Monsters of the Medieval World

Summary

Gone Medieval: Episode Summary – "Monsters of the Medieval World"

Release Date: July 18, 2025
Host: Matt Lewis
Co-host: Dr. Eleanor Jaenega
Guest: Nick Jubber, author of Monsterland

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Introduction to Medieval Monsters

In the Gone Medieval episode titled "Monsters of the Medieval World," hosts Matt Lewis and Dr. Eleanor Jaenega delve into the enduring fascination with monsters during the medieval period. Joined by Nick Jubber, author of Monsterland, they explore how these mythical creatures reflected the fears, beliefs, and societal dynamics of the time.

Why Medieval Societies Were Captivated by Monsters

Nick Jubber opens the discussion by highlighting the "intensification of monsters as you move towards medieval times," attributing this to the period’s rich literary and artistic records. He explains that medieval manuscripts and travelers' tales often featured classical monsters like cyclopes and minotaurs, as well as uniquely imagined creatures such as skia pods and blemmies [05:17].

"There's a fertility to the medieval imagination as a whole. There's such a colorful richness to the imag of the period," Jubber notes, emphasizing the era’s spiritual anxieties and the perceived need to assert control over unexplored wild spaces [05:17].

Monsters as Tools for Territorial Control

The conversation shifts to how monster narratives served political purposes. Jubber cites Geoffrey of Monmouth's History of the Kings of Britain, where the hero Corineus slays giants to legitimize territorial claims over Cornwall [07:35]. This theme of defeating monsters to assert dominance is prevalent across various cultures and underscores the use of mythical tales in reinforcing societal structures.

Parallels Between Medieval Monsters and Modern Science Fiction

Matt Lewis draws an intriguing parallel between medieval monster stories and contemporary science fiction. He muses, "All we've done is actually move our monsters off world as we've explored the map of this planet," suggesting that modern narratives like Star Wars and Avatar echo the medieval impulse to externalize fears [10:34].

Dr. Jaenega concurs, pointing out the human instinct to project fears onto the unknown, whether it be in uncharted territories during medieval times or the vastness of space today [11:12].

Spotlight on Specific Monsters

1. The Bavarian Dragon

Nick Jubber provides an in-depth exploration of the Bavarian dragon, a quintessential medieval creature. He traces the dragon's evolution from classical inspirations to its medieval incarnation, highlighting its presence in various cultural regalia—from Viking ship prows to Chinese emperor symbols [12:04].

"The legend of St. George and the dragon really emerging... the dragon is sort of expressing its wrath at humanity for what we have been doing to nature," Jubber explains, illustrating how the dragon's symbolism has transformed over centuries [16:02].

He discusses the annual dragon-slaying performances in Furthenwald, Bavaria, noting how the depiction of dragons has shifted from evil beings to symbols of ecological catastrophe [16:12]. This evolution reflects a broader societal change in perceiving nature and its wrath, maintaining the dragon's relevance in contemporary culture.

2. The Japanese Oni

Shifting focus to Japan, Jubber describes the oni, fierce ogre-like creatures integral to Japanese folklore. Initially invisible spirits, oni are depicted with vivid features—two large horns, vibrant skin colors, and traditional weapons—symbolizing their role as both protectors and predators [27:57].

"Oni represent both the supernatural and the chaotic forces of nature," Jubber articulates, explaining their duality in Japanese culture. He recounts the story of Raiko, a hero who defeats the powerful oni Shuten Doji through cunning and bravery, illustrating the balance between human civilization and wild, untamed nature [29:53].

Jubber also touches on modern traditions like Setsubun, where soybeans are used to ward off oni, showcasing the enduring legacy of these mythical creatures in contemporary Japanese rituals [38:27].

3. The Orkney Selkie

In the Orkney Islands, the folklore centers around the selkies, seals that can shed their skins to become human. These tales often involve themes of love, loss, and the longing for one's true nature [43:25].

"The selkie stories reflect the Islanders' deep connection to the sea and their respect for its creatures," Jubber notes. He narrates the poignant tale of a selkie woman who, despite living with a human family, yearns to return to the ocean, embodying the conflict between societal obligations and innate desires [51:47].

Selkie narratives also serve as cautionary tales about overexploitation of natural resources, aligning with broader medieval themes of harmony and discord with nature [55:08].

The Dual Nature of Monsters: Fear and Fascination

Throughout the episode, Jubber emphasizes that monsters in medieval lore were not merely objects of fear but also symbols of broader human emotions and societal issues. Whether represented as threats to be vanquished or beings to be respected and understood, these creatures mirrored the complexities of medieval life.

"It's about how we are responding to that sense of the weird and the inexplicable, the strange, and what that does to us," Jubber concludes, encapsulating the enduring power of monster stories in human culture [53:37].

Conclusion

"Gone Medieval" offers a comprehensive exploration of medieval monsters, revealing how these mythical beings served as mirrors to the fears, aspirations, and social dynamics of their time. Through the insightful analysis provided by Nick Jubber, listeners gain a deeper understanding of how these legends continue to influence modern storytelling and cultural practices.

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Notable Quotes:

• "There's a fertility to the medieval imagination as a whole. There's such a colorful richness to the imag of the period." – Dr. Eleanor Jaenega [05:17]
• "All we've done is actually move our monsters off world as we've explored the map of this planet." – Matt Lewis [10:34]
• "The legend of St. George and the dragon really emerging... the dragon is sort of expressing its wrath at humanity for what we have been doing to nature." – Dr. Eleanor Jaenega [16:02]
• "Oni represent both the supernatural and the chaotic forces of nature." – Dr. Eleanor Jaenega [27:57]
• "It's about how we are responding to that sense of the weird and the inexplicable, the strange, and what that does to us." – Dr. Eleanor Jaenega [53:37]

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For more fascinating insights into medieval history and myths, tune into the next episodes of "Gone Medieval" and explore Nick Jubber's enlightening book, Monsterland.

Transcript

[Matt Lewis]

Hello, I'm Matt Lewis. And I'm Dr. Eleanor Jaenega and we're just popping up here to tell you some insider info. If you would like to listen to Gone Medieval ad free and get early access and bonus episodes, sign up to History Hit with the History Hit subscription, you can also watch hundreds of hours of original documentaries, such as my new series on everyone's favorite conquerors, the Normans, or my recent exploration of the castles that made Britain. There's a new release to enjoy every week. Sign up now by visiting historyhit.com subscribe or find the link in the show notes for this episode.

