FT265


“For the Snark was a Boojum, you see”

In Lewis Carroll’s The Hunting of the Snark, a baker mysteriously disapp­ears when he mistakes a Snark (safe and tasty) for a dangerous Boojum, which has the strange property of making captors “softly and suddenly vanish away”. Little did Carroll realise that his apposite example of the perils of monster classification would still have relevance in the 21st century.

When I was in my teens, I was a keen player of Dungeons and Dragons. I not only played, I also took the part of the referee or “dungeon master”. For those readers who are unfamiliar with Dungeons and Dragons, it is a role-playing game where the players take on the characters of individuals on a quest in a mediæval fantasy world with technology and magic on a par with Tolkein’s Middle-earth. The players hunt for treasure, fight and, if they are lucky, slay monsters. Combat is decided by the outcome of dice throws. In order for the game to be played, all the monsters are of distinct types with their own statistics. Dungeons and Dragons had an atlas called the Monster Manual, later supplemented with the Fiend Folio, which listed all of the available monsters with their details conveniently listed in alphabetical order. Players with a copy of the Monster Manual could familiarise themselves with the specific statistics of the monsters and learn their weaknesses, an irritation for a dungeon master eager to give the players a taste of mystery and the unknown.

Classifying monsters seems a natural way to consider reports of unknown animals, and there are numerous encyclo­pædias and compilations of monsters available – essentially, versions of the Monster Manual with collections of creatures from folklore, myth and legend. There are real-life versions too, where people have classified monsters based on the subjective analysis of eyewitness testimony. Cryptozoologist Bernard Heuvelmans distinguished nine differ­ent sorts of marine sea serpent-like animals in his In the Wake of the Sea Serpents [1] and others have followed in his wake. Classifying monsters like this is of interest to the casual reader and perhaps provides a framework to consider cryptozoological reports, but the trouble is, such subjective shoehorning doesn’t work. It’s misleading and can lead to invalid conclusions. Real monsters – by which I mean, paradox­ically, the monsters of folklore, myth, legend and, indeed, eyewitness reports – are not Dungeons and Dragons monsters. They are not easily classified. They are concept­ually amorphous and difficult to define. Fireside tales are not associated with morphological or zoological precision. Names and characteristics of monsters do not conform to the rigid minds of modern-day cryptozoologists. Snarks overlap with boojums. Take, for example, the Scottish kelpie or water horse. In most stories, it is a metamorphosing animal whose default form is a horse. Sometimes it may take the form of a handsome stranger or an old man. [2] Sometimes it is a strange horse-headed animal of the loch itself. [3] On top of this, and just to add to the confusion, grey seals are referred to by some English-speaking communities as “horseheads”, an inconvenient fact blithely ignored by most cryptozoologists.

But it is not just folkore that is amorphous. Ulrich Magin [4] has documented how a myriad of different forms of monster have been reported from Loch Ness, including horse-headed forms. The neat categories of today can have little meaning for the past. Hans Egede, leader of an evangelising mission to Greenland in the 18th century, equates accounts of the remora fish (which attached to boats and caused them to go off course) with the “Kracken” (sic). [5] Similarly, diarist William Bentley, writing of what we now call the New England sea serpent in his diary of 15 August 1817, says: “We have heard from Gloucester a Narway (sic) Kraken had visited their harbour.” [6]

Witnesses of the sea serpent in the 19th and early 20th centuries would invoke the “plesiosaur” or “ichthyosaur” even though their description bears no resemblance to those prehistoric creatures. Sir Arthur Conan Doyle twice described an encounter off the island of Aegina in the Aegean. He described the animals as ichthyosaurs the first time and as plesiosaurs the second time! [7]

Early scientific considerations of what we would now call crypto­zoology understood this characteristic of witnesses. For example, in 1786 an affidavit was sent to the Royal Society of Edinburgh and written up as “Jens Anderson master, and Mads Jenson, mate of a Norwegian ship, relating to the appearance of a supposed kraken or (emphasis added) sea-worm.” [8] Both sea worms and krakens were amorphous and overlapping categories to the scient­ific authorities of the 18th century. Not so to modern cryptozoologists, although the evidence for some of the categories is still as vague.

