Mythical Creatures Generator

Somebody built a filing cabinet for monsters

If you have ever noticed that the same creature keeps turning up in unrelated countries and wondered whether anybody had checked, somebody did. Thoroughly. For decades.

In 1910 a Finnish folklorist called Antti Aarne published a list of folktale types. An American, Stith Thompson, translated it, expanded it, and then went further and built something larger: a six volume catalogue of the individual pieces that folktales are made of. He called them motifs, and he defined a motif as the smallest striking element of a story, the sort of thing that survives being retold.

The Motif-Index of Folk-Literature sorts thousands of them into twenty six lettered classes. A is for mythological motifs. B is for animals. There are numbers under the letters, and numbers under those.

Somewhere in that index is every creature this generator can hand you, filed, cross-referenced, and sitting beside its cousins from four continents.

It is a strange and rather beautiful object. A library card catalogue for things that never existed, built by people who took them completely seriously.

The rule of three cultures

The companion volume, now called the Aarne-Thompson-Uther index after the three men who successively built it, has a rule that is worth stealing.

A tale type is only admitted as international if it has been identified in three or more separate cultural or national groups.

Three. That is the whole test. One culture is a story. Two might be borrowing. Three means something else is going on.

It is a deeply practical piece of scepticism, and it is the reason the index is useful rather than merely long. It forces the question every time. Did this creature travel from one people to another along a trade route, or did several peoples arrive at it independently because they were all looking at the same world?

Usually the answer is the second one, and it is more interesting.

Why everybody has a thing in the water

Take the creatures in this generator and lay them out on a map.

Yacuruna lives in the rivers of the Amazon. Kappa lives in the rivers of Japan. Abaia lives in a lake in Melanesia. Unktehila belongs to the Lakota. There is a sea serpent in here, and a Greek creature that is half serpent.

None of these peoples were in contact. Several of them are separated by oceans and by thousands of years.

And every one of them put something in the water that will take you.

This is not evidence of a lost universal religion. It is evidence of something plainer and sadder. Every human community that has ever lived near deep water has watched somebody go into it and not come out. Children especially. Rivers are useful and rivers are lethal and the second fact has to be taught to a four year old who cannot yet understand hydrology.

So you give the river a face and a name and an appetite, and you tell the child a story. The story does the job that a fence and a warning sign would do now, and it does it better, because a story stays in the head.

A monster is a memory device. That is what it always was. The kappa lurking in the pool is a lecture on drowning, delivered to somebody too young for lectures.

Not everything in a bestiary is ancient

It is worth saying, because the solemnity of the subject invites a certain reverence that is not always deserved.

Sitting in this list beside genuine river gods and Finnish giants is the Oozlum Bird, a comic creature of British and Australian folklore, which is said to fly in ever-decreasing circles until it disappears into itself.

It is a joke. It has always been a joke.

And it belongs in the bestiary, because bestiaries have always contained jokes. Folklore is not a solemn archive assembled by priests. It is what people said to each other, and people are funny.

The same list holds Antero Vipunen, a giant out of the Finnish national epic who has been dead and buried so long that trees are growing out of him, and a hero has to climb inside his body to ask him a question.

Wonder, terror and a punchline, in the same drawer of the same cabinet. That is the actual texture of folklore.

Using a creature nobody has heard of

The temptation, when a generator hands you a name you do not recognise, is to look it up and copy the entry.

Resist that, and do something better. Look it up and find out what it was for.

Almost every creature in this list is an answer to a practical question that a particular community had. Do not go in the water. Do not go into the forest at that time of year. Do not trust a stranger who is too beautiful. Do not dig there.

Find the warning and you have found the creature. Its number of heads is decoration. Its purpose is the thing that made it survive a thousand retellings, and it is the thing that will make it land in your story.

Two practical notes. Many of these belong to living cultures with living beliefs, so it is worth reading past the first search result before you put one in a book. And a creature borrowed with its warning intact is a hundred times more frightening than a creature borrowed with just its teeth.

If you want the same thing at a smaller scale, the dragon is the best worked example there is. The word does not mean fire. It means the one who is looking at you.

How this list was chosen

The creatures come from a list our team researched and checked by hand, drawn from folklore across every inhabited continent rather than from the usual European shelf. One is chosen at random each time. It runs on your own device, and nothing you type is sent anywhere.

Questions people ask about mythical creatures

Is there really a catalogue of folklore motifs?

Yes, and it is enormous. Stith Thompson's Motif-Index of Folk-Literature runs to six volumes and sorts thousands of story elements into twenty six lettered classes. Folklorists use it alongside the Aarne-Thompson-Uther index of tale types, and both are standard tools rather than curiosities.

Why do unrelated cultures invent the same creatures?

Because they were solving the same problems. Deep water drowns people everywhere, so nearly everywhere has something in the water. The creature is a way of teaching a danger to somebody who is too young to be taught it any other way.

What makes a folktale international?

A practical threshold. In the standard index, a type is only counted as international if it has been identified in three or more separate cultural or national groups. Below that, it is a local story.

Are any of these creatures based on real animals?

Some almost certainly are, and some are not. It matters less than people think. A creature earns its place in folklore by being useful to tell, not by being observed. The question worth asking is what somebody needed this story to do.

Can I use a creature from another culture in my story?

Generally yes, and it is worth doing properly. Many of these belong to cultures that still exist and still hold these beliefs. Read further than the first summary, keep the warning the creature was built to carry, and credit where the thing came from.

References

1. Thompson, Stith. Motif-Index of Folk-Literature, six volumes. https://archive.org/details/Thompson2016MotifIndex
2. Aarne-Thompson-Uther Index. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aarne-Thompson-Uther_Index
3. Tale Type and Motif Indexes. University of Washington Libraries. https://guides.lib.uw.edu/research/folklore/motif