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[Matt Lewis]

Hello, I'm Matt Lewis. Welcome to Gone Medieval. From History Hit, the podcast that delves into the greatest millennium in. We've got the most intriguing mysteries, the gobsmacking details and latest groundbreaking research. From the Vikings to the printing press, from kings to popes to the Crusades, we cross centuries and continents to delve into rebellions, plots and murders, to find the stories, big and small, that tell us how we got here, find out who we really were with Gone Medieval. Welcome to the realm of dragons, demons and beasts that lurk in the darkness. I'm Matt Lewis. Not one of those beasts, though, honestly. We're about to pay a visit to Monsterland. Monsters are a fixture in many cultures across the world. What do they tell us about the fears and beliefs of medieval people? Are they just rip roaring tales of heroes slaying beasts? Or is there more to it than that? How do they differ across the world? And how do some of them somehow seem to stay the same? Almost as though they say more about the listener than the monster. To help us navigate these tales, I'm joined by Nick Jubber, whose new book, A Journey around the World's Dark Imagination explores the history of the monster story. Welcome back to God Medieval. Nick, it's fantastic to have you with us again.

[Dr. Eleanor Jaenega]

Oh, thank you very much for inviting me back.

[Matt Lewis]

No, always here for the stories. And we're going to talk about a few in particular from your shiny new book, Monsterland. I mean, who doesn't like a few monsters? So I guess to ease us into this, we're going to talk about three monsters in particular that you cover in the book. But I wondered if we could start with a slightly more general conversation about why medieval people seem so fascinated by monsters. Why do they crop up in marginalia? Why are storytellers writing about monsters? What is it about monsters that grips the medieval imagination?

[Dr. Eleanor Jaenega]

Yeah, it does seem that there's a sort of intensification of monsters as you move towards medieval times. And I think that's partly that. We have more records of what they set down and they were able to record things in marginalia and to have these wonderful manuscripts full of These magnificent creatures and on these sort of tall travelers tales and the stories as well. And they were drawing on a lot of the classical monsters as well. So you have the sort of Greek monsters, the cyclopses and the minotaurs. But then you also get your monsters that, that people would have claimed to have encountered in strange places. The skia pods with their huge club foot shielding them from the sun, or the blemmies with their eyes in their chests. But it is an interesting question. I think there's a fertility to the medieval imagination as a whole. There's such a colorful richness to the imag of the period. And I think that bleeds very much into that sense of monsters. And I think there's a spiritual dimension of an utter terror of what is out there, of what's out there in the dark, in the wild spaces. A sense that they're starting to control the wild spaces around them, but they haven't got there yet. And there's still things to tame, things to control. Monster stories can also be very useful narratives for asserting territorial control. One of the stories I talk about early on in my book is from Geoffrey of Monmouth's History of the Kings of Britain, where he writes about the human settlement of Britain by Brutus and the descendants of the Trojans, and how they slew all these giants going around Albion until eventually one of his wingmen, Corineus, takes on Gog Magog and defeats him and then gives his name to Cornwall. And there's a sense that you have to defeat a monster in order to have the right to the territory. So I think that's another theme that comes in, and there's also this fear of what is to come. A lot of the monsters that emerge in medieval times, and this is, I think, is not only in Europe, but around the world, they're there in fear of damnation. You know, we've all seen those sort of last judgments with the magnificent demons ferrying the sinners to hell. And you find that not only in European culture, but it will come up when we talk about the Japanese oni, you see that in Buddhist hell scrolls as well. So I think there are all these elements, this, this sort of combination of a flourishing of imagination, but also the spiritual terrors of what might be out there and what is to come.

[Matt Lewis]

It's easy to forget that they lived in a time when, as you say, the map wasn't fully explored and there could be things out there. They were almost free to use their imaginations to think what might be beyond the bounds of where people currently know, you know, what might you encounter? And I guess hark back to some of those ancient Greek myths about monsters being places. And, you know, if you've explored so far, then the monsters must be just a little bit further, but you're going to encounter them eventually. When we hear monsters in medieval stories, do we need to think about what they are in general terms there to represent in terms of a storytelling trope? Are they kind of deployed as tools to help tell a story, or should we be taking them quite literally when they talk about monsters?

[Dr. Eleanor Jaenega]

I think we have to be careful not to be seeing them as one thing or the other, because it's so easy with any aspect of history for us to project our own way of thinking back into the past. So I think with a lot of monsters, they do have that representative quality to them and they are tools for teachers. And we see that sort of idea of the demons that are going to come and eat your soul coming out of the homilies and sermons. But there is always more to them, I think. You know, when you look at the monsters in, in an epic like Beowulf, for example, they're not there simply to warn us of what we might be afraid of if we sin too much. There's an entertainment value to them. They are very, very exciting monsters and they're manifesting something of the darkness outside. You've mentioned about that idea of sort of going further and you might see the monsters. And I think, as you say, it was something that was a real possibility for people in medieval times. You never quite know what. What might be out there. My first book was about Prester John, the mythical king in the Indies. And I was fascinated by the idea of a medieval messenger who was sent out by the Pope to go and find him. Of course, he didn't exist, but the messenger didn't know that. And I loved the idea. I was fascinated by the idea that there was this. This poor guy who was sent on this sort of quixotic mission that he could never accomplish. Where might he have gone and what did he imagine he was going to find? You know, he must have thought, well, I'm going to discover the lost tribes of Israel and I'm going to discover the ski pods and the Cunikephali with their dog heads and, and all these sort of wonderful new beings that I'll be able to come back everybody about. But of course, that didn't quite happen for him. And in many ways these stories are doing what now we have science fiction to do the Idea of what is out there in the universe. But for medieval people, it could be out there much closer. It might be just across the sea, which, of course, could be very far, you know, certainly felt very far. And it could even just be across the valley. There's a reason given for why Japan, for example, has so many monsters, Is because it has so many valleys, it has so many mountains, and they're divided by different rivers and valleys and mountains, so forth. And so each community comes up with its own monsters. And, of course, other communities, they are monsters as well. You project all your terrors Onto just the people who are across the way.

[Matt Lewis]

That's a really fascinating parallel with science fiction that I hadn't really thought about before, that all we've done is actually move our monsters off world as we've explored the map of this planet, so that we're satisfied there aren't, as far as we know, Any monsters lurking anywhere in the corners. All we've really done is take science fiction and move those monsters off world. We've turned them into aliens, and we encounter them when we get out there. And it's interesting to think, you know, in a thousand more years, when people have explored the farthest reaches of space and there's no monsters there, Will they look back at us and say, look at these idiots thinking there was aliens out there?

