Gone Medieval - Monsters of the Medieval World

Episode Date: July 18, 2025

Welcome to Monsterland.The Medieval world is a realm of dragons, demons and beasts. Matt Lewis and Nick Jubber step into this murky world to tell the magical tales of the Bavarian Dragon's fire-breathing spectacle, the dark allure of Japan's mischievous Oni, and the hauntingly beautiful legend of Orkney's Selkies.An adventure into the rich tapestry of medieval folklore and what these monsters reveal about human nature and the fears of the past.MOREMonsters of the Medieval Apocalypsehttps://open.spotify.com/episode/54HitUMboNBFWtOJQhvH3HWelsh Folk Taleshttps://open.spotify.com/episode/3rNA9vSBAs4MuE1T5X2VReGone Medieval is presented by Matt Lewis. It was edited and produced by Joseph Knight. The senior producer is Anne-Marie Luff.All music used is courtesy of Epidemic Sounds.Gone Medieval is a History Hit podcast.Sign up to History Hit for hundreds of hours of original documentaries, with a new release every week and ad-free podcasts. Sign up at https://www.historyhit.com/subscribe. You can take part in our listener survey here: https://uk.surveymonkey.com/r/6FFT7MK Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

From long-loss Viking ships and kings buried in unexpected places to tales of murder, power, faith, and the lives of ordinary people across medieval Europe and beyond. Join me, Matt Lewis, Dr. Eleanor Jarniger, and some of the world's leading historians as we bring history's most fascinating stories to life, only on history hit. With your subscription, you'll unlock hundreds of hours of exclusive documentaries

with a brand-new release every week exploring everything from the ancient world, to World War II. Just visit historyhit.com forward slash subscribe. Hello, I'm Matt Lewis. Welcome to Gone Medieval from History Hit, the podcast that delves into the greatest millennium in human history. We've got the most intriguing mysteries, the gobsmacking details and latest groundbreaking research from the Vikings to the printing press, from kings to popes to the crusades. We cross centuries and continents to delve into aliens, plots and murders to find the stories big and small that tell us how we got here.

Find out who we really were with Gone Medieval. Welcome to the realm of dragons, demons and beasts that lurk in the darkness. I'm Matt Lewis. Not one of those beasts, though, honestly. We're about to pay a visit to Monsterland. Monsters are a fixture in many cultures across the world. What do they tell us about? the fears and beliefs of medieval people. Are they just writ-roaring tales of heroes, slaying beasts, or is there more to it than that? How do they differ across the world and how does some of them

somehow seem to stay the same? Almost as though they say more about the listener than the monster. To help us navigate these tales, I'm joined by Nick Jubber, whose new book, Monsterland, a journey around the world's dark imagination explores the history of the monster story. Welcome back to God Medieval Nick. It's fantastic to have you with us again. Oh, thank you very much for inviting me back. No, always here for the stories. And we're going to talk about a few in particular from your shiny new book, Monsterland. I mean, who doesn't like a few monsters? So I guess to ease us into this, we're going to talk about three monsters in particular that you cover in the book.

But I wondered if we could start with a slightly more general conversation, about why medieval people seem so fascinated by monsters? Why do they crop up in marginalia? Why are storytellers writing about monsters? What is it about monsters that grips the medieval imagination? Yeah, it does seem that there's a sort of intensification of monsters as you move towards medieval times. And I think that's partly that we have more records of what they set down.

And they were able to record things in marginalia and to have these wonderful manuscripts full of these magnificent creatures and on these sort of tall travellers' tales and the stories as well. And they were drawing on a lot of the classical monsters as well. So you have the sort of Greek monsters, the Cyclopses and the Minor Tours, but then you also get your monsters that people would have claimed to have encountered in strange places, the skierpods with their huge club foot shielding them from the sun or the blemies with their eyes in their chests.

But it is an interesting question. I think there's a fertility to the medieval imagination as a whole. There's such a colourful richness to the imagination of the people. And I think that bleeds very much into that sense of monsters. And I think there's a spiritual dimension of utter terror of what is out there, of what's out there in the dark, in the wild spaces, a sense that they're starting to control the wild spaces around them, but they haven't got there yet.

And there's still things to tame, things to control. Monster stories can also be very useful narratives for asserting territorial control. One of the stories I talk about early on in my book is from Geoffrey of Monmouth's history of the Kings of Britain, where he writes about the human settlement of Britain by Brutus and the descendants of the Trojans, and how they slew all these giants going around Albion until eventually one of his wingmen, Corinius takes on Gog Magog and defeats him and then gives his name to Cornwall. And there's a sense that you have to defeat a monster in order to have the right to the territory. So I think that's another theme that comes in.

And there's also this fear of what is to come. A lot of the monsters that emerge in medieval times, and this is, I think, it's not only in Europe, but around the world. They're there in fear of damnation. You know, we've all seen those sort of last judgments with the magnificent demons ferrying the sinners to hell. And you find that not only in European culture, but it will come up when we talk about the Japanese Oni.

You see that in Buddhist hell scrolls as well. So I think there are all these elements, this sort of combination of a flourishing of imagination, but also the spiritual terrors of what might be out there and what is to come. It's easy to forget that they lived in a time when, as you say, the map wasn't fully explored. And there could be things out there. They were almost free to use their imaginations to think what might be beyond the bounds of where people currently know, what might you encounter.

