Adlet

Region/Culture: North America (Inuit of Greenland, Baffin Land, Labrador, and the Hudson Bay coasts)
Mythos: Inuit Mythology
Primary Type/Nature: Monsters and Beasts
Mythical Attributes: A race of swift, aggressive beings born from the union of a woman and a dog, the upper body human and the lower body canine.
Role in Mythos: They explain the origin of hostile inland peoples and, in the same breath, the coming of foreigners across the sea, while also serving as cannibal antagonists in other tales.
Relation to Humans: The Adlet are counted as enemies of the Inuit, faster and taller than ordinary people and sometimes man-eating. Yet the stories almost always let the human walk away, which says something about how the danger was understood.

The boots gave him away. A spotted dog swimming the cold strait between a small island and the shore, a pair of sealskin boots strung around his neck so they would stay dry until he could carry meat back in them, his head the only thing above the grey water. He did this every day. On the day the boots came back heavy, weighted with stones instead of food, he went under and did not surface, and the whole tangled story of the Adlet turned on that one quiet drowning.

They are a race rather than a single creature, and they come from the far north of the Inuit world, told of along the coasts of Greenland, across Baffin Land, down through Labrador and around the shores of Hudson Bay. The name shifts as you travel. Inuit in Labrador say Adlet; west of Hudson Bay the word is Erqigdlit. Where there were neighbouring inland tribes to point at, the name attached itself to them. Where there were none, as in Greenland and Baffin Land, it kept its older meaning and named the half-things instead: people to the waist, dogs below it.

What they look like beyond that split is harder to pin down than the lurid retellings suggest. The oldest recorded descriptions are spare. The lower part of the body is a dog’s, the upper part a man’s; they run quickly; they stand taller than the Inuit and taller than white men. That is most of it. The vivid catalogue of fiery fur and yellow eyes that turns up in modern accounts is later decoration, not something the early storytellers bothered with. The fear in the original tales lives in motion and number rather than in a face. An Adlet is the thing that runs you down across open ground, and there are always more of them than you.

The origin was written down by the ethnologist Franz Boas, who heard it in Cumberland Sound on Baffin Land from a man named Pakaq and published it, with a translation by Hinrich Rink, in 1889. A woman called Niviarsiang, “the girl,” lives with her father Savirqong and refuses every man who comes for her, which earns her a second name, Uinigumissuitung, she who would not take a husband. In the end she marries a dog instead, Ijirqang, marked with white and red spots. She bears him ten children. Five are dogs outright. The other five are Adlet, dog below and human above.

Ijirqang does not hunt, and ten hungry children make a loud house, so the feeding falls to the grandfather. Savirqong tires of it. He ferries the whole brood out to a small island and tells the dog to swim over each day to collect meat, which is where the boots and the stones come in. After the drowning, the killing runs both directions. Niviarsiang sends the young dogs to gnaw the hands and feet off her father. He waits until she is in his boat, kicks her into the sea, and when she clutches the gunwale he cuts off her fingers, which sink and become the whales and the seals. The same severed-fingers motif anchors the great myth of Sedna, and the two stories clearly drink from one source.

Then the dispersal. Afraid her father will finish the Adlet off, Niviarsiang sends them inland, and from them a numerous and aggressive people springs. The pure dogs she sets adrift across the ocean in a makeshift boat, and on the far side they become the ancestors of the foreigners who would later arrive by sea. It is a strange double accounting: the same litter produces the enemy at your back and the stranger who comes from the water bringing goods, and the woman who married the dog stands as the hinge between both.

The Adlet keep turning up after their origin. A tale from Smith Sound, recorded by A. L. Kroeber, drops two members of another fabulous race, the Tornit, into a camp of cannibal Adlet; the Tornit slip away in the night, cutting the thongs that bind the crossbars to their hosts’ sled runners, so that when the Adlet leap onto their sledges to give chase the runners simply fall away. A Point Barrow fragment tells of a dog named Aselu who gnaws himself free of a stick and fathers a hybrid brood, the same marriage of human and dog blood under a different name. In “The Origin of the Narwhal,” the Adlet appear again as plain murderers.

Their gifts are few and brutal: speed, height, strength, hunger, and the weight of numbers. Against a lone traveller on the tundra those are usually enough. What undoes them is almost comic in its plainness. They are not clever. In the recorded encounters with people the human nearly always comes out on top, by a trick, a cut thong, a head start. For all their ferocity the Adlet are a danger you outrun or outthink, which is perhaps the most honest thing the old stories say about them, and the most reassuring.

Frequently Asked Questions

What is the Adlet?

The Adlet is a race of beings from Inuit mythology with the upper body of a human and the lower body of a dog. They are described as swift runners, taller than humans, often aggressive, and in some stories cannibalistic. They appear in the lore of Greenland, Baffin Land, Labrador, and the Hudson Bay coasts.

Where does the name Adlet come from?

Inuit in Labrador use the word Adlet, while those west of Hudson Bay use Erqigdlit. Among groups with inland tribal neighbours the term came to refer to those peoples, but in Greenland and Baffin Land, which had no such neighbours, it kept its meaning of the half-human, half-dog creatures.

How were the Adlet born?

According to the account Franz Boas recorded in 1889, a woman named Niviarsiang married a spotted dog called Ijirqang and bore ten children. Five were ordinary dogs and five were Adlet, human above the waist and dog below. After her father killed the dog husband, she sent the Adlet inland, where they multiplied into a numerous people.

Are the Adlet connected to the Inuit sea goddess Sedna?

Yes, the two myths share a key detail. In the Adlet origin story, Niviarsiang’s father cuts off her fingers as she clings to his boat, and the severed fingers become whales and seals, the same motif found in the central myth of Sedna. The shared image suggests the stories grew from a common root.

How are the Adlet defeated in the myths?

Despite their speed and strength, the Adlet are usually outwitted rather than overpowered. In recorded tales humans escape them through tricks, such as two Tornit who cut the thongs on the Adlet’s sledges so the runners fall off during the chase. Across the stories, the human almost always survives the encounter.