but Ruth Plumly Thompson and later authors did make references suggesting that such is the case. Ozma's birthday party is a central part of Road, which has visitors from many of Baum's other fantasies coming to the Emerald City to pay their respects to the ruler. We also see birthday celebrations for the princess in two other canonical books, Magic and Wonder City. The former bases much of its plot around Ozma's friends hunting for unusual presents for the fairy ruler. Ozma's birthday isn't that significant to the plot of the latter, and from what I've heard, it wasn't referenced at all in John R. Neill's original manuscript. He had Jenny Jump arrive in Oz in the Munchkin Country, while the published version has her land in the Emerald City during Ozma's birthday parade. Incidentally, since the Heelers attack during the new moon about a week later, we might be able to work out some specific dates for when the events of this story take place. The book was published in 1940, when the first new moon after 21 August was on 2 September. In the previous three years, they were on 13 September 1939, 25 August 1938, and 4 September 1937. The 1940 date would probably work out best with the events, although that probably means it would take place after Neill wrote it. Oh, well. I'm sure Neill and his editor didn't have such trivial matters in mind when planning out the story.

Continuing the fairy theme from last week, I'm sure you know that the rulers of the fairies in A Midsummer Night's Dream are Oberon and Titania. But what was Shakespeare's own source for these characters? Well, "Oberon" is a French variation on the Germanic name "Alberich," which translates as "king of the elves." Alberich was a dwarf (the difference between elves and dwarves wasn't as distinct as it would become in Tolkien's work) who showed up in the Niebelungenlied, which told the story of the legendary hero Siegfried, and would eventually provide the basis for Wagner's Ring Cycle. The first known literary appearance of the French version of the dwarf's name was in the thirteenth-century epic of Huon de Bordeaux, in which the elf is the diminutive son of Morgan le Fay and Julius Caesar. So the name had a significant history by the time Shakespeare used it for his own fairy king.

The name of Shakespeare's elvish queen, on the other hand, does not have the same literary background as her husband's. In fact, it was almost certainly the first time the name had been used for a fairy. Spencer's Faerie Queene (who, from what I've read, was an allegorical version of Queen Elizabeth I) was named Gloriana, and the Bard himself had made brief mention of a fairy queen named Mab in Romeo and Juliet (in the form of a speech by Mercutio). Shakespeare actually took the name "Titania" from Ovid's Metamorphoses, in which it referred to the descendants of Titans. Kind of an odd choice for a fairy queen, but some think that it was because of the similarity between the monarch and Diana, identified by Ovid as one of the Titania. Incidentally, because Saturn's moons are named after figures from classical Greco-Roman mythology and Uranus' after characters from Shakespeare and Alexander Pope, our solar system ended up with moons named both Titan and Titania.



From this picture by Sir Joseph Noel Paton, we can tell that Oberon was known to don a party hat on occasion, while Titania regularly walked around topless. And I assume that dark-skinned kid with the pageboy haircut is Puck?

Well, summer is, as they say, icumen in. I believe the actual solstice is tomorrow, but I'm not sure it really matters in the modern United States, where businesses usually use Memorial Day as the beginning of the season. But for the English of the Middle Ages, the beginning of summer was May Day, and Midsummer's Eve was celebrated on the night of 23 June. This was the time that the fairies would meet, and of course fairies were an integral part of Shakespeare's A Midsummer Night's Dream. One of the most prominent fairies, whom I address in this post, is Puck, also known as Robin Goodfellow.



The term "puck" or "pooka" had been used for some time prior to the Bard's time to refer to mischievous fairies or devils, but Shakespeare's use of "Puck" to refer specifically to the name of this one particular fairy pretty much solidified the use of Puck as a proper name in popular culture. Within the play, he's the jester at Oberon's court. "Robin Goodfellow" is sort of a nickname, which most likely came from the tradition of not referring to fairies by their proper names, so as not to attract their attention. The euphemistic names usually included some reference to the fay as "good" or "fair," even though they were really often quite nasty, presumably so as not to get their dander up. Puck himself was held responsible for many acts of mischief, including changing his own form to deceive travellers, and making milk sour. He was also occasionally said to do helpful tasks, however, like sewing and housecleaning, and people would sometimes leave out milk for him. In such a role, he's basically a variation on all the stories of hobgoblins, kobolds, and other house-spirits who perform household tasks.

The legendary bandit Robin Hood (appropriate for a mention today, I suppose, seeing as how it's Errol Flynn's birthday) is sometimes viewed as a humanized version of Robin Goodfellow. Robin Hood doesn't have any magical powers, but he DOES live in the forest, dress in green, and have a sense of mischief. Wikipedia says that this is unlikely to have been the source of the outlaw's origins, but it's still an interesting thought.