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Dr Jekyll and Me Hyde

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Dracula
One of the most famous monsters around the world is Dracula, the most terrifying vampire, created by Bram Stoker in 1897.  The novel, written in epistolary format*, tells the story of Dracula’s attempt to move to England from Transylvania in order to find new blood. The novel begins with the journey that John Hackers, an estate agent, make from London to count’s Dracula castle (Transylvania) in order to conclude the real estate transaction for the purchasing of Dracula’s new residence in England. But, as soon as he got in the castle, Hacker became the vampire’s ,prisoner, as he couldn’t go away anymore. Meanwhile Dracula went to London, where, killing many people, he began to make enemies. He was forced to return back to his castle, where he was captured and killed with a woodpile.

*Epistolary format: written in a series of documents. The usual form is letters, although diary entries, newspaper and other documents are common too.

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The strange case of dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde
Robert Louis Stevenson wrote this book in 1886. The novella is about a lawyer, Mr Utterson, who investigates  strange events occurred between his old friend, Dr Jekyll and the evil man Mr Hyde. The monster, in this case, is no more some kind of animal or a horrifying creature, but is a real person. As the two protagonists, Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde, could seem two different people, indeed they are just one human being. In fact, Jekyll has been using a potion he formulated to switch between the two personalities and while Hyde torments the town, Jekyll apologizes for him.

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Frankenstein

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Frankenstein
Frankenstein is a story about a mad scientist, Victor Frankenstein who creates a monster using body parts from deceased criminals in order to make a perfect human being. This Monster is endowed with superhuman strength and speed and torments Dr Frankenstein and his family as he feels alone and abandoned.

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Monster literature
Monster literature it’s a literature’s genre that combines the good and the evil, which is presented by monsters. Mary Shelly, releasing Frankenstein(1818), is considered the mother of monster literature in England.

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the Black Shuck

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Black Shuck, Old Shuck, Old Shock or simply Shuck is the name given to an unknown creature said to roam in East Anglia. Black Shuck is one of many ghostly black dogs recorded across the British Isles. Sometimes recorded as an omen of death, sometimes a more companionable animal, it is classified as a cryptid, and there are varying accounts of the animal's appearance.

The famous sighting in Bungay and Blythburg is a particularly famous account of the beast, and images of black sinister dogs have become part of the iconography of the area.

For centuries, inhabitants of England have told tales of a large black dog with malevolent flaming eyes (or in some variants of the legend a single eye) that are red or alternatively green. They are described as being 'like saucers'. According to reports, the beast varies in size and stature from that of simply a large dog to being the size of a calf or even a horse. Sometimes Black Shuck is recorded as having appeared headless, and at other times as floating on a carpet of mist.

According to folklore, the spectre haunts the landscapes of East Anglia, primarily coastline, graveyards, sideroads, crossroads, bodies of water and dark forests. W. A. Dutt, in his 1901 Highways & Byways in East Anglia describes the creature thus:

He takes the form of a huge black dog, and prowls along dark lanes and lonesome field footpaths, where, although his howling makes the hearer's blood run cold, his footfalls make no sound. You may know him at once, should you see him, by his fiery eye; he has but one, and that, like the Cyclops, is in the middle of his head. But such an encounter might bring you the worst of luck: it is even said that to meet him is to be warned that your death will occur before the end of the year. So you will do well to shut your eyes if you hear him howling; shut them even if you are uncertain whether it is the dog fiend or the voice of the wind you hear. Should you never set eyes on our Norfolk Snarleyow you may perhaps doubt his existence, and, like other learned folks, tell us that his story is nothing but the old Scandinavian myth of the black hound of Odin, brought to us by the Vikings who long ago settled down on the Norfolk coast. It is Dutt's description which gave rise to one misnomer for Black Shuck as "Old Snarleyow"; in the context of his description it is a comparative to Frederick Marryat's 1837 novel Snarleyyow, or the Dog Fiend, which tells the tale of a troublesome ship's dog.