And I guess heart back to some of those ancient Greek myths about monsters being places and, you know, if you've explored so far, then the monsters must be just a little bit further, but you're going to encounter them eventually. When we hear monsters in medieval stories, do we need to think about what they are, in general terms, they're to represent in terms of a storytelling trope? Are they kind of deployed as tools to help tell a story, or should we be taking them quite literally when they talk about monsters? I think we have to be careful not to be seeing them as one thing,

or the other, because it's so easy with any aspect of history for us to project our own way of thinking back into the past. So I think with a lot of monsters, they do have that representative quality to them, and they are tools for teachers, and we see that sort of idea of the demons that are going to come and eat your soul coming out of the homilies and sermons. But there is always more to them, I think. You know, when you look at the monsters in an epic like bearwolf, for example, they're not there simply to warn us of what we might be afraid of if we sin too much. There's an entertainment value to them. They are very, very exciting monsters.

And they're manifesting something of the darkness outside. You've mentioned about that idea of sort of going further and you might see the monsters. And I think, as you say, it was something that was a real possibility for people in medieval times. You never quite know what might be out there. My first book was about Presta John, the mythical king in the Indies. and I was fascinated by the idea of a medieval messenger who was sent out by the Pope to go and find him. Of course, he didn't exist, but the messenger didn't know that. And I loved the idea, I was fascinated by the idea that there was this poor guy who was sent on this sort of quixotic mission that he could never accomplish.

Where might he have gone? And what did he imagine he was going to find? I mean, he must have thought, well, I'm going to discover the lost tribes of Israel, and I'm going to discover the skierpods and the cunekephaly with their dogheads and all these sort of wonderful new beings. and I'll be able to come back and tell everybody about. But, of course, that didn't quite happen for him. And in many ways, these stories are doing what now we have science fiction to do, the idea of what is out there in the universe.

But for medieval people, it could be out there much closer. It might be just across the sea, which, of course, could be very far, you know, certainly felt very far. And it could even just be across the valley. There's a reason given for why Japan, for example, has so many monsters, is because it has so many valleys. It has so many mountains, and they're divided by different rivers and valleys and mountains and so forth.

And so each community comes up with its own monsters. And of course, other communities, they are monsters as well. You project all your terrors on to just the people who are across the way. That's a really fascinating parallel with science fiction that I hadn't really thought about before, that all we've done is actually move our monsters off world as we've explored the map of this planet so that we're satisfied there aren't, as far as we know, any monsters lurking anywhere in the corners. all we've really done is take science fiction and move those monsters off world. We've turned them into aliens and we encounter them when we get out there.

And it's interesting to think, you know, in a thousand more years, when people have explored the farthest reaches of space and there's no monsters there, will they look back at us and say, look at these idiots thinking there was aliens out there. Well, it's going to take them a while to map the whole of space, I suppose. So they've got a bit of time. And I guess medieval people thought the same about the world, you know. We keep exploring a little bit further, but there must be monsters out there somewhere. It's interesting what it says about us as people that we almost need those monsters to be somewhere.

If they're not on this planet, we send them into space. We need a monster. Exactly. It's one of the things I think so fascinating about monsters that we have, and especially in medieval times, we had so many incredible, rich, wondrous things in nature, so many different species to discover. And yet people had to always imagine something else. And we've always had that need to project our imaginations onto nature and sort of mix it up with what we're seeing out there and imagine something else.

And that's something that is, I think, instinctive to humans. It's a kind of definition of humanity, that need to constantly imagine the freaky, the weird, to bring out all the darkness inside us and put it out there and give it a sort of physical form. Well, the first of the three monsters that we're going to focus on from your book today is the dragon, particularly, specifically the Bavarian dragon. So dragons, more generally, before we get really focused in on Bavaria, dragons are obviously incredibly popular in the medieval period. I mean, they are still popular.

You've only got to look at Game of Thrones and House of the Dragon. Dragons are still everywhere. Yeah. But it's very much a throwback to the medieval period, isn't it? The popularity of dragons now and Tolkien and that sort of re-engineering of the medieval dragon in particular, I think. Yeah, they always seem to need to exist in a medieval parallel world, the medieval adjacent world, you know, a fantasy medieval world.

What do you think the popularity of dragons says about the medieval mind, and perhaps why are they still popular today? Yeah. There are stories about dragons, obviously, that go back, way back, and it becomes increasingly difficult to define, is this what we would call a dragon? You have what might be called a dragon in the Rig Vader or in the Babylonian epic of creation,

the shining Tiamat who brings forth all these monsters out of the primordial sea. But as you get into medieval times, it seems there is something very specifically dragon in these forms, and we can see it visualised. And I think, you know, around the time you sort of get to the ninth of 10th century, you've got, you've got dragons everywhere. You've got them on the prows of Viking ships. You've got them on the regalia of Chinese emperors. You've got them on the banners of the Feard of Wessex as they march to the Battle of Hastings. So you have this sense of dragons being depicted as this very, very visibly recognizable form.