Take Heuvelmans’s category of the “super otter”-type sea serpent with the scientific name Hyperhydra egedei. This animal is a large, otter-shaped creature with web-toed limbs, a seal- or otter-like head, and no crest or fins. This category is named from a 1734 report described by Hans Egede, but in fact this report has almost none of the characteristics of Heuvelmans’s super otter – only two flippers (not webbed toes) were reported, the head was not seal-like, save perhaps a snout, and there is a hint of a dorsal fin. [9] Other putative super otters were equally nonsensical. Heuvel­mans tentatively identifies a poss­ible juvenile super otter as washed up in 1744: “Dagfind Korsbeck catched… a monstrous fish… its head was almost like the head of a cat; it had four paws and about its body was a hard shell like a Lobster’s, when they put a stick to it, it would snap at it.” [10] The reader can readily conjecture what this might have been, but whatever it was, it was hardly a flexible-bodied otter-like animal.

When people talk about witnessing a sea serpent, we don’t necessarily know what serpentine elements – if any – they are ascribing to the thing they have seen. Its movement? General body form? Presence of scales? We don’t even know if they have assigned the body parts corr­ectly and not mistaken for example, a penis for a tail [11].

None of this is surprising, as it is a lack of knowledge that effectively defines a modern-day monster not, as stated in the Oxford English dictionary, its misshapen form. Elephants are weird and misshapen, but they are not monsters because they are well known. Sea monsters’ monstrousness is related to how little we know about them. If we knew all about them they would be called “animals” not “monsters”.

A cryptozoologist might argue: “but we don’t have monsters, we have ‘crypt­ids’, a far more scientific term” – one invented by John Wall in 1982. But they speak of different sorts of “cryptid” just as a layperson would use the term “monster”. The raw data of cryptozoology should not be “cryptids” – as many cryptozoologists seem to believe – but reports. So when cryptozoologists refer to a parti­cular “cryptid” they really should be referring to a number of reports which may or may not have a common source. The justification for inferring a common cause for those reports (and, remember, reports are not the same as sightings) in the absence of know­ledge of what was actually seen seems weak. Calling a group of reports by a particular name that invokes anything other than location (i.e. the Loch Ness monster) seems to be setting the cart before the (water) horse. We don’t know what was seen, and if we did it would not be a monster or cryptid. So, while attaching an identity to a sighting might be a matter of convenience, it should perhaps, like Charles Fort’s comment on ideas, be considered something merely to be worn for a time.

“But surely,” the cryptozoologic­ally interested reader counters, “the whole point of cryptozoology is to establish identities of things, and cataloguing cryptids is part of that process.” We cannot classify what we do not know, and cryptozoologists do not know, even if they sometimes delude themselves into thinking that they do.

But if we cannot classify monsters, then what can we do?

Well, we can analyse and classify reports. A team of us at the University of St Andrews are doing just that. We are asking the question: “Do reports of monsters fall into natural categor­ies and can these be mapped onto descriptions of real animals?” Time will tell, but the result will be no Monster Manual but more likely woolly clusters of reports which may or may not overlap with accounts of known animals.



Notes
1 Bernard Heuvelmans: In the Wake of the Sea Serpents, 1968.
2 Ulrich Magin: “St George Without a Dragon”, Fortean Studies 4, pp223–234, 1996.
3 Ronald MacDonald Robertson: More Highland Folktales, 1961; Walter Gregor: Folk-Lore Journal 1, pp292–294, 1883.
4 James Harris, 3rd Earl of Malmesbury: Memoirs of an Ex-minister, 1884.
5 Hans Egede: A Description of Greenland, 1745.
6 William Bentley: The Diary of William Bentley, Vol 4, 1962.
7 Arthur Conan Doyle: Adventures and Memories, 1924; Harold Wilkins: Secret Cities of Old South America, 1952.
8 Anon: Transactions of the Royal Society of Edinburgh 1, pp16–17, 1786.
9 Lars Thomas: “No super-otter after all?”, Fortean Studies 4, pp234–236, 1996.
10 Heuvelmans, op.cit.
11 Charles Paxton et al: Archives of Natural History 32, pp1–9. 2005.