The Monstrefact: He Who Walks Behind the Rows

In this episode of STBYM’s The Monstrefact, Robert discusses the the sinister entity from Stephen King’s 1977 short story “Children of the Corn” and its mythological and folkloric predecessors….

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:03):
Welcome to Stuff to Blow Your Mind, a production of iHeartRadio.

Speaker 2 (00:09):
Hi, my name is Robert Lamb and this is the
Monster Fact, a short form series from Stuff to Blow
Your Mind focusing on mythical creatures, ideas, and monsters in time.
In March of nineteen seventy seven, Penthouse Magazine published a
short story by Stephen King called Children of the Corn,

(00:31):
alongside a pro Nixon watergate piece and photos of Polish
model Jolanta von Zamuda. It was a nasty and highly
effective little short story about a troubled couple on a
road trip across America's heartland, right into the corn choked
expanses of Nebraska and the clutches of a strange youth
cult that venerated a being known only as He who

(00:54):
Walks behind the Rose, represented in crude local folk art
as a kind of page in Green Haired Christ. King
writes of it as quote a strange green god, a
god of corn, grown old and strange and hungry, and
later on he describes it as a large shadow with

(01:14):
great red eyes, moving behind roe upon row of perfect corn.
The being in question here may have connections to the
titular entity from it, as well as other beings in
the Stephen King universe and in the two thousand and
six Malius Mastrorum monster book from the RPG Call of Cthulhu.

(01:35):
He who walks behind the Rose is identified as an
avatar of the god shub Nigoruth and described as a
kind of twisted fertility and vegetation deity. Children of the
Corn is a tale full of monocrop anxiety and religious horror,
and while the deity worshiped by the murderous children in

(01:55):
the story is purely fictitious, it does tie into several
different legacies of corn crops and associated deities. For starters,
we should remind ourselves that corn mayze was long a
sacred crop of indigenous Americans, and multiple meso American maze
gods loom large, including the Aztec god Zinteatu and the

(02:18):
goddess Chico mi Kuar. The rights concerning these deities, like
the rights concerning harvest deities around the world, could certainly
involve bloodshed and sacrifice, but I think a better match
for what we're dealing with in Stephen King's short story
here can be found in European folklore. I turned to

(02:39):
Brad Steiger's were Wolf book from nineteen ninety nine and
was instantly captivated by an entry for the corn Wolf. Yes,
that's spelled with a K like the New Metal Band,
and the corn in question is not Mays but wheat.
As we've discussed on stuff to blow your mind before.
Mays only entered into European usage after first contact with
the indigenous people of the Americas, and the new to

(03:02):
Europeans crop came to be known as corn in some
English speaking countries, but the word corn predated this contact
and referred to different grains and cereal grasses. German folklore
in particular features various accounts of feldgeister or field spirits,
also known as corn de Momnen. There's also the Hofferman

(03:25):
or oat man, as well as the Ragenwulf and indeed
the corn Kinder. There are many such corn spirits, typically
malicious in nature and prone to disappearing people, especially children.
According to Steiger, one such spirit is the corn wolf,
a supernatural lupine predator said to haunt the fields and

(03:46):
prey on the weak or unaware. The tale it would
seem served as a kind of boogeyman to alert children
to the risks of actual wolves. Amid the crops drawn
in by hares and small game, and the unbalanced eCos
of a farm, as well as referring to human outlaws
and miscreants potentially hiding from capture amid the cover of

(04:08):
pre harvest fields, a place where you could hide and
potentially sustain yourself on the ripening crops. Steiger goes on
to mention various rural European rights in which the corpse
of the corn wolf or related entities is symbolically burned
each year. Now I should mention that steiggerb cites a
particular book for this entry, Robert Eisler's Man into Wolf,

(04:32):
An Anthropological Interpretation of Sadism, Masochism, and Lacanthropy from nineteen
forty eight. It's a rather interesting volume. It's not purely
history or folklore, but rather a union anthropological work arguing
that the union archetype of the werewolf connects with a
primal evolutionary split that saw humans develop into opposing groups

(04:56):
of peaceful and violent individuals. Ultimately proposing his own version
of to borrow, a term used by Terence McKenna, archaic
revival a return to primordial ways of human behavior in
an attempt to prevent our own continual self destruction. Indeed,
Eisler does discuss the corn wolf, rye wolf, bean wolf,
and pee wolf and related entities as imaginative creatures, archetypes

(05:21):
of quote, the disguised outlaw and wear wolf, hiding and
feeding in the ripe cornfield, dream analysis, and jungion theory. Aside,
the traditions presented here are fascinating and do match up
with what I've read elsewhere, such as M. James Fraser's
section of the Golden Bough on the corn spirit as
a wolf or dog, as well as more contemporary writings

(05:42):
in folklore and belief. You might also remember our past
stuff to blow your mind episodes on beans, in which
we discuss the very old traditions of supernatural danger associated
both with legomes as something you might eat and also
as haunted fields of legomes where you might dare to venture.

(06:03):
And all of this brings us back once more to
Stephen King in Children of the Corn. He does a
fantastic job of conveying the uncanny nature of the monocrop field.
It sits both with the main character, Burt and the reader,
as a sinister perversion of the natural order within the
depths of the corn dangerously close to the presence of

(06:24):
he who walks behind the rose. Burt encounters corns so perfect,
so flawless, that neither weed nor insect encroaches upon it.
As such, the green harvest god of the story stands
as a fitting deity for modern industrialized agriculture, brutal, unflinching,
and alien to natural balance. Tune in for additional episodes

(06:47):
of The Monster Fact each week. As always, you can
email us at contact it's stuff to Blow your Mind
dot com.

Speaker 1 (07:03):
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