Although, of course, the Chinese dragon and the European dragon, there's a lot of difference between them. And I think one has to be careful with the terminology because, you know, we use the word dragon. Going back to the Latin Draco, obviously, there's the Germanic Wyvern or Wim, there's the Chinese Lung and so many different terms for dragons. There are the Meso-American dragons, which would have been appearing and being carved into sculptures around the same time. But again, there are questions. Can we define those exactly as dragons? is a dragon simply a winged serpent of some kind? And then does that mean you exclude the ones that don't have wings,

which are often defined as being dragons? So it can get quite naughty and complicated. But I think to try and answer the question, I think that, yes, there is something happening around the turn of the millennium of real obsession with dragons and a lot of stories coming out of it. And I think that's where you see the legend of St. George and the dragon really emerging. Because with St. George, you have a saint who had died many centuries earlier and had nothing, obviously, had nothing to do with.

dragons. But he wasn't even the most obvious saint to associate with dragons or the holy figure to associate with dragons. I would have thought, you know, somebody like the Archangel Michael would be more obvious because there's a sort of biblical precedent for that. And you've got the dragon of revelations, which has, I think, an impact on the way that dragons are depicted in European mythology. But then you also have these sort of Norse and Germanic tales of the dragon, one of the great stories, Seagor, the dragon slayer, Siegfried, which becomes the Vagnerian legend from the Nibylungen and the Volsung saga. So you have these stories sort of joining together and there's a sort of perfect coordination that happens where the cult of St. George starts to grow at around the same time

that the cult of the dragon is intensifying. So you've got these depictions of Seagore the dragon slayer that even appear on the porters of Spanish churches on the route to Santiago de Compostela. But then as you go through the centuries, those are being replaced by St. George and the dragon. And that's partly to do with the Crusades, I think. The increasing popularity of George is this sort of military saint, the sort of swashbunkling knight saint, and the idea that he had appeared at the siege of Antioch and many other occasions where people believe they had had visions of him. And at the same time, you have these stories of the dragons increasing. And so he sort of gets latched onto the dragon and it becomes the quintessential dragon story that has sort of dominated European culture ever since. Yeah, and interesting how so many of the dragon stories always focus around the slaying of a dragon, particularly St George there being the main example, but it always seems to be that you have to be the slayer of the dragon. Yes, and it's a funny thing now, actually, because we've come to a different stage in how we see monsters today.

So when I went out to Bavaria, they do a performance of the slaying of the dragon, and they've been doing it every year since at least 1590. They have records in Fufumbao in the town archives there, going back as far as 5090 of I think a protocol from that time. And then there were receipts of two guilders being paid to the man who performed the knight who slew the dragon in sort of the early 1600s and various other bits and pieces through the centuries to show how consistently this was performed. It seems to have been pretty much performed all the time with the exception, I think,

of World War II and COVID. But people's reaction to the dragon is very different now because when the dragon is slaying, there's a sort of collective sigh that breaks out. because actually people have come not to see the hero. They've come to see the dragon. And in the case of this place in Bavarian, Firf and Vald, there's a good reason for that because it's a magnificent dragon. I mean, it's huge.

It's got a wingspan of 12 metres, and it breathes out fire and smoke and it roars. It was made for two million euros by 20 companies, including Magiacon, who were one of the companies behind the Harry Potter movie. So it's an absolute spectacle. But the sympathy has moved towards the monsters. We see them, I think, now as a sort of emanation of something that we are damaging in nature.

And I talked to various people who were involved in this performance, and one of them was the director and writer of the current iteration of it, because it has changed, obviously, over time, over the generations, a writer called Alexander Ezzor Ragoza. And he talked about how in the past you would have seen the dragon as being a sort of representation of the devil, which I think is very much how a medieval Christian audience would see it. But every so often that meaning changes,

so that then in recent times people saw the dragon as representing the beast from the east, as they called it. It was the idea that it was coming from beyond the iron curtain. So it had this sort of political resonance where it was seen to represent what people feared across the iron curtain in the communist world. And then now it had become a sort of representation of what Alexander called our ecological catastrophe, the idea that the dragon now is sort of expressing its rough at humanity for what we have been doing to nature. And so it becomes a sort of God that represents the natural world and is punishing us for our sins, which in some ways it's quite medieval actually that you know that I think there is that sort of medieval element

to our current sort of spiritual anxiety that we're racking ourselves understandably for all the damage that we've been doing and we need that dragon to come out and sort of give us a good burning we can't be too far off the dragon actually winning then at the festival no no that's exactly the thing like is it going to is that going to be the next iteration because there are so many monster stories now where the monsters have become the heroes you know they're now it's wolverine or the navi from the Avatar series or Shrek in a postmodern sense, that actually we quite like to watch the monsters being the heroes now. So it may well be that that's where the dragon is going.

I was just thinking, as you were saying, the other example is something like Wicked Way. We always have to have these backstories for the villains now, in which they're not villains. We have to understand how and why they've become what we consider to be villains, so we can almost feel sorry for them. Is there anything specific or different that we should know about the Bavarian dragon? Why is that one in particular the focus of your book?

Well, Bavaria does have quite a lot of dragon stories. And I think it's very interesting sometimes to look at the landscape and the climate and to look at where these things may have particular resonances. In Bavaria, you do have a lot of flooding, a history of flooding. And there's a lot of rivers there and they are flooded a lot. So the area of Firfamauld where this particular dragon story is told has got a terrible history of being flooded throughout the centuries. And dragons would often be blamed for flooding.

They were the creature up in the sky that released the waters. We tend to think of them associated them now with fire, but actually historically, they're associating this specifically with water. So when you go back to something like the Rig Vader, they set the waters of life free. In the Chinese myths, often the dragons are the bestowers of water. They are the rain clouds, basically. And if you think of these dark clouds with fire coming out of them in a thunderstorm,

that does parallel with a dragon. And you can see why then in the plains of China, you would be very grateful for that. And you would tell stories that treat that creature as a divine being that has given blessings. Whereas in Northern Europe, where we take our rainfall very much for granted, obviously, we're not so grateful. And we go, oh, damn, that dragon up there, bringing these storms down upon us. And because it's quite close to the Alps, you get a lot of clouds getting jammed up. And so you get this sort of particular intensity of rainfall.