[Dr. Eleanor Jaenega]

Well, it's going to take them a while to map the whole of space, I suppose. So they've got a bit of time.

[Matt Lewis]

And I guess medieval people thought the same about the world. You know, we keep exploring a little bit further, but there must be monsters out there somewhere. It's interesting what it says about us as people, that we almost need those monsters to be somewhere. If they're not on this planet, we send them into space. We need a monster.

[Dr. Eleanor Jaenega]

Exactly. It's one of the things, I think, so fascinating about monsters that we have, and especially in medieval times, we had so many incredible, rich, wondrous things in nature, so many different species to discover, and yet people had to always imagine something else. And we've always had that need to project our imaginations onto nature and sort of mix it up with what we're seeing out there and imagine something else. And that's something that is, I think, instinctive to humans and is a kind of definition of humanity that need to constantly imagine the freaky, the weird, to bring out all the darkness inside us and put it out there and give it a sort of physical form.

[Matt Lewis]

Well, the first of the three monsters that we're going to focus on from your book today is the dragon, particularly specifically the Bavarian dragon. So dragons more generally, before we get really focused in on Bavaria, dragons are obviously incredibly popular in the medieval period. I mean, they are still popular. You've only got to look at Game of Thrones and House of the Dragon. Dragons are still everywhere.

[Dr. Eleanor Jaenega]

Yeah, but it's very much a throwback to the medieval period, isn't it, the popularity of dragons now and Tolkien and that sort of re engineering of the medieval dragon in particular? I think.

[Matt Lewis]

Yeah. They always seem to need to exist in a medieval parallel world, medieval adjacent world, you know, a fantasy medieval world where what do you think the popularity of dragons says about the medieval mind and perhaps why are they still popular today?

[Dr. Eleanor Jaenega]

Yeah, there are stories about dragons, obviously that go back, way back, and it becomes increasingly difficult to define. Is, is this what we would call a dragon? You have what might be called a dragon in the Rig Veda or in the Babylonian epic of creation, the shining Tiamat, who brings forth all these monsters out of the primordial sea. But as you get into medieval times, it seems there is something very specifically dragon in these forms. And we can see it visualized. And I think you, around the time you sort of get to the 9th, 10th century, you've got. You've got dragons everywhere. You've got them on the prows of Viking ships, you've got them on the regalia of Chinese emperors, you've got them on the. On the banners of the feared of Wessex as they march to the Battle of Hastings. So you have this sense of dragons being depicted as this very, very visibly recognizable form. Although of course, the Chinese dragon and the European dragon, there's a lot of difference between them. And I think one has to be careful with the terminology because, you know, we use the word dragon going back to the Latin draco, obviously. There's the Germanic wyvern or wim, there's the Chinese lung, and so many different terms for dragons. There are the Mesoamerican dragons, which would have been appearing and being carved into sculptures around the same time. But again, there are questions. Can we define those exactly as dragons? Is a dragon simply a winged serpent of some kind? And then does that mean you exclude the ones that don't have wings, which are often defined as being dragons? So it can get quite naughty and complicated. But I think to try and answer the question, I think that, that yes, there is something happening around the turn of the millennium of real obsession with dragons and a lot of stories coming out of it. And I think that's where you see the legend of St. George and the dragon really emerging, because you have. With St. George, you have a saint who had died many centuries earlier and had nothing. Obviously had nothing to do with dragons, but he wasn't even the most obvious saint to associate with dragons or the holy figure to associate with dragons. I would have thought, you know, somebody like the Archangel Michael would be more obvious because there's a sort of biblical precedent for that. And you've got the Dragon of Revelations, which has, I think, an impact on the way that dragons are depicted in European mythology. But then you also have these sort of Norse and Germanic tales of. Of the dragon. The. One of the great stories, Sigurd the Dragon Slayer, Siegfried, which becomes the Wagnerian legend of. From the Nibelungen and the Volsung saga. So you have these stories sort of joining together and. And there's a sort of perfect coordination that happens where the cult of St. George starts to grow at around the same time that the cult of the dragon is intensifying. So you've got these depictions of Sigurd the Dragon Slayer that even appear on the portals of Spanish churches on the route to Santiago de Compostela. But then, as you go through the centuries, those are being replaced by St. George and the dragon. And that's partly to do with the Crusades. I think the increasing popularity of George is this sort of military saint, the sort of swashbuckling night saint, and the idea that he had appeared at the Siege of Antioch and many other occasions where people believe they had had visions of him. And at the same time, you have these stories of the dragons increasing, and so he sort of gets latched onto the dragon and it becomes the quintessential dragon story that has sort of dominated European culture ever since.

[Matt Lewis]

Yeah. And interesting how so many of the dragon stories always focus around the slaying of a dragon, particularly St. George there being the main example. But it always seems to be that you have to be the slayer of the drag.

[Dr. Eleanor Jaenega]

Yes. And it's a funny thing now, actually, because we've come to a different stage in how we see monsters today. So when I went out to Bavaria, they do a performance of the slaying of the dragon. And they've been doing it every year since at least 1590. They have records in Furfinbaud, in the town archives there, going back as far as 1590 of, I think, a protocol from that time. And then there are receipts of two guilders being paid to the man who performed the knight who slew the dragon in Sort of the early 1600s and sort of various other bits and pieces sort of through the centuries to show how consistently this was performed. It seems to have been pretty much performed all the time, with the exception, I think, of World War II and Covid. But people's reaction to the dragon is very different now, because when the dragon is slain, there's a sort of collective sigh that breaks out, because actually, people have come not to see the hero, they've come to see the dragon. And in the case of this place in Bavaria, in Furthenwald, there's a good reason for that, because it's a magnificent dragon. I mean, it's huge. It's got a wingspan of 12 meters, and it breathes out fire and smoke and it roars. It was made for 2 million euros by 20 companies, including Magic on, who were one of the companies behind the Harry Potter movie. So it's an absolute spectacle. But the sympathy has moved towards the monsters. We see them, I think, now, as a sort of emanation of something that we are damaging in nature. And I talked to various people who were involved in this performance, and one of them was the director and writer of the current iteration of it, because it has changed, obviously, over time, over the generations, a writer called Alexander Etzel Ragusa. And he talked about how in the past, you. You would have seen the dragon as being a sort of representation of the devil, which I think is very much how a medieval Christian audience would see it. But every so often that meaning changes, so that then in recent times, people saw the dragon as representing the beast from the east, as they called it. It was the idea that it was coming from beyond the Iron Curtain. So it had this sort of political resonance where it was seen to represent what people feared across the Iron Curtain in the communist world. And then now it had become a sort of representation of what Alexander called our ecological catastrophe. The idea that the dragon now is sort of expressing its wrath at humanity for what we have been doing to nature. And so it becomes a sort of God that represents the natural world and is punishing us for our sins, which in some ways is quite medieval, actually, that, you know, that. I think there is that sort of medieval element to our current sort of spiritual anxiety that we're racking ourselves understandably, for all the damage that we've been doing. And we need that dragon to come out and sort of give us a good burning.

