The Monstrefact: Ogres

In this episode of STBYM’s The Monstrefact, Robert discusses ogres…

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Episode Transcript

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

Speaker 2 (00:10):
Hi, my name is Robert Lammon. This is the Monster Fact,
a short form series from Stuff to Blow Your Mind,
focusing on mythical creatures, ideas, and monsters. In time, the
ogre has come up in different contexts, recently here in
the Stuff to Blow Your Mind podcast feed. So I

(00:31):
thought I'd devote an episode to an overview, brief overview
of just what we mean when we talk about ogres.
You may know them best as a distinct fantasy species
in Dungeons and Dragons, Warhammer, or perhaps Shrek. The fantasy
tradition leans on the ogre's place in English language fairy

(00:52):
folk tales, as folklorist Carol Rose discusses in her excellent
book Giants, Monsters and Dragons. The word entered into this
English usage either via the translated work of two seventeenth
century French authors or the slightly earlier work of Italian
author John Bautista Bazila. Whatever the case, the word may

(01:15):
have originally derived from the Latin orcus, the flesh eating
underworld god who punishes oath breakers. More interesting than the
specific etymology, however, is the widespread concept of what an
ogre is thought to be. An enormous and powerful humanoid
male or female. In the case of an ogress with

(01:35):
a taste for brutality and sometimes human flesh, he is
typically dim of wits, however, and easily outmaneuvered by cunning
heroes or even children, as discussed by Ian Jobbling in
the Psychological Foundations of the Hero Ogre story published two
thousand and one in Human Nature. This concept, the concept

(01:57):
of the ogre, is likely rooted in the huge human
propensity to favor the in group and to demonize the outgroup.
So the basic ogre figure is essentially an exaggeration of
the threat posed by outsiders right down to their base
violent intense. An intensely noble and social insider hero overcomes

(02:20):
this solitary and anti social outsider through cunning and heroism.
It's a story that you find in cultures around the world,
working as a form of threat management, reducing anxiety intensions
over outsiders into a single heroically defeated threat. It also
serves to reinforce positive notions about the in group. We

(02:44):
work together, and we're wise, and we're cunning, and while
encouraging negative savage notions about the outsider. Carol Rose also
points out that ogre stories often involve a certain amount
of black humor, and also they tend to lack a
mythological origin for the ogres in question, setting them apart

(03:04):
from giants, which often factor into human origin stories and mythologies.
The International RNAE. Thompson Uther or ATU Index includes multiple
folk tale types than entail an ogre specifically, or that
sometimes feature an ogre as opposed to a full blown
giant or some other threat. Within the ATU, giants and

(03:26):
ogres are largely interchangeable threats in many uses, but again,
more broadly, giants suggest deeper mythological connections, such as those
seen in Norse and Greek myths. So when we read
about an ogre in say, a paper about Chinese or
indigenous North American traditions folkloric traditions, we're using an English

(03:48):
language word to stand in for a specific in culture term.
And of course, like other folkloric entities rooted in particular
social or historic circumstances, the ogre has taken on life
of its own. It's become a standard fantasy world creature,
though one that's still hints at its likely original purpose.

(04:09):
Tune in for additional episodes of The Monster Fact, The Artifact,
or Animalies Dependium each week. As always, you can email
us at contact at Stuffdblow your Mind dot com.

Speaker 1 (04:28):
Stuff to Blow Your Mind is production of iHeartRadio. For
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