So there's that, I think there's also that it is close to Bohemia. It's a sort of, it's a hinterland. And hinterlands are often places where monster stories flourish. That part of Bavaria has often, they've often felt like they're sort of out on a wing a bit, that they were ignored by the Germanic princes. They were at the prey of the Bohemians. In the 14th, 50th century, there was a lot of fighting with the Hussite rebellions and a lot of carnage and destruction happening around this area, around Firf and Vowl,

the fortress there getting destroyed, and lots of soldiers and armies sort of moving back and forth across into the bohemian woods, which fringes very much on the town of Ferbem Wilder. I mean, it's within walking distance of it. So you've got that sort of political turmoil, which, again, is something that intensify stories of monsters. You see that in many, many types of monster stories, whether it's in the 1600s where in France,

where werewolf stories manifested a lot during a time of turmoil in the west of France or in the Balkans in the 18th century when you have a lot of vampire stories emerging. And it's often people moving around, armies moving around carnage and turmoil and people are looking over their shoulders at the strangers in their midst and trying to find an explanation for all the trouble that's brewing around them. So I think it's that mixture of nature and politics and sort of being

in the right place really at the centre of this sort of cult of the dragon itself. Yeah, it's a really interesting association with political unrest and the desire to explain it via monsters. You know, it's almost something unhuman about the amount of violence and upset and political unrest and all of that kind of thing and the othering of people you consider foreign as they move around, that there must be some kind of monstrous element to what's going on. Yeah, and they have a pageant in Firfimval, which is part of this show that goes on, where more than a thousand people are dressed in medieval costume, and amongst them they have the war wagons of the Hussites. And so the Hussites from Bohemia would travel around in these

sort of high-sided wagons, pulled by several horses, and you have them parading down the town. and people boo them and sort of call out of them, even though they're their neighbours, you know, who are just dressed up in costume. You know, it's all part of the fun, part of the show. But I think it speaks to a sense of a sort of historical scar. Still a little bit sensitive, that sense of always, you know, it's them, those guys from across the way, you know,

all that trouble they caused us. And yes, it's the easiest thing to do. If you can turn your neighbours into monsters, then it's much easier to kill them. Do we ever get much of a sense in the medieval world of whether people actually really believed that dragons existed? Were they always a metaphor for this kind of thing? Or did people genuinely think there were dragons out there?

So I think people believed that there was darkness out there and they believed very much in the devil and that the devil could take many forms. And I think that the dragon really is a sort of magnificent form for evil itself in European culture that you can latch that fear of all those terrors onto. And that, again, it's a very different way of seeing the dragon from how we see it now where we tend to be more, we admire its splendor and magnificence.

But I think for a lot of medieval people, it was something quite terrified. Although on the other hand, these things always have nuances because they put dragons on coats of arms and on various regalia. So, you know, it wasn't something that you would sort of keeping away. There was a sort of pride in connecting that with yourselves. There's an odd juxtaposition in there somewhere about thinking about dragons as a representation of evil, perhaps an expansion of the biblical, snake as the representation of the devil, but also invoking them for protection, you know, where, as you said, the Anglo-Saxons are marching to Hastings with dragons on their shields,

the Vikings have them on the prowess of their ship while also having legends about dragon slayers and things like that. So there is this odd juxtaposition, isn't there, between calling on them for protection, but believing that they're evil and need to be hunted. There is, and I think we should always remember there is that ambiguity in how dragons are being treated. I mean, because they are these fierce beings, the idea, well, look, if you're going to come to battle with us, we're going to set our dragon on you. We're going to become a dragon to fight you. There's that element. And yeah, there is, as you say, that fascinating juxtaposition that keeps going on. Right, we probably need to move on. We're going to skip to almost the other side of the medieval world, really,

and we're going to head to Japan. And one of the other monsters that you focus on in the book is the Japanese only. Can you give us a kind of a brief overview, I guess, of what an ony is. is, and how are they depicted in Japanese literature? Yes. Well, first of all, they're depicted as being invisible. Their first appearances is these sort of invisible shifting spirits. Yeah, how do you depict the invisible? And so then because Japanese culture is very, very pictorial and visual,

you start to get these fantastically lured depictions of them, where they tend to become extremely consistent. And they tend to have two horns, ox's horns, particularly, sort of very large curdling horns bursting out of their heads, big sort of red or blue or yellow or green head and they wear and they're sort of ogre-like in their form, often carrying a club or some kind of weapon and wearing a tiger skin pelt around their waist to save their modesty. And that becomes, from quite early on, that becomes a depiction that you see in Japanese hell scrolls and then it from sort of from medieval times onwards, it becomes pretty much the standard depiction.

There's a museum actually on top of one of the mountains which is associated with one of the ony stories where they have sculptures of the ony because they're often depicted on the ridge lines of the roofs of Shinto temples, Shinto and Buddhist temples. They're a sort of apotrapeic symbol that wards off other terrifying beasts. So if you have your ony on your temple, then anything else is going to keep away because they're so ferocious. So you can see them, and they're lined up actually by date. So you can see the development of the form. And it is fairly consistent. They all tend to have these horns. But as the sculptor's art is becoming increasingly sophisticated,

their tusks are getting more and more elaborate. The eyes are sometimes very large or sometimes small. I think by the 19th century, some of them even have moustaches, which makes them look rather dandy-like. But the really freaky ones are the older ones, actually, the medieval ones, where you can sense the fear of the sculptor and the sense that this is something that might be out there and that we want to be wary of.