[Matt Lewis]

We can't be too far off. The dragon actually winning then at the festival?

[Dr. Eleanor Jaenega]

No, no, that's exactly the thing, like, is it going to. Is that going to be the next iteration? Because there are so many monster stories now where the monsters have become the heroes. You know, they're now it's Wolverine or the Navi from the Avatar series, or Shrek in a postmodern sense. You know, that actually we quite like to watch the monsters being the heroes now. So it may well be that that's where the dragon is going.

[Matt Lewis]

I was just thinking, as you were saying, that the other example is something like wicked way. We always have to have these backstories for the villains now in which they're not villains. We have to understand how and why they've become what we consider to be villains. So we can almost feel sorry for them. Is there anything specific or different that we should know about the Bavarian dragon? Why is that one in particular the focus of your book?

[Dr. Eleanor Jaenega]

Well, Bavaria does have quite a lot of dragon stories, and I think it's very interesting sometimes to look at the landscape and the climate and to look at where these things may have particular resonances. In Bavaria, you do lot of flooding, a history of flooding, and there's a lot of rivers there, and they are flooded a lot. So the area of Firth and Bowd, where this particular dragon story is told, has got a terrible history of being flooded throughout the centuries. And dragons would often be blamed for flooding. They were the creature up in the sky that released the waters. We tend to think of them, associate them now with fire, but actually, historically, their association is specifically with water. So when you go back to something like the Rig Veda, they set the waters of life free. In the Chinese myths, often the dragons are the bestowers of water. They are the rain clouds, basically. And if you think of these dark clouds with fire coming out of them in a thunderstorm, that does parallel with a dragon. And you can see why then in the plains of China, you would be very grateful for that and you would tell stories that treat that creature as a divine being that has given blessings. Whereas in northern Europe, where we take our rainfall very much for granted, obviously we're not so grateful. And we go, oh, damn that dragon up there, bringing the. These. These storms down upon us. And because it's quite close to the Alps, you get a lot of clouds getting jammed up. And so you get this sort of particular intensity of rainfall. So there's that. I think there's also that it is close to Bohemia. It's a sort of. It's a. It's a hinterland. And hinterlands are often places where monster stories flourish. That Part of Bavaria has often. They've often felt like they're sort of out on a wing a bit, that they were ignored by the, the Germanic princes. They were at the prey of the Bohemians in the 14th, 15th century there was a lot of fighting with the Hussite rebellions and a lot of carnage and destruction happening around this area around Firfenvald. The fortress there getting destroyed and lots of soldiers and armies sort of moving back and forth across into the Bohemian woods, which fringes very much on the town of Firthenwald. I mean, it's within walking distance of it. So you've got that sort of political turmoil which again is something that intensifies stories of monsters. You see that in many, many types of monster stories. Whether it's in the 1600s, where in France, where werewolf stories manifested a lot during a time of turmoil in the west of France or in the BALKANS in the 18th century, when you have a lot of vampire stories emerging and it's often people moving around, armies moving around, carnage and turmoil and people are looking over their shoulders at the strangers in their midst and trying to find an explanation for all the trouble that's brewing around them. So I think it's that mixture of nature and politics and sort of being in the right place really at the center of this sort of cult of dragon itself.

[Matt Lewis]

Yeah, it's a really interesting association, is it, with political unrest and the desire to explain it via monsters. You know, it's almost something unhuman about the amount of violence and upset and political unrest and all of that kind of thing. And the othering of people you consider foreign as they move around, that there must be some, some kind of monstrous element to what's going on.

[Dr. Eleanor Jaenega]

Yeah. And they have a pageant in Firfenvald which is part of this show that goes on where more than a thousand people are dressed in medieval costume. And amongst them they have the war wagons of the Hussites. And so the Hussites from Bohemia would travel around in these sort of high sided wagons pulled by several horses and you have them parading down the tower and people boo them and sort of call out at them even though they're their neighbors, you know, who just dressed up in costume. You know, it's all part of the fun part of the show. But I think it speaks to a sense of a sort of historical scar. Still a little bit sensitive, that sense of. Oh, it's, you know, it's them, those guys from across the way, you know, all that trouble they caused us. And yes, it's the easiest thing to do. If you can turn your neighbors into monsters, then it's much easier to kill them.

[Matt Lewis]

Do we ever get much of a sense in the medieval world of whether people actually really believed that dragons existed? Were they always a metaphor for this kind of thing, or did people genuinely think there were dragons out there?

[Dr. Eleanor Jaenega]

So I think people believed that there was darkness out there, and they believed very much in the devil and that the devil could take many forms. And I think that the dragon really is a sort of magnificent form for evil itself in European culture that you can latch that fear of all those terrors onto. And that, again, it's a very different way of seeing the dragon from, I think, from how we see it now, where we tend to be more. We admire its splendor and magnificence, but I think for a lot of medieval people, it was something quite terrifying. Although, on the other hand, these things always have nuances because they put dragons on coats of arms and on various regalia. So, you know, it wasn't something that you would sort of keep in mind keeping away. There was a sort of a pride in connecting that with yourselves.

[Matt Lewis]

There's an odd juxtaposition in there somewhere about thinking about dragons as a representation of evil, perhaps an expansion of the biblical snake as the representation of the devil, but also invoking them for protection. You know where, as you said, the Anglo Saxons are marching to Hastings with dragons on their shields, the Vikings have them on the prows of their ship, while also having legends about dragon slayers and things like that. So there is this odd juxtaposition, isn't there, between calling on them for protection but believing that they're evil and need to be hunted.

[Dr. Eleanor Jaenega]

There is, and I think we should always remember there is that ambiguity in how dragons are being treated. I mean, because they are these fierce beings. The idea, well, look, if you're going to come to battle with us, we're going to set our dragon on you. We're going to become a dragon to fight you. There's that element. And yeah, there is, as you say, that fascinating juxtaposition that keeps going on.