Dr Simon Sherwood suggests that the earliest surviving description of devilish black hounds is an account of an incident in the Peterborough Abbey recorded in the Peterborough Chronicle (one of the Anglo-Saxon Chronicles] around 1127. This account also appears to describe the Europe-wide phenomenon of a Wild Hunt: Let no-one be surprised at the truth of what we are about to relate, for it was common knowledge throughout the whole country that immediately after [Abbot Henry of Poitou's arrival at Peterborough Abbey] - it was the Sunday when they sing Exurge Quare - many men both saw and heard a great number of huntsmen hunting. The huntsmen were black, huge and hideous, and rode on black horses and on black he-goats and their hounds were jet black with eyes like saucers and horrible. This was seen in the very deer park of the town of Peterborough and in all the woods that stretch from that same town to Lincolnshire Stamford, and in the night the monks heard them sounding and winding their horns. Reliable witnesses who kept watch in the night declared that there might well have been as many as twenty or thirty of them winding their horns as near they could tell. This was seen and heard from the time of his arrival all through Lent and right up to Easter. According to some legends, the dog's appearance bodes ill to the beholder - for example in the Essex Maldon and Dengie area of Essex, the most southerly point of sightings, where seeing Black Shuck means the observer's almost immediate death. However, more often than not, stories tell of Black Shuck terrifying his victims, but leaving them alone to continue living normal lives; in some cases it has supposedly happened before close relatives to the observer die or become ill.

By contrast, in other tales the animal is regarded as relatively benign and said to accompany women on their way home in the role of protector rather than a portent of ill omen. Some black dogs have been said to help lost travellers find their way home and are more often helpful than threatening; Sherwood notes that benign accounts of the dog become more regular towards the end of the 19th and throughout the 20th centuries.

One of the most notable reports of Black Shuck is of his appearance at the churches of Bungay and Blythburgh in Suffolk. On 4 August 1577, at Blythburgh, Black Shuck is said to have burst in through the church doors to a clap of thunder. He ran up the nave, past a large congregation, killing a man and boy and causing the church steeple to collapse through the roof. As the dog left, he left scorch marks on the north door which can be seen at the church to this day. The encounter on the same day at Bungay was described in A Straunge and Terrible Wunder by the Reverend Abraham Fleming in 1577: This black dog, or the divel in such a linenesse (God hee knoweth al who worketh all,) running all along down the body of the church with great swiftnesse, and incredible haste, among the people, in a visible fourm and shape, passed between two persons, as they were kneeling uppon their knees, and occupied in prayer as it seemed, wrung the necks of them bothe at one instant clene backward, in somuch that even at a moment where they kneeled, they strangely dyed.

Adams was a clergyman from London, and therefore probably only published his account based on exaggerated aural accounts. Other local accounts attribute the event to the Devil (Abrahams calls the animal "the Divel in such a likeness". The scorch marks on the door are referred to by the locals as "the devil's fingerprints", and the event is remembered in this verse: All down the church in midst of fire, the hellish monster flew, and, passing onward to the quire, he many people slew. Dr David Waldron and Christopher Reeve suggest that a fierce electrical storm recorded by contemporary accounts on that date, coupled with the trauma of the ongoing Reformation, may have led to the accounts entering folklore. The Kettle Chronicles: The Black Dog of Bungay, I.S. Morgan (2006) is a historical novel recounting the events and aftermath of August 1577.

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Black Shuck, Old Shuck, Old Shock or simply Shuck is the name given to an unknown creature said to roam in East Anglia. Black Shuck is one of many ghostly black dogs recorded across the British Isles.

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The Black Shuck
For centuries inhabitants of England have told tales about a large black dog with devil red or green eyes, called ‘black shuck’. This ghost/demon dog was believed to have the power of killing people only with a sight.

There are legends of the Black Shuck roaming the Anglian countryside since before the Vikings.

One of the most notable reports of Black Shuck is of his appearance of the churches of Bungay and Blunt Bar in Suffolk. On the 4th August 1577, Black Shuck is said to have burst through Bungay’s church doors, to run up the nave and to past the large congregation killing a man and a boy causing the church tower to collapse through the roof. Escaping, apparently, the dog has left scorch marks on the door which can be seen at the church to this day.

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Black Annis

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Black Annis

Background

Purpose

To teach children not to wander

Country

England

Black Annis, also known as Black Agnes, is a boogeyman figure in English folklore. She is said to haunt the countryside of Leicestershire, living in a cave in the Dane Hills, with an oak tree at its entrance.