Yeah, and we've got that similar ambiguity that we're just talking about there, where you've got something that is essentially evil, but being used to also ward off other evil. Are only basically equivalents to demons. Should we be thinking them as demons? Well, I think that's how they were originally depicted. So in the Buddhist Hell Scrolls,

they ferry the sinners to hell. So they have that similar role to what we would see the demons in our last judgments. having. But then the stories sort of take over and become increasingly varied and elaborate, and they're often out of control. The idea maybe of our sort of medieval demons, they're sort of under the ages of the devil or some kind of sort of evil leader, whereas the, the ony tend to, you know, they just go off and do whatever they want really. So you have a lot of stories where they are driven by their appetites. They love to drink. They love to eat. Sometimes they love to

steal away Japanese women and children and other captives. They even love to play music, which is very unusual for monsters. It's usually, if you think of Grendel is in Beowulf, is pushed back by the singing of the Psalms and the music that's going on in Frothgar's Meathor, whereas in some of the Japanese stories, you hear of music being played in the Rashemong Gate of Kyoto beautifully, you know, perfectly played. And then as the listeners draw closer, they realize that it's an ony that's actually playing the music. So they have these different qualities, but they are mostly driven by evil, by wanting to capture and kill. So the main story that I focused on in my book, Monsterland,

is one about a hero called Ryko, and he's sort of one of the prototypes for the samurai, who is sent off on a mission to capture or to defeat the ony of Mount O, which is outside Kyoto. And because several people have been kidnapped, and there's an ony called Shutund Doji, who is lauding over a place called the Iron Palace on the top of the top of the army of of this mountain. The story goes that a seer, Abe Nilsemi, who's one of the great seers of Japanese medieval culture, has identified where the Onee is and has sent the warriors out to find him. But along the way, they meet some mountain priests who accompany them, and they bring along with them several jars of Sarki, which is, of course, a very good idea whenever you're going on a long

journey. And so they arrive at this Iron Palace, which is ruled by these creatures, these Oni, and they present them with the sarki. And so the chutendosji, the leader of the oni, ends up getting drunk on it and passes out. And then they're able to sweep around the palace, kill off all the ony, and release the captives, and finally decapitate the evil churton doji in his bedchamber. Although, because he's such a ferocious ony, he's 50, I think 50 meters long, and his head rises up even after it's been decapitated into the sky. And then Raiko, the hero, has to drop him down and very nearly gets bitten by this flying head in a very sort of beautifully sort of lurid final scene

before finally defeating the head. And then they carry it down. And there's actually a temple or a shrine on the edge of Kyoto where the head is said to be buried, which is still a place that can be visited for people who are suffering from head issues, I think particularly some issues of the neck and such problems. And so people leave certain offerings there.

And they actually, it said you should, or a little bit of Sarki when you go there over the burial place as a sort of offering or active respect. How important was medieval Kyoto to these stories and the development of these stories? Because I'm struck again that we're talking about Kyoto is in a fairly mountainous region, similar to what we talked about in Bavaria. Does that play into the development of these only stories as well? I think with Kyoto, you have this, it is at the heart of so many of the great medieval Japanese stories because it's such a dominant imperial capital.

You know, it was the capital until, I think, the 19th century. So it has this huge cultural dominance, and it was a spectacular place. I think in some ways it's difficult to see that now because so much of it has been destroyed in the intervening centuries. But on the other hand, Kyoto today is in many ways a sort of mirage that is trying to replicate the visual beauty of medieval Kyoto. So a lot of the temples are built on the same form or shape or appearance that they were supposed to have, according to records from earlier times before being burned or destroyed in war. So there's a sense of Kyoto as this perfection of human civilization, but surrounded by, as you say, by the mountains and by such a richness of landscape.

You also have the problem that Japan has that it is afflicted by every possible disaster that you can have, tsunamis and earthquakes and volcanoes and all these different kind of phenomena. So stories were invented to explain these things. And all over the world, people would explain these natural disasters through stories of monstrous creatures of some kind. And the onyar especially associated with eruptions on the mountains, with avalanches and so forth. In fact, I think in the story,

Schueton Dojee even claims credit for causing avalanches that have taken people's lives. Actually, as it happens, Schuton Doge himself was believed by many people to not be a, figment of fiction, but to actually have been a real life figure. So there's a 17th century writer whose name, I think it's Kaibana Eken, who described Chuton Doji as being a sort of gangster who was operating in the mountains and who was acting as one of these demonic figures, even possibly wearing a mask to frighten the people in the town, in the city. And there are lots of stories

about people outlaws living out in the mountains who would then become in the focus. claw, they would then become monsters. And that goes way back over the century. So you have, I think it's the earth spiders who are another sort of monster that appears in a lot of Japanese stories. And the word that was used to for that has a connection with a word for one of the tribes that was overtaken by the people who ended up becoming dominant into pre-medieval Japan. So you have a lot of these stories where there are these sort of roots in a blurred version of history where gradually as they get told and retold and spun into tales, the monster becomes clarified. But if you can sort of tease them apart, you can see there's actually more of a human conflict that's going on at the

