The author, Juliette Wood, lives in Wales and is an expert on Welsh folklore as well as
medieval European mythology and folklore, which she has shown in books such as
This field interests not only folklorists and cultural historians but also cryptozoologists, whose objective is to show that creatures we know from the realm of folklore can be traced back to zoological reality, sometime in the past or still existing. Juliette Wood is critical of this aim, since it can lead to unscientific wishful thinking, which means that the reader is spared confrontation with Bigfoot and the Abominable Snowman and has to read just one single sentence about the Loch Ness monster. Instead, her theoretical background is that of the folklorist and cultural historian.
This does not mean that she is uninterested in a possibly real background to those stories about fantastic creatures that have attracted human imagination for millennia. At the end of the book she discusses, for example, whether folklore about dragons can be traced back to the existence of prehistoric dinosaurs. But she warns the reader to look at this folklore from our present zoological knowledge. Those who lived during classical antiquity or in the Middle Ages perceived elephants, whales, and dolphins as fantastic creatures surrounded by no less mythical conceptions than mermaids and dragons: many believed in the stories about people surviving in the interior of whales or riding on dolphins. It is therefore logical that she has not omitted these animals from her account of fantastic creatures.
The first of the four chapters in the book is dedicated to the unicorn. As Wood rightly remarks, there exists no folklore about unicorns, no stories about encounters with them, no ballads. The conceptions about the unicorn seem to have belonged to the higher strata of society rather than folk culture. The sources are to a high degree pictorial. The oldest mentions are found in travel accounts from classical antiquity, which during the Middle Ages gave rise to a Christian symbolism with erotic, mystical overtones. The long, spiral teeth of the narwhal that were kept in the royal “cabinets of curiosity” were seen as evidence of the real existence of the unicorn and were thought to have medical effects.
In the next chapter the mermaid is portrayed, together with other fabulous creatures living in the water. As opposed to the limited amount of sources about the unicorn, there are innumerable myths, folktales, and legends about the inhabitants of the seas, lakes, and rivers, who are often conceived as hybrids of man and fish. The richness of the source material has forced Juliette Wood to make a selection. She has included several less known non-European myths that one reads with interest. Unknown to many is also that the mermaid has left many traces in modern popular culture, not least in films.
Chapter 3, “Things with Wings,” reports about fantastic creatures in a third element, the air. It is similar to the chapter about the unicorn in that pictorial sources have a prominent position. Here the reader encounters several creatures with classical ancestry such as the griffin and the hippogriffin, harpies and sirens, the giant bird of Arabic tradition called the Roc, and the phoenix. Many are hybrids between birds and serpents, such as the rooster-headed and winged cockatrice.
This chapter naturally leads over to the chapter about the epitome of a fantastic creature, the dragon. Dragon lore has a global distribution and has taken many different forms: a Japanese dragon may have eight heads, eight tails, red eyes, and a body large enough to cover eight hills, whereas a dragon from the children’s literature of our time is so small and convenient that it can live in furnished rooms. Wood gives an account of the dragon-slayer theme in myths, folktales, and Christian legends. She notices that dragons in the oldest times often have been associated with threats to our environment: they pollute the air with their breath and cause plagues and bad harvests. An interpretation that I would have liked to see developed in more detail is that the origin of the earliest dragon myths might have been disasters such as volcanic eruptions, epidemics, and wildfires.
In the text on the back cover the book one can read that it is “a vital resource for undergraduates studying fantastic creatures in history, literature and media studies.” This is also my opinion. Juliette Wood combines extensive learning about classical and medieval cultural history with a fluent, absorbing language. She is well informed in the folkloristic sources as well as in folklore theory, but she is wise enough not to choose a too high level of abstraction. Undergraduate readers will especially appreciate the many references to contemporary culture, films, cartoons, and computer games. Her book convincingly proves that age-old fantasies about more or less monstrous creatures still make up a part of our cultural baggage.
My only critical remark concerns the pictorial material, which is reproduced in a drab, grey tone and only partially illustrates all the useful information in the text. The reader has to be content with the verbal descriptions of the manticore, the yale, and the harpie. The two pictures of a mermaid are both romantic book illustrations from the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, which do not give a hint of the expressiveness in the mermaids depicted in church paintings, marine maps, and the figureheads of ships. One also asks oneself what the point is in rendering the unabridged illustration captions twice, first in the beginning of the book, then under the illustrations.
However, even if Juliette Wood’s ingenious text is worth better illustrations, one is thankful that she has put together this learned and very readable book.
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[Review length: 1013 words • Review posted on March 6, 2019]