Characteristics

Physical appearance

She is imagined as a blue-faced crone or witch with iron claws and a taste for humans (especially children).

She supposedly goes out onto the glens at night looking for unsuspecting children and lambs to eat, then tanning their skins by hanging them on a tree, before wearing them around her waist. She would reach inside houses to snatch people. Legend has it that she used her iron claws to dig into the side of a sandstone cliff, making herself a home there which is known as Black Annis's Bower. The legend led to parents warning their children that Black Annis would catch them if they did not behave.

It is thought that the earliest written reference to Black Annis was from the eighteenth century, from which a title deed referred to a parcel of land as "Black Anny's Bower Close".

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Black Annis, also known as Black Agnes, is a boogeyman figure in English folklore. She is said to haunt the countryside of Leicestershire, living in a cave in the Dane Hills, with an oak tree at its entrance. She is imagined as a blue-faced crone or witch with iron claws and a taste for humans (especially children).

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Witches

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Witches
In England, during the XV century witches were considered real monsters. They were usually imagined as old poor women, crone-like, with a cat. For these reasons many unfortunate women were tortured and hanged.

One of the most terrifying British legends about witches tells the story of ‘Black Annis’. She is imagined to be a blue-faced crone, immensely strong and with sharp tearing teeth. She lived in the countryside of Leicestershire, in a cave in the Dane Hills, with an oak tree at its entrance. She is particularly known because the legend told that she ate young children, whom she has earlier flayed alive.

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Monster in English culture
The figure of monsters in England dates to many centuries ago. Stories and legends about horrifying creatures and disturbing facts were handed down from generation to generation for several reasons, for example scarring the children to make them obey.

Some of the most famous English monsters are:

·      Witches

·      The Black Shuck

·      Frankenstein

·      Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde

·      Dracula

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Centaurs

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Centaurs: they were considered savage and violent. Their body is for an half human and for an half the one of an horse. They live in the forests and mountains and they eat raw flesh.
In Roman literature are the protagonists of Ovid' s Metamorphoses where they are against Heracles. In the legend Nessun gave to Heracles ' wife a bottle filled with his own blood to control her husband's love and make it still for ever. However the blood was a poison to destroy Heracles.

Chimaera: this monster is for an half a goat and for an half a lion in the original legend but there are a different versions about its body, for others it also has a part of a snake or two heads that cuold breath fire.
It is more common in Greek culture but it's also very famous in Roman architecture.

Cyclopes: very famous in Greek literature thanks of Odyssey, the cyclopes are giants with only one eye in the middle of their head. In Latin culture are shown in the portrait Polyphemus of Ovid as a bit of doofus in love.

Harpies: birds with women' s face, with long claws and faces pale with hunger. They,  driven away by the heroes of the Argonaut expedition, took refuge on an island where Aeneas arrived and that is described in book III of Aenid. In this rare case the monster gets a voice and one has to acknowledge its perspective.

Hydra: it' s a snake with a lot of heads that sometimes can be human. It was created to provide a test for Heracles. Its caratteristics is the breath that could kill anyone.

Lamia: this is a female monster that drinks the bloog of children. She has a woman' s head and a snake' s body. The legend tells that she was a lover of Jove discovered by Juno, the goddes found a way to make her suffering and killed all her children. Lamia for thi reason became jealous of mothers.

Medusa: she is showed in Ovid' s metamorphoses. She is the only one mortal between her two sisters. Her hair were composed by snakes and it was as terrible that everyone who saw it was turned to stone, the only one that could see her was Neptune. She died killed by Perseus that cut her head using a looking-glass.

The Nemean lion:a terrible lion killed by Heracles. It was sent to Namea by Juno to punish the people. After he killed it Heracles took its skin and used it as his helmet.

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Some monsters in Roman literature:
- Cerberus: the watchdog of the realm of Pluto.
He is a dog with three heads and a serpent tail, on his back he has snackes head.
As usually he comes from Greek culture but we catch about him also from Aeneid, book VI, and Dante's Inferno. On the basis of the legend he terrorizes souls upon their entering.