heart of it. So in some ways, that story of Riker and the Oni Shutendoggi, like many of the only stories, is the story of the people, the elite, who had control of civilization against the outsiders who lived in the countryside, who lived in the mountains and around the rivers. And I guess in that, there's almost a literary comparison to be made. for Beowulf, and essentially that's about the monster that lives outside that isn't in the inner circle, isn't in the Mead Hall enjoying the warmth of the fire and the hospitality. If it's external, it's a monster and it should be feared. And it sounds like maybe the Japanese had the same idea that people who are outside of the civilized areas of Japan, people who

didn't behave as they should do, outlaws, I guess, effectively become monsters. Yes, I think it happens in almost every culture. I think that we have that in British culture. with stories of the woodwoses and other sort of creatures that lived in the woods. Sometimes we turn them into folk heroes like Robin Hood, but sometimes they became our goblins and sprites and other sort of creepy things that were out there in the woods. I think it's part of the human instinct to monster the other. And as you say, it's that sense of the outsider, which I think Grendel and Beirwool to me is such an epitome for that idea

that the monster is this being who is outside and just isn't let into elite society. I mean, to be fair, if somebody's going to come into your home and start, punching on your friends. You're not going to want them in your society. But still, and it's the same sort of idea, I think, with shooting Doji. Although interestingly, in this one, he has his own palace. So that may be saying something that the monsters, you know, he has a form of his own civilization in this particular tale. And there's often quite a splendor to the way that the only are depicted. And when you see them in some of the medieval scrolls, there's a marvelous scroll depicting this particular story that's on display in one of the, you know, and you see them.

the museums, the name of which is obviously going to escape me right now, but it depicts in magnificently beautiful, coloured detail, the court of Kyoto and then the court of the Oney, which is splendid. It's sort of barbaric and gushing with blood, but it has a sort of splendour of its own. And it's also very detailed in depicting the jars of Sarki as well, with sort of wonderful inscriptions along them. And perhaps they are the ultimate symbol of civilization, this rather lovely drink that is ultimately the undoing of the monsters.

And do we see traditions springing up around the Oni, maybe to keep them away to ward off evil? And do any of those traditions persist until today? Well, there are some wonderful traditions that have indeed continued over the centuries. So with a lot of monsters, there's some weak spot, there's some way that you can defeat them.

It's not necessarily what you expect. So with the only, yeah, you have stories of them suddenly appearing. They'd come out of the spirit world. And in a lot of the Japanese stories, they can appear out of nowhere because they're coming from a sort of other world. It's a bit like the Celtic other world, I think, in some ways.

And they're appearing amongst people. And they're especially appearing in the mountains. So amongst monks who are hermits, which in Japanese culture you have a lot of stories of the monk who's a hermit on the mountainside. And then the ony suddenly appears as they're praying and how do they defeat them? And in one of the stories, which goes back to medieval times to what's called the Muromachi period, the monk has, he's got no weapons on him. So all he's got is he's been roasting some beans. So he hurls the beans at the ony.

And then the creature sort of screams and is blinded by these roasted soyobines and disappears back into the other world. And so that's how he manages to survive. And that was then taken on as a tradition during the sort of 14th, 15th century or so during medieval times. And it became a court ritual. And it's now a sort of public ritual. So when I was in Kyoto around this time, and it's specifically at a time known as Setzibun, which is the traditional in the traditional Japanese calendar. It's the time of the new year.

It's as spring is coming through. And people gather in the Shinto temples. And there are people dressed as the oni in wonderful masks. Some of them incredibly elaborate, sort of with their horns, very high, elaborate horns and magnificent sort of military costumes and huge boots and so forth. You have arrows being shot to the four corners of the temple. There's a sort of form of psychic protection. But then the ony burst in.

And then the soyab beans are. throne and everybody hurls their soyabins at the monsters and eventually they are expelled. And it's one of those rituals that everybody really gets involved in becomes quite anarchic. And it's a big crowd of people herding the beans everywhere. And there's also that you have the beans being given by the temple priests, the Shinto priests. And so there's a sense there also of the sort of the authority of the temples over the whole of the ritual. And it's very much taking place under their aegis.

And you have verses being recited by some of the priests as well. And there are all sorts of elements in it. In one of the temples that I went to, they had the ony appear. It was just as darkness had fallen. So there was a sort of eerie aspect to it. But you also had a character called the Hososhi, who looks a bit like an oni because he looks kind of monstrous. He's got, I think, a single horn, but a sort of monstrous mask on. But he is a shamanic figure, and he leads a group of acolytes, and they go around the temple,

and eventually he dispels the ony. So in that case, it's not the beans that dispel them. the shamanic figure of the Hussoshi, which is the title for a particular court shaman of those times. And so he becomes the person or the figure who drives the only out of the temple. For our last monster that we're going to focus on, we're going to head all the way west again. We're going to go past Bavaria. Are we going to go north a little bit as well? And we're going to get to the Orkney Islands.

