COLLECTION
Stories connected by a shared idea.
Korea's oldest books know the fox as an omen, a demon in a monk's robe and, once, a mountain god who helped a famous monk. The gumiho who longs to become human, and counts the years or the livers until she does, comes mostly from television.
Read story 13 min readHorned, wrapped in tiger skin and armed with an iron club, the oni is the ogre Japan drives out with beans every year. Yet the oldest oni has one eye and no description, the word may once have meant something hidden, and in some villages the oni at the door is a god.
Read story 12 min readA creature the size of a child, with a hollow of water on its head, waits in the river for horses and swimmers, yet a polite bow can drain its strength. Japan's best-known water spirit has dozens of local names, and an encyclopedia of 1712 draws it as a hairy, upright figure like an ape, not a turtle.
Read story 13 min readA prince from Troezen sailed to Crete among the young Athenians sent to the Minotaur, came out of the labyrinth by Ariadne's thread, and forgot to change his sail on the way home. Plutarch, who tells the story most fully, also reports a Cretan version in which the Minotaur was a general named Taurus.
Read story 12 min readIn the Avesta he is a dragon with three heads; in Ferdowsi's Shahnameh he is a king whose shoulders sprout two black serpents that must be fed every night. When Fereydun brings him down at last, an angel stops the final blow, and Zahhak is left in chains inside Mount Damavand.
Read story 11 min readA fine horse grazes by the water, and whoever climbs on its back is carried into the deep. Scots called it the kelpie and Gaelic speakers the each-uisge, and the men who wrote the stories down could not agree whether they were one creature or two.
Read story 12 min readEnlil set him to guard the cedars, and Gilgamesh and Enkidu killed him to make their names. A tablet that reached the Sulaymaniyah Museum in 2011 fills his forest with birdsong and monkeys, and leaves the heroes wondering what they will tell Enlil.
Read story 11 min readThrown out of heaven, Susanoo comes down by a river in Izumo, makes a serpent with eight heads drunk and cuts it to pieces. In its tail is the sword that became one of Japan's imperial regalia. Izumo's own record of its gods never mentions the serpent.
Read story 9 min readThe gods raised the wolf in their own home, then bound him with a ribbon made from a cat's footfall, a woman's beard and the roots of a rock, and Týr paid with his hand. Only Snorri Sturluson, around 1220, tells the whole story; the older poems know the hand, the fetter and the day the wolf runs free.
Read story 10 min readEvery night the sun sailed through the twelve hours of the underworld, and every night the serpent Apophis lay across its path. The spells told him he would never rise again, then ordered the same rite again for the next day.
Read story 8 min readIn the oldest account, Medusa is born a Gorgon, the only one of three sisters who can die. The beautiful girl punished by Athena arrives some seven hundred years later, in a Roman poem.
Read story 9 min read