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[Dan Snow]

Hi folks. I want to tell you about my latest series on Dan Snow's history. Now I expect like me, you have grown up reading or watching movies about pirates, swashbuckling rogues, having adventures on the high seas, disregarding authority, not taking it from the man, not taking any nonsense. What would you say if I, I told you that basically everything you think about pirates isn't true? Treasure maps, parrots, buried treasure. So what is true? Well, my latest series that is running all through this July with new episodes every Monday, answers that question. We'll be telling the real stories, the pirates, you know, Blackbeard, Captain Kidd and Anne Bonny. And I'll also be telling you astonishing tales of of the pirates that you don't know, like Zheng Yi Sao, the queen of the South China Seas. Definitely the most formidable pirate in history. So make sure you check out and follow Dan Snows history hit to get new episodes on pirates every Monday this month.

[Matt Lewis]

Right. We probably need to move on. We're going to skip to almost the other side of the medieval world, really, and we're going to head to Japan. And one of the other monsters that you focus on in the book is the Japanese oni. Can you give us a kind of a brief overview, I guess of what an oni is and how are they depicted in Japanese literature?

[Dr. Eleanor Jaenega]

Yes. Well, first of all, they're depicted as being invisible. Their first appearances as these sort of invisible shifting spirits. Yeah. How do you depict the invisible? And so then because Japanese culture is very, very pictorial and visual, you start to get these fantastically lurid depictions of them where they tend to become extremely consistent and they tend to have two horns, ox's horns, particularly sort of very large, curdling Horns bursting out of their heads, big sort of red or blue or yellow or green head. And they wear. And they're sort of ogre like in their form, often carrying a club or some kind of weapon and wearing a tiger skin pelt around their waist to save their modesty. And that becomes. From quite early on, that becomes a depiction that you see in Japanese hell scrolls. And then it. From sort of, from medieval times onwards, it becomes pretty much the standard depiction. There's a museum actually on top of one of the mountains, which is associated with one of the oni stories, where they have sculptures of the oni, because they're often depicted on the ridge lines of the roofs of temples of Shinto temples, Shinto and Buddhist temples. They're a sort of apotropaic symbol that wards off other terrifying beasts. So if you have your oni on your temple, then anything else is going to keep away because they're so ferocious. So you can see them and they're lined up actually by date, so you can see the development of the form and it is fairly consistent. They all tend to have these horns. But as the sculptor's art is becoming increasingly sophisticated, their tusks are getting more and more elaborate. The eyes are sometimes very large or sometimes small. I think by the 19th century, some of them even had moustaches, which makes them look rather dandy like. But the really freaky ones are the older ones, actually, the medieval ones, where you can sense the fear of the sculptor and the sense that, you know, this is something that might be out there and that we want to be wary of.

[Matt Lewis]

Yeah, and we've got that similar ambiguity that we're just talking about there, where you've got something that is essentially evil but being used to also ward off other evil. Our only basically equivalents to demons. Should we be thinking them as demons?

[Dr. Eleanor Jaenega]

Well, I think that's how they were originally depicted. So in the Buddhist hell scrolls, they ferry the sinners to hell, so they have that similar role to what we would see the demons in our last judgments having. But then the stories sort of take over and become increasingly varied and elaborate and they're often out of control. The idea maybe, of our sort of medieval demons is that they're sort of under the aegis of the devil or some kind of sort of evil leader, whereas the. The oni tend to, you know, they just go off and do whatever they want, really. So you have a lot of stories where they are driven by their appetites. They love to drink, they love to eat, Sometimes they love to steal away Japanese women and children and other captives. They even love to play music, which is very unusual for monsters. It's usually, if you think of Grendel is in Beowulf, is pushed back by the singing of the psalms and the music that's going on in Hrothgar's Mead Hall. Whereas in some of the Japanese stories, you hear of music being played in the Rashomon Gate of Kyoto, beautifully, you know, perfectly played. And then as the listeners draw closer, they realize that it's an oni that's actually playing the music. So they have these different qualities, but they are mostly driven by evil by wanting to capture and kill. So the main story that I focused on in my book, Monsterland, is one about a hero called Raiko, and he's sort of one of the prototypes for the samurai who is sent off on a mission to capture or to defeat the oni of Mount O, which is outside Kyoto. And because several people have been kidnapped, and there's an oni called Shuten Doji who is lording over a place called the Iron palace on the top of this mountain, the story goes that a seer, Abe Nu Semei, who's one of the great seers of Japanese medieval culture, has identified where the oni is and has sent the warriors out to find him. But along the way, they meet some mountain priests who accompany them, and they bring along with them several jars of sake, which is, of course, a very good idea whenever you're going on a long journey. And so they arrive at this iron palace, which is ruled by these creatures, these oni, and they present them with the sake. And so the Shuten Doji, the leader of the oni, ends up getting drunk on it and passes out. And then they're able to sweep around the palace, kill off all the oni and release the captives, and finally decapitate the evil Shot and his bedchamber, although, because he's such a ferocious Oni, he's 50, I think 50 meters long, and his head rises up, even after it's been decapitated, into the sky. And then Raiko the hero, has to chop him down and very nearly gets bitten by this flying head in a very sort of beautifully sort of lurid final scene before finally defeating the head. And then they carry it down. And there's actually a temple or a shrine on the edge of Kyoto where the head is said to be buried, which is still a place that can be visited for people who are suffering from head issues, I think, particularly issues of the neck and Such problems. And so people leave certain offerings there. And they actually, it said you should pour a little bit of sake when you go there over the burial place as a sort of offering or act of respect.

[Matt Lewis]

How important was medieval Kyoto to these stories and the development of these stories? Cause I'm struck again that we're talking about Kyoto is in a fairly mountainous region, similar to what we talked about in Bavaria. Does that play into the development of these oni stories as well?