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Monster in Roman culture.
As we know, monsters in Roman culture took the cue from Greek traditions, for this reason monsters, other creatures, style of poem and compositions are more or less the same, only with some differences.
In classical mythology in general the monsters are typically part animal and part human. They aren' t really horror monsters but represent a penalty that the gods send to the human world, an other important function is to glorify the figure of literature 's protagonists and make them become heroes during a fight between hero and monsters by dieing 'cause of the power of the main.
The main intellectual in Latin tradition that wrote about monsters was Virgil in Aeneid. Aeneid is a epic poem comparable to Iliad and Odyssey that are the most important epic poems of Greek culture and also they were - and still be- the base of the European culture. From that we can understand how much Romans took from Greek and the cause of their affinities.
Virgil in a section of Aeneid, book VI, describes the entrance of Aenea into the jaws of Orcus (known as the mouth oh hell).
Usually monsters are described as horrible creatures connected to actions like killing ( so death), bringing war, raving discord...

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Origin of the concept of "Monster"

As a response to perceived threat, humans, just like animals, feel fear.

The concept of monster can be traced back to the instinctual fear of vicious predators that endangered our ancestors millennia ago. When humans managed to keep predators at bay and civilization flourished, we no longer feared such dangers as much.

But, some traces of this fear simply never went away.
Instead, tales of hybrid, mythical animals of awesome features and attributes began to be composed, creatures never seen before that no man could hope to match. The once "simply" poisonous snake became the dragon, an unstoppable force of nature.

Much more often than not, there was also a particular man in those tales, who distinguished himself from all other mortals for his incredible virtues, and fighting prowess: The Hero.  The battle between Hero and Monster is present in almost every mythology, from the Greek Hercules and Hydra as part of his twelve labours, to Beowulf and Grendel in English Folklore and even Krishna and Kaliya from Hindu myth.

This particular theme is called Chaoskampf, or "battle against Chaos" in German, as Man and Beast were, by intuition, allegories of Order and Chaos respectively.

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The Caledonian Boar, Greek culture

The greatest example of the wild boar was observed in Greek mythology. In fact the hunting of the Caledonian boar was one of the most famous episodes of heroic legend in ancient Greece. The legend started with Oeneus, king of Calydon, who failed to pay honor to Artemis, the goddess of hunting,  when harvesting the first fruits of the season. Conseguently Artemis released a wild boar that  decimated Calydion and places near. Due to these attacks Oeneus created a group of warrior greek heroes in order to fight the wild boar. At the end the wild boar was killed and someone said that  the boar was a monster sent by gods in order to destroy the vineyards as the blast of the savagery into the human world. For someone the wild boar was an expression of heroic symbol. However it represented the difference between human behavior to animal one. In conclusion the Caledonian boar became a symbolic monster in Greek culture.

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Article about the ancient view of monsters in greek culture

The conventional view is that the ancient Greeks provided for Western civilization. They invented democracy, philosophy and drama. However their society wasn’t rational as it was shaped by strange and primal forces. We can see this surely in their art. One of the most captivating aspects of ancient Greek art is its glut of fantastical creatures. When we consider Greek art, we tend to image marble statues of Olympian gods – but gorgons, griffins, centaurs and sphinxes are actually just as common. What was the significance of all these ferocious supernatural beasts? Fantastical animals were already part of the repertoire of Aegean craftsmen in prehistory, a millennium before the high point of the classical age in Athens in the Fifth Century BC. For instance, they star in the art of both the Minoan and Mycenaean civilizations of the Bronze Age. The famous ‘Throne Room’ in the Minoan palace at Knossos on Crete was decorated with frescoes of elegant griffins – hybrid creatures with the bodies of lions and the heads of birds of prey. They flanked the chamber’s so-called throne, as Fantastical creatures in ancient Greek art now had their utmost ferocity and bristling, bare-fanged power. But a century or two later, artists would present monsters in a radically different fashion. “In the Greek world,” explains Joan Mertens, curator of Greek and Roman art at the Metropolitan Museum, “many creatures that start off ferocious and ugly evolve into beautiful figures or animals. Perhaps the most dramatic example is the gorgon Medusa who in early Greek art is all fangs and wrinkles and by the mid-Fifth Century is a beautiful woman. ”.”As ancient Greece shifted into the classical era”, says Stewart, “The most noticeable trend is that the monsters become more realistic. As artists become more interested in realistic bodies, and more able to represent them, it perhaps becomes a challenge to show fantastic creatures in a plausible way.” As Stewart puts it: “I don’t think that Greeks really expected to meet a centaur or sphinx, or even a satyr, out in the countryside, and maybe they were always regarded as the stuff of legend. But a recurring trait of Greek art is that monstrous creatures seem to be held up as a foil to the Greeks’ concept of civilization – a sort of distorting mirror in which the Greeks could look at themselves. The Greeks seem to have found these monstrous or semi-human creatures useful to explore and express their world-view, their ideas about humanity and civilization, the mortal and divine. Fantastical beings were part of the furniture of the Greek mind.”