So there we have a case of the Orkney Selkies. So what is a Selke? Well, a Selke, it is literally a seal. It is the old word for a seal out in the north in Scotland and Orkney and so on. But in the folklore, it's the Selkeye is a seal that comes to shore and sheds their skin. So the seal's skin is shed and then they turn into human form. And in a lot of the traditional tales, it would go something along the lines of this. The Selkees arrive at the shore under the moonlight in the world.

darkness. They shed their skins and then they start dancing under the moonlight. It's a sort of fairy dance. And there's a lone farmer. There's always a lone farmer in these stories who's been living on his own too long and he sort of hides behind one of the rocks. And the Selkees are, they can be both male and female. There's a certain gender dynamic in a lot of these stories where they're a group of beautiful young females dancing under the moonlight and he grabs hold of one of their skins and holds onto it so that when they're always, disturbed by the noise of him approaching. They all go back into their skins and go back into the sea, but one of them can't because he's holding her skin. And so she has to go and live with him in his

croft. And he says, you know, he's in love with her. He's fallen for her radiant beauty. And he wants her to come and live with him in his croft. And so she then has to live with him. And she lives with him for many, many years, brewing the best beer in the island, often singing beautiful songs and giving birth to several children. But of course, she's always hankering for the sea, because that's her natural form. That's her natural state. But she doesn't know where he's hidden her seal skin. He's hidden it usually in some kind of casket or chest or coffer, which is out of the way she doesn't know where it is. But then eventually one day, one of the children has hurt their foot and she needs to make a sort of rivlin around the foot to heal them. And the child has seen where the skin is hidden

and says, I remember there's a place where daddy hid that skin. That would be perfect for it. Where? Where is it? Oh, it's just over there, you know, under the bed or in the barn. And the husband and the other children have gone off to the fair that day. And so she brings it out. She brings out the skin and she is restored to her form. And then she has the heartbreaking decision of leaving her child, all her children, and going back to the sea because that's where she's really from. And so she goes back into sealed form.

And although the children have then lost their mother, they have a protector out at sea. So whenever they're in their fishing boats and they're about to get drowned or a terrible storm is coming on, there's always a seal and often many seals to protect them and help them along the way. So it actually sort of turns out to be kind of a bonus, you know, depending on how you interpret it. That's the sort of classic Selkeye narrative that people have been telling over the centuries in the North of Scotland in Orkney, in the Shetlands in many of the islands out there. The ones that I particularly focused on were in Orkney, where I travelled to met a few of the storytellers there. And it was amazing to find out how far back these stories go, because they do go right back to medieval times.

And how significant is the Selke in Orcadian literature? because I guess, you know, they're even more tied to the sea than we might think of in most of the rest of the British Isles. So does it reflect this desire to this almost dual personality of living on land but being so connected to the sea of wanting a protector at sea, as you say? Does it reflect this desire to build a connection with the sea? Absolutely.

I think Orkney does have a lot of stories about different creatures that come in from the sea and it's that sense that it's a place where anything might turn up. because especially in past centuries, you never quite knew who or what was going to wash up. And there are lots of real-life stories of shipwrecks and of people from all kinds of places around the world who'd end up living on one of the islands of Orkney

for a generation, maybe for the rest of their lives, because they happened to be passing when the storm struck and they ended up on that particular island. So it does feed into that reality of what it is like to live on this archipelago of small, scattered islands where there is all that movement going on, between them and it's very easy for the stranger to suddenly appear with no sort of story behind them. Who are they? Why have they suddenly come out of the sea like that? And then it's also an

island that does have a lot of seals. They are a real phenomenon there. And so when I was researching that part of the book, I was talking to the storytellers, but I also talked to marine biologists about the phenomenon of seals because it's one of the best places in the world to go to watch seals and to watch their behavior. And they do have, they are very complicated creatures. One of the marine biologists I spoke to talked about the variety of maternal behavior in seals, where some of the mother seals, you would see them being very devoted to their children, others you would see them sort of pushing their children back.

And you'd get that sense of having very different kind of personalities. So I think all those kind of things, if you think of the sort of the fishing communities that would have lived amongst these seals over the generations, you can imagine how these stories would have developed. but a lot of the stories are also about being kind or at least being honorable to the sea, treating the sea with respect and treating the creatures of the sea with respect. So you have a lot of stories about the fishermen who takes too many seals, who hunts the seals and then ends up getting punished for it.

And in fact, one of the oldest stories, I think the oldest known Selke's story, which is also my favorite, it's called the tale of the lady or the player, the lady Odavir. And it was collected, scraps of it, fragments were collected by an amazing folk. the Cloorice could Water Trail Denison, who's one of the core figures in Arcadian literature. And he pulled it together in the language of this poem. There's a lot of Norse language in it. So it echoes back into the connections that Orkney had with the Norse kingdoms, the sense that Orkney was part of a much wider sort of empire of Norse-speaking communities.

You know, some scholars have talked about it being that it was the Venice of the North Sea. You know, we now think of it as this sort of place out there, at the back of beyond, but it was very much at the heart of a lot of things that were going on. And so you see Orkney in a lot of the Icelandic savers. It's characters in the most famous of the Icelandic sagas like the saga of Bert Nia. They travel out to Orkney. You find fleets from Orkney, the Earls, Giles of Orkney, travelling across to Ireland in some of the core battles of medieval times,

fighting the High King Brian over in Ireland at Clontarf, for example. So you have a lot of these, a sense of Albany being part of something much, much bigger than perhaps we see it as being now. And so these stories play their part in echoing that. So in the story of the play of the Lady Odeby, and it's got wonderful sort of medieval textures to it, it's about a crusader. He's called Odeviere, and he's married this woman,

but he leaves her to go on crusade, and he sort of sets her up in his big castle on one of the islands. And then he heads off to go and fight the infidel and bring back glory, but he doesn't come back for a very long time. And she's there on her own on the island, until Aselke appears. And he's a, you know, a handsome,

a tall, handsome, dark stranger who comes in, obviously he's shed his brown seal skin, but has something of the sea about him and something of the sort of the mystery and enticement of the sea about him. And so she takes him into her chamber and the inevitable happens and she gives birth to a Selky child. But she knows that this Selky child will not thrive in human society. And so the child is taken by the Selke back to his kingdom of Sul Skerry, which is one of these sort of legendary islands where the Selkees would go and congregate. And then eventually when her husband comes back,

he's come back from the Crusades, he's come back from, they say, feasting in Micklegarf, which is what they call Constantinopen in these stories, having a high old time in between the battles, and eventually he's come back, brought lots of treasure back with him, but of course he can't stop hunting.