[Dr. Eleanor Jaenega]

I think with Kyoto, you have this. It is at the heart of so many of the great medieval Japanese stories because it's such a dominant imperial capital. You know, it was the capital until, I think, the 19th century. So it has this huge cultural dominance, and it was a spectacular place. I think in some ways it's difficult to see that now because so much of it has been destroyed in the intervening centuries. But on the other hand, Kyoto today is in many ways a sort of mirage that is trying to replicate the visual beauty of medieval Kyoto. So a lot of the temples are built on the same form or shape or appearance that they were supposed to have, according to records from earlier times, before being burnt or destroyed in war. So there's a sense of Kyoto as this perfection of human civilization, but surrounded by, as you say, by the mountains and by such a richness of landscape. You also have the problem that Japan has that it is afflicted by every possible disaster that you can have tsunamis and earthquakes and volcanoes and all these different kind of phenomena. So stories were invented to explain these things. And all over the world, people would explain these natural disasters through stories of monstrous creatures of some kind. And the oni are especially associated with eruptions on the mountains, with avalanches and so forth. In fact, I think in the story, Shuten Doji even claims credit for causing avalanches that have taken people's lives. Actually, as it happens, Shuten Doji himself was believed by many people to not be a figment of fiction, but to actually have been a real life figure. So there's a 17th century writer whose name, I think it's Kaibana Eken, who described Shuten Doji as being a sort of gangster who was operating in the mountains and who was acting as one of these demonic figures, even possibly wearing a mask to frighten the people in the town, in the city. And there are lots of stories about people, outlaws living out in the mountains, who would then become, in the folklore, they would then become monsters. And that goes way back over the centuries. So you have. I think it's the earth spiders who are another sort of monster that appears in a lot of Japanese stories. And the word that was used for that has a connection with a word for one of the tribes that was overtaken by the people who ended up becoming dominant in pre medieval Japan. So you have a lot of these stories where there are these sort of roots in a blurred version of history, where gradually, as they get told and retold and spun into tales, the monster becomes clarified. But if you can sort of tease them apart, you can see there's actually more of a human conflict that's going on at the heart of it. So in some ways, that story of Raiko and the oni shuten doji, like many of the oni stories, is the story of the people, the elite, who had control of civilization against the outsiders, who lived in the countryside, who lived in the mountains and around the rivers.

[Matt Lewis]

And I guess in that there's almost a literary comparison to be made for Beowulf in that, you know, essentially that's about the monster that lives outside, that isn't in the inner circle, isn't in the mead hall, enjoying the warmth of the fire and the hospitality. If it's external, it's a monster and it should be feared. And it sounds like maybe the Japanese had the same idea that people who were outside of the civilized areas of Japan, people who didn't behave as they should do, outlaws, I guess, effectively become monsters.

[Dr. Eleanor Jaenega]

Yes, I think it happens in almost every culture. I think that we have that in British culture. I think with stories of the wood wosers and other sort of creatures that lived in the woods. Sometimes we turned them into folk heroes like Robin Hood, but sometimes they became our goblins and sprites and other sort of creepy things that were out there in the woods. I think it's part of the human instinct to monster the other. And as you say, it's that sense of the outsider, which I think Grendel and Beowulf to me, is such an epitome for that idea that the monster is this. This being who is outside and just isn't let into elite society. I mean, to be fair, if somebody's going to come into your home and start munching on your friends, you're not going to want them in your society. But still. And it's the same sort of idea, I think, with Shoot and Doji, although, interestingly, in this one, he has his own palace. So that may be saying something, that the monsters, you know, he has a form of his own civilization in this particular tale. And there's often Quite a splendor to the way that the oni are depicted. And when you see them in some of the medieval scrolls, there's a marvellous scroll depicting this particular story that's on display in one of the museums, the name of which is obviously going to escape me right now. But it depicts in magnificently beautiful coloured detail the court of Kyoto and then the court of the oni, which is splendid. It's sort of barbaric and gushing with blood, but it has a sort of splendor of its own. It's also very detailed in depicting the jars of saki as well, with wonderful inscriptions along them. And perhaps they are the ultimate symbol of civilization, this rather lovely drink that is ultimately the undoing of the monsters.

[Matt Lewis]

And do we see traditions springing up around the oni, maybe to keep them away, to ward off evil? And do any of those traditions persist until today?

[Dr. Eleanor Jaenega]

Well, there are some wonderful traditions that have indeed continued over the centuries. So with a lot of monsters, there's some weak spot, there's some way that you can defeat them. It's not necessarily what you expect. So with the oni, yeah, you have stories of them suddenly appearing. They come out of the spirit world, and in a lot of the Japanese stories, they can appear out of nowhere because they're coming from a sort of other world. It's a bit like the Celtic other world, I think, in some ways. And they're appearing amongst people and they'll especially appear in the mountains, so amongst monks who are hermits, which in Japanese culture, you have a lot of stories of. Of the monk who's a hermit on the mountainside. And then the oni suddenly appears as they're praying. And how do they defeat them? And in one of the stories which goes back to medieval times, to the. What's called the Muromachi period, the monk has. He's got no weapons on him, so all he's got is he's been roasting some beans. So he hurls the beans at the oni and then the creature sort of screams and is blinded by these roasted soya beans and disappears back into the other world. And so that's how he manages to survive. And that was then taken on as a tradition during the sort of 14th, 15th century or so during medieval times, and it became a court ritual and it's now a sort of public ritual. So when I was in Kyoto around this time, and it's specifically at a time known as setsubun, which is the traditional. In the traditional Japanese calendar, it's the time of the new year, it's as spring is coming through and people gather in the Shinto temples. And there are people dressed as the oni in wonderful masks, some of them incredibly elaborate of. With their horns, very high, elaborate horns, and magnificent sort of military costumes and huge boots and so forth. You have arrows being shot to the four corners of the temple as a sort of form of psychic protection. But then the oni burst in, and then the soybeans are thrown, and everybody hurls their soya beans at the monsters, and eventually they are expelled. And it's one of those sort of rituals that everybody really gets involved in, becomes quite anarchic. And, you know, it's a big crowd of people hurling the beans everywhere. And there's also. You have the beans being given by the temple priests, the Shinto priests. And so there's a sense there also of the sort of the authority of the temples over the whole of the ritual. And it's very much taking place under their aegis. And you have verses being recited by some of the priests as well. And there are all sorts of elements in it. In one of the temples that I went to, they had the oni appear. It was just as darkness had fallen. So there was a sort of eerie aspect to it. But you also had a character called the hososhi, who looks a bit like an oni because he looks kind of monstrous. He's got, I think, a single horn, but a sort of monstrous mask on. But he is a shamanic figure, and he leads a group of acolytes, and they go around the temple, and eventually he dispels the oni. So in that case, it's not the beans that dispel them, but the shamanic figure of the hososhi, which is the title for a particular court shaman of those times. And so he becomes the person or the figure who drives the oni out of the temple.

[Jacob Goldstein]

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[Matt Lewis]

For our last monster that we're going to focus on, we're going to head all the way west again. We're going to go past Bavaria. We're going to go north a little bit as well, and we're going to get to the Orkney Islands. So there we have a case of the Orkney selkies. So what is a selkie?