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Monster in Greek culture

Argus:
had one hundred eyes, which were located all over his body.  Hera employed him as a guard. He was killed by Hermes.

Cerberus:
was a huge and powerful  dog with three heads. He was owned by Hades , god of the dead, as guard of the entrance to the underworld. In his final labor, Hercules  went to the underworld and kidnapped Cerberus.

Cyclopes:
gigantic and with a single eye in the middle of its forehead. The brutal Polyphemus, a Cyclops and a son of  Poseidon, lived on an island, where he was blinded by  Odysseus.

Gorgons
were  ugly monsters who lived at the edge of the world. Their hair was made of serpents, and  the one who look from a Gorgon's eyes would turn a man to stone. Perseus killed the Gorgon Medusa by beheading her while looking only at her reflection.

Hydra
was a massive serpent with nine heads. Every time one head was injured, another two grew in its place. Hercules killed it.

Minotaur
was a man-eating monster with the head of a bull. King Minos kept it hidden in a maze in Knossos, where he used it to frighten his enemies. Theseus killed the Minotaur.

Scylla and Charybdis
The powerful monsters Scylla and Charybdis lived together in a sea cave. Scylla had many fierce dog heads and ate sailors alive; Charybdis created whirlpools by sucking in and spitting out seawater. Both Jason and Odysseus safely traveled by these monsters.

Sirens

were giant, winged creatures with the heads of women. They lived on rocks on the sea, where their beautiful singing lured sailors to shipwreck. Odysseus filled his sailors' ears with wax so that they might sail safely past the Sirens.

Centaurs

Consider violent, these beings are half man and half horse, they used to live in mountains and forests, their food was raw flesh and their behavior was bestial.

Harpies

Harpies were birds with the heads of women, they were originally sent by Jove to torment a blinded soothsayer, Phineas.

Lamia

Somewhat vampirical, this was a female who was thought to steal children and drink their blood.

Sphinx

This monster was said to have the face of a woman, the chest,feet and tail of a lion and wings of a bird. This monster was sento to Thebes by Hera to punish the city for the crime of Laius, who had been guilty of loving Pelops’ son.

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The monster in Greek mythology

Monsters in Greek mythology were usually part animal and part human, but often were a collection of animal graftings. Actually they were not a horror monsters, but they were seen as unpleasant creatures sent by gods in order to obstruct the hero’s purpose. In fact they usually took part of a story only to be destroyed by  heroes. We can say that they were used to build  the figure of the hero on. There are several common denominators among the mythological monsters. In fact each monster was created thanks to combine different parts of the body of various type of animals. However the most common one was the snake. Each time the snake was seen as a physical influence, it shot terrible fears through the hearts of those who were trying to destroy the monster. In fact throughout the centuries, the snake usually symbolized something evil and monstrous as it represented the devil in Greek mythology as well in Christianity. Another animal that was represented as a monster was the lion as it was seen as a beast that loved killing people or other animals. For this reason the pagans and uncivilized people had fear of it. However the biggest question is , why animal and not some sort of  magical person who can use spells in order to destroy the heroes? This is because ancient people used to be afraid of something that was tangible to them as the combination made them uncivilized. This is because the behavior of a common person could be changeable as well as the one of animals, so their combination made a monster that could be able to do everything, so unpredictable.