So he goes off to hunt down the whales and the seals, and then he comes back from the hunt with a seal who has a golden chain around his neck, which the mother put around the chain of her son when she handed him over to his father. And so she knows that her son has been killed and she's, of course, terribly distraught. But that gives her away to her husband, who then has her locked up in one of his towers, says, well, she's going to have to be killed because she has betrayed him. But then suddenly there's the sound, the tumult of all kinds of creatures at sea.

And he thinks, oh, I could go and I could go and catch some whales now. I could go and really hunt some big quarry out there. So he goes off to hunt them and isn't able to catch anything at all. And then when he comes back to the island, his wife has disappeared. She's been rescued by her beloved and taken to the mysterious isle of Soles Scary. And I guess compared to our other two stories, at least, this one sticks out because here we have a monster who, rather than people being afraid of them, people are attracted to them. You know, the lonely farmer wants to marry a Selke. The lonely wife will take a Selke into her house.

And I guess it almost goes back to what we were saying about the Bavarian dragon, about the dragon becoming. almost the hero of the story, that there is this kind of two elements to the monster, isn't there? It's always other, but we can be scared of it or we can be attracted by it, enticed by it. And I guess it's where that balance sits, whether we call it a monster or something friendlier than that. Well, yes.

I mean, I probably wouldn't call a Selke a monster. That does seem sort of too much. But then I also wanted to include it in a book called Monsterland to sort of challenge the definition of what a monster is. And also, I think, to point out, because I think it's not an isolated example, there's quite a strain in medieval literature of the supernatural creature being in some ways the hero or at least a sort of point of identification. I mean, you have stories, you probably know Biscleveret, the werewolf story from Mary de France, where you have quite a sympathetic depiction of another kind of shapeshifter who shapeshifts into a wolf, but he is the character who the reader sort of identifies with. So I think that medieval writers were not necessarily. always depicting the shapeshift of the non-human as being the outsider and the evil antagonist. There are a lot of varieties to how they perceived these creatures, especially with shape-shifting. I think that medieval culture had a real fascination for shapeshifting, and it really seems that

those sort of stories come into their own in that period, which I think is something quite telling about medieval times and that sort of recognition of the wildness inside us and that we all perhaps have something that sort of potential to become something different. Yeah, I think it's an interesting reflection of the sophistication of the medieval storyteller's mind, though, isn't it? That a monster can be something you're afraid of, but it can be something that you sympathize with. Should we hunt monsters or should we be more sympathetic to monsters? There can be things that you might consider monsters that are actually very, very attractive. It's almost less to do with the monster or more to do

with the human response to the unknown or the unexpected. Yes, exactly. I'd agree of that, that I think it's about how we are responding to that sense of the weird and the inexplicable, the strange, and what that does to us. That's part of what gives these stories that tremendous power. When you read them, I think a few years ago, I would not have expected to read these kind of stories as being medieval tales, I mean, handed down over quite a few generations, but I think having that medieval source to the narrative in them. But now I think, you know, I've seen quite a few of these, and it's something I think is so exciting about medieval literature that it does have such a range and that medieval storytellers like you say they were

incredibly sophisticated. I think also with this particular story, the Selke story, it's a sort of anti-hunting story. And it seems like it's a story that resonates in Arcadian literature. So I think it's a story that that does resonate and has resonated. And there is quite a strain also of these sort of stories with that message of, you know, be careful about overhunting, you know, overuse of your, of the resources of the sea that comes out in a lot of the Selkey stories. And then a lot of the other stories that are told about the other creatures in Aegean mythology. Yeah, yeah, fascinating. I mean, this has been incredible, Nick.

We have barely scratched the surface of Monsterland. There is so much more in the book for people to go and find their way around. But thank you for explaining a bit about Bavarian Dragons, Japanese Oni and Orkney Selkees to us. It's been really interesting to think about what they meant to the medieval mind. Thank you for taking us on those trips. Oh, you're welcome. It's been really fun chatting about them all. That's been great.

Thank you very much, Nick. I hope you enjoyed this voyage into Monsterland. You can discover more stories in Nick's book. And you can also catch Nick's last visit to Gone Medieval to talk about the medieval origins of fairy tales in our back catalogue. There are new installments of Gone Medieval every Tuesday and Friday, so please come back and join Eleanor and I for more from the greatest millennium in human history. Don't forget to also subscribe or follow us on Spotify or wherever you get your podcasts

and tell all of your friends and family that you've gone medieval. You can sign up to History Hits to access hundreds of hours of original documentaries with a new release every week and all of History Hits podcasts add free. Head over to historyhit.com forward slash subscribe right now. Anyway, I better let you go. I've been Matt Lewis and we've just gone medieval with History Hits.