[Dr. Eleanor Jaenega]

Well, a selkie, it is literally a seal. It is the old word for a seal out in the north, in Scotland and Orkney and so on. But in the folklore, it's the selkie is a seal that comes to shore and sheds their skin. So the seal skin is shed and then they turn into human form. And in a lot of the traditional tales, it would go something along the lines of this. The selkies arrive at the shore under the moonlight, in darkness. They shed their skins, and then they start dancing under the moonlight. It's a sort of fairy dance. And there's a lone farmer, there's always a lone farmer in these stories who's been living on his own too long, and he sort of hides behind one of the rocks. And the selkies are. They can be both male and female. There's a certain gender dynamic in a lot of these stories where there are a group of beautiful young females dancing under the moonlight. And he grabs hold of one of their skins and holds onto it so that when they're all disturbed by the noise of him approaching, they all go back into their skins and go back into the sea. But one of them can't because he's holding her skin. And so she has to go and live with him in his croft. And he says he's in love with her. He's fallen for her radiant beauty, and he wants her to come and live with him in his croft. And so she then has to live with him. And she lives with him for many, many years, brewing the best beer in the island, often singing beautiful songs and giving birth to several children. But, of course, she's always hankering for the sea because that's her natural form, that's her natural state. But she doesn't know where he's hidden her seal skin. He's hidden it usually in some kind of casket or chest or coffer, which is out of the way. She doesn't know where it is. But then eventually one day, one of the children has hurt their foot and she needs to make a sort of riveling around the foot to heal them. And the child has seen where the skin is hidden and says, I remember there's a place where Daddy hid that skin that would be perfect for it. Where? Where is it? Oh, it's just over there, you know, under the bed or in the barn. And the husband and the other children have gone off to the fair that day. And so she brings it out, she brings out the skin and she's restored to her. And then she has the heartbreaking decision of leaving her child, all her children, and going back to the sea, because that's where she's really from. And so she goes back into seal form. And although the children have then lost their mother, they have a protector out at sea. So whenever they're in their fishing boats and they're about to get drowned or a terrible storm is coming on, there's always a seal and often many seals to protect them and help them along the way. So it actually sort of turns out to be kind of a bonus, depending on how you interpret it. That's the sort of classic selkie narrative that people have been telling over the centuries in the north of Scotland, in Orkney, in the Shetlands, in many of the islands out there. The ones that I particularly focused on were in Orkney, where I traveled to met a few of the storytellers there. And it was amazing to find out how far back these stories go, because they do go right back to medieval times.

[Matt Lewis]

And how significant is the selkie in Orcadian literature? Because I guess there are even more tied to the sea than we might think of in most of the rest of the British Isles. So does it reflect this desire to. This almost dual personality of living on land but being so connected to the sea, of wanting a protector at sea, as you say, does it reflect this desire to build a connection with the sea?

[Dr. Eleanor Jaenega]

Absolutely. I think Orkney does have a lot of stories about different creatures that come in from the sea. And it's that sense that it's a place where anything might turn out up, because especially in past centuries, you never quite knew who or what was going to wash up. And there are lots of real life stories of shipwrecks and of people from all kinds of places around the world who'd end up living on one of the islands of Orkney for a generation, maybe for the rest of their lives, because they happened to be passing when the storm struck and they ended up on that particular island. So that it does feed into that reality of what it is like to live on. This archipelago is of small, scattered islands where there is all that movement going on between them. And it's very easy for the stranger to suddenly appear with no sort of story behind them. Who are they? Why. Why have they suddenly come out of the sea like that? And then it's also an island that does have a lot of seals. They are a real phenomenon there. And so when I was researching that part of the book, I was talking to the storytellers, but I also talked to marine biologists about the phenomenon of seals because it's one of the best places in the world to go to watch seals and to watch their behavior. And they do have. They are very complicated creatures. One of the marine biologists I spoke to talked about the variety of maternal behavior in seals, where some of the mother seals, you would see them being very devoted to their children. Others you would see them sort of pushing their children back. And you get that sense of having very different kind of personalities. So I think all those kind of things, if you think of the sort of the fishing communities that would have lived amongst these seals over the generations, you can imagine how these stories would have developed. But a lot of the stories are also about being kind or at least being honorable to the sea, treating the sea with respect, and treating the creatures of the sea with respect. So you have a lot of stories about the fisherman who takes too many seals, who hunts the seals and then ends up getting punished for it. And in fact, one of the oldest stories, I think the oldest known selkie story, which is also my favorite, it's called the Tale of the lady or the Play of the Lady Odiver. And it was collected, scraps of it, fragments were collected by an amazing folklorist called Water Trail Denison, who's one of the core figures in Orcadian literature. And he pulled it together in the language of this poem. There's a lot of Norse language in it. So it echoes back into the connections that Orkney had with the Norse kingdoms, the sense that Orkney was part of a much wider sort of empire of Norse speaking communities. You know, some scholars have talked about it being that it was the Venice of the North Sea. You know, we now think of it as this sort of place out there at the back of beyond. But it was. It was very much at the heart of a lot of things that were going on. And so you see Orkney in a lot of the Icelandic sagas. It's characters in the most famous of the Icelandic sagas, like the saga of Burnt Neot. They travel out to Orkney. You find fleets from Orkney, the earls and Giles of Orkney travelling across to Ireland in some of the core battles of medieval times, fighting the High King Brian over in Ireland at Clontarf, for example. So you have a lot of these. A sense of Orkney being part of something much, much, much bigger than perhaps we see it as being now. And so these stories play their part in echoing that. So in the story of the play of the Lady Odiver. And it's got wonderful sort of medieval textures to it. It's about a crusader, he's called Odiver, and he's married this woman, but he leaves her to go on crusade and he sort of sets her up in his big castle on one of the islands, and then he heads off to go and, you know, fight the infidel and bring back glory. But he doesn't come back for a very long time. And she's there on her own on the island, until a selkie appears. And he's a, you know, handsome. A tall, handsome, dark stranger who comes in. Obviously, he's shed his brown seal skin, but has something of the sea about him and something of the sort of the mystery and enticement of the sea about him. And so she takes him into her chamber and the inevitable happens and she gives birth to a selkie child. But she knows that this selkie child will not thrive, thrive in human society. And so the child is taken by the selkie back to his kingdom of Sulskerry, which is one of these sort of legendary islands where the selkies would go and congregate. And then eventually, when her husband comes back, he's come back from the Crusades. He's come back from, they say, feasting in Micklegarh, which is what they call Constantinople in these stories, having a high old time in between the battles. And eventually he's come back, brought lots of treasure back with him, but, of course, he can't stop hunting, so he goes off to hunt down the whales and the seals. And then he comes back from the hunt with a seal who has a golden chain around his neck, which the mother put around the chain of her. Of her son when she handed him over. To his father. And so she knows that her son has been killed and she's, of course, terribly distraught. But that gives her away to her husband, who then has her locked up in one of his towers, says, well, she's going to have to be killed because she has betrayed him. But then suddenly there's the sound, the tumult of all kinds of creatures at sea. And he thinks, oh, I could go and catch some whales now. I could go and really hunt some big quarry out there. So he goes off to Hun and isn't able to catch anything at all. And then when he comes back to the island, his wife has disappeared. She's been rescued by her beloved and taken to the mysterious isle of Sulskerry.

[Matt Lewis]

And I guess compared to our other two stories, at least this one sticks out because here we have a monster who, rather than people being afraid of them, people are attracted to them. You know, the lonely farmer wants to marry a selkie. The lonely wife will take a selkie into her house. And I guess it almost goes back to what we were saying about the Bavarian dragon, about the dragon becoming almost the hero of the story, that there is this kind of two elements to the monster, isn't there? It's always other. But we can be scared of it or we can be attracted by it, enticed by it. And I guess it's where that balance sits, whether we call it a monster or something friendlier than that.

[Dr. Eleanor Jaenega]

Well, yes, I mean, I probably wouldn't call a selkie a monster. That does seem sort of too much. But then I also wanted to include it in, in a book called Monsterland, to sort of challenge the definition of what a monster is. And also, I think, to point out, because I think it's not an isolated example, there's quite a strain in medieval literature of the supernatural creature being in some ways the hero, or at least a sort of point of identification. I mean, you have stories, you probably know, Bisclavaret, the werewolf story from Marie de France, where you have quite a sympathetic depiction of another kind of shapeshifter who shapeshifts into a wolf. But he is the character who. Who the reader sort of identifies with. So I think that medieval writers were not necessarily always depicting the shape shifter, the non human, as being the outsider and the evil antagonist. There are a lot of varieties to how they perceived these creatures, especially with shape shifting. I think that medieval culture had a real fascination for shape shifting. And it really seems that those sort of stories come into their own in that period, which I think is something quite telling about medieval times and that sort of recognition of the wildness inside us and that we all perhaps have something that sort of potential to become something different.

[Matt Lewis]

Yeah. I think it's an interesting reflection of the sophistication of the medieval storyteller's mind though, isn't it? That a monster can be something you're afraid of, but it can be something that you sympathise with. Should we hunt monsters or should we be more sympathetic to monsters? There can be things that you might consider monsters that are actually very, very attractive. It's almost less to do with the monster or more to do with the human response to the unknown or the unexpected.

[Dr. Eleanor Jaenega]

Yes, exactly. I'd agree with that, that I think it's about how we are responding to that sense of the weird and the inexplicable, the strange, and what that does to us. That's part of what gives these stories that tremendous power. And when you read them, I think a few years ago I would not have expected to read these kind of stories as being medieval tales. I mean, handed down over quite a few generations. But I think having that medieval source to the narrative in them. But now I think, you know, I've seen quite a few of these and it's something I think is so exciting about medieval literature that it does have such a range and that medieval storytellers like you say they were incredibly sophisticated. I think also with this particular story, the selkie story, it's a sort of anti hunting story and it seems like it's a story that resonates in Orcadian literature. So I think it's a story that does resonate and has resonated and there is quite a strain also of these sort of stories with that. That message of, you know, be careful about overhunting, you know, overuse of your. Of the resources of the sea. That comes out in a lot of the selkie stories and then a lot of the other stories that are told about the other creatures in Aegean mythology.

[Matt Lewis]

Yeah, yeah, Fascinating. I mean, this has been incredible, Nick. We have barely scratched the surface of monsterland. There is so much more in the book for people to go and find their way around. But thank you for. For explaining a bit about Bavarian dragons, Japanese Oni and Orkney selkies to us. It's been really interesting to. To think about what they meant to the medieval mind. Thank you for taking us on those trips.

[Dr. Eleanor Jaenega]

Oh, you're welcome. It's been really fun chatting about them all.

[Matt Lewis]

That's been Great. Thank you very much, Nick. I hope you enjoyed this voyage into Monsterland. You can discover more stories in Nick's book and you can also catch Nick's last visit to Gone Medieval to talk about the medieval origins of fairy tales in our back catalogue. There are new installments of Gone Medieval every Tuesday and Friday, so please come back and join Elena and I for more from the greatest millennium in human history. Don't forget to also subscribe or follow us on Spotify or wherever you get your podcasts and tell all of your friends and family that you've gone medieval. You can sign up to History Hit to actually access hundreds of hours of original documentaries with a new release every week. And all of History Hits Podcasts ad free. Head over the historyhit.com subscribe right now. Anyway, I better let you go. I've been Matt Lewis and we've just gone medieval with history. How many discounts does USAA Auto Insurance offer?

[Jacob Goldstein]

Too many to say here.

[Matt Lewis]

Multi vehicle discount Safe driver discount New vehicle discount? Storage discount?

[Dr. Eleanor Jaenega]

How many discounts will you stack up?

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[Dr. Eleanor Jaenega]

Hey folks, it's Marc Maron from WTF. It's been more than 15 years now, and I'm still talking to all kinds.

[Jacob Goldstein]

Of people in my garage every week.

[Dr. Eleanor Jaenega]

Sometimes it's Bill Burr, sometimes it's Ariana Grande.

[Matt Lewis]

She just looks at me because she's always going like, dad, it's not that big a deal. Yeah.

[Dr. Eleanor Jaenega]

I go, sorry, I lost my temper. I go, I still love you.

[Matt Lewis]

You know, Daddy has issues.

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Are you afraid of it?

[Matt Lewis]

Of death?

[Jacob Goldstein]

Of death?

[Matt Lewis]

Well, I don't. I think about it all the time.

[Dr. Eleanor Jaenega]

How are we here already? Listen to WTF with Marc Maron twice a week on your favorite podcast app. Or get more WTF with a WTF plus subscription. Just go to wtfpod.com and click on WTF.

[Matt Lewis]

Acast helps creators launch, grow, and monetize their podcasts everywhere.

[Dr. Eleanor Jaenega]

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