Bugbear

Also Known As: also bugbeare, buggbear; from Middle English bugge, a frightening thing, compounded with bear
Region/Culture: Northern Europe
Mythos: English Mythology
Primary Type/Nature: Fairy Folk and Spirit Beings
Mythical Attributes: It works entirely by suggestion, frightening without ever arriving, and takes all its force from whoever agrees to believe in it.
Role in Mythos: A household terror spoken of by nurses and servants to keep children obedient, and later a byword among adults for a dread far bigger than its cause.
Relation to Humans: Its whole existence was transacted between a grown-up who invoked it and a child who could not check. Adults who had grown out of it kept the word anyway, using it to name other people’s groundless fears and, by John Locke’s account, still flinching at their own.

Somewhere in 1535 a compositor setting the ninety-first Psalm for the first complete printed English Bible reached the fifth verse and chose a word that later translators would quietly replace with terror. Thou shalt not need to be afraid, the line ran, for any bugges by night. The volume has been called the Bug Bible ever since. Whatever a bugge was, it came out after dark, and it was the sort of thing scripture felt obliged to talk a reader down from.

The word was already old by then. Middle English bugge, in use by the late fourteenth century, covered anything frightening that had no settled shape: a ghost, a goblin, a scarecrow standing black against a field at dusk. It belongs to the same crowded corner of the language as bogle, bogey and bugaboo, a family of half-named dreads that share a sound and very little else. An older account traced the whole set back to a Welsh word, bwg, and that derivation still turns up in print, though the Welsh word is recorded late enough that the traffic more likely ran the other way, out of English rather than into it. Nobody has settled it. What is clear is that the noun meant fear before it ever meant a creature, and that the insect sense of bug, which now crowds everything else out, arrived later and shouldered the old meaning aside.

The bear was bolted on in the middle of the sixteenth century. The compound is first recorded in 1552, and from its earliest appearances it works as an all-purpose word for an object of dread rather than a description of any particular beast. The hobgoblin sense came in slightly afterwards. This matters more than it sounds, because the modern encyclopedia bugbear, a heavy shaggy thing with a goblin’s face that prowls medieval woods for straying children, rests almost entirely on that second syllable and on nothing else. The bear is a rhyme, not an anatomy.

What the sixteenth century actually recorded was the working method. In 1584 Reginald Scot set down what he remembered of being small, and it reads like an inventory of a house after dark: the ugly devil with horns and a tail and eyes like a basin, and then the roll-call the maids kept up, bull beggars, urchins, elves, hags, the man in the oak, the hell wain, Tom Thumb, hobgoblin, boneless, and such other bugs, that we are afraid of our owne shadowes. A child lay under wool in an unheated room, the rushlight guttering low on the landing, and listened to a list. That was the bugbear at work. It never had to enter.

Grown men used the word too, and used it to say they were past it. Shakespeare gives Petruchio the line when the man is warned that Katherina has a temper: he has heard lions, and artillery, and the sea, and tush, tush, fear boys with bugs. The taunt only lands because everyone in the audience had been one of those boys.

The one place the bugbear is dramatised at length in the century that named it, it is not in a wood and it has no fur. An Elizabethan comedy of the mid 1560s credited to John Jeffere, adapted loosely from Grazzini’s La Spiritata with scenes borrowed from Terence, is titled The Bugbears, and its bugbears are a fraud. Formosus needs three thousand crowns to buy his miserly father Amadeus into consenting to a marriage. So he and a friend make a disturbance in the house at night, night after night, until the old man is convinced the place is haunted. Amadeus takes his trouble to an astrologer named Nostrodamus, who is in fact a servant, Trappola, in a borrowed gown and in league with the conspirators, and receives the diagnosis he has paid for: the spirits are angry about the marriage, and by way of punishment they have carried off three thousand crowns from his hoard. They had not. Formosus had. A miser who hears something in the night will always arrive at the expensive explanation.

That is the bugbear’s whole anatomy. It is a noise on a stair, an unlit doorway, a gap between what somebody can hear and what they can check, and it is always somewhere the light has just failed to reach.

A century later John Locke was still trying to get it out of English nurseries. Servants, he complained in 1693, keep children in subjection by telling them of raw-head and bloody-bones and such other names, and he thought the cure worse than the fault it corrected. Such bug-bear thoughts, once got into the tender minds of children, sink deep, and fasten themselves so as not easily, if ever, to be got out again. He had met men who told him so themselves. Their reason had corrected the error years before; the old notion still came up first, in the dark, unasked.

By 1755 Samuel Johnson could enter it as a frightful object and a walking spectre, and add that it was by then generally used for a false terror to frighten children. The dictionary had caught up with the joke. The word had become its own diagnosis.

Its powers follow from that. It is strongest unobserved and among the credulous, it prefers a house at night to open country, and it can be anywhere it is not being looked at, because it is not anywhere at all. It borrows every ounce of its strength from the person it is being used on, which is why it costs nothing to keep and never has to be fed.

Its limits follow just as directly. Daylight ends it. So does an adult, a count of the money, or a plain name said out loud. It cannot survive being examined, and it cannot survive its audience growing up, which is why the surviving sense of the word is the deflating one: a bugbear now is a grievance out of all proportion to its object, the thing that looms enormous until somebody turns and looks at it. What is odd is how badly that deflation works in practice. Locke’s grown men had the argument, had the evidence, and reported that at the top of a dark stair the argument arrived second.

Frequently Asked Questions

What is a bugbear?

A bugbear is an English nursery terror, a name spoken by nurses and servants to frighten disobedient children into staying quiet and indoors after dark. The word is first recorded in 1552 and began as an all-purpose term for any object of dread, not the name of a particular beast. It works by suggestion rather than appearance, and no early source describes it arriving.

Did the bugbear really look like a bear?

There is little evidence that a bug or a bugbear was ever imagined in the form of a bear. The bear in the name was compounded onto the older word bugge in the sixteenth century, and the shaggy bear-like creature described in modern reference books is a picture reconstructed from the second half of the compound rather than from any early record.

Where does the word “bugbear” come from?

It comes from Middle English bugge, meaning a frightening thing of no fixed shape, joined to bear. The same bugge stands behind bogey, bogle and bugaboo. An older derivation from the Welsh word bwg is still repeated, but the Welsh form is recorded late enough that it was probably borrowed from English rather than the other way round.

What is the play The Bugbears about?

The Bugbears is an Elizabethan comedy of the mid 1560s credited to John Jeffere, adapted from Grazzini’s Italian play La Spiritata. Its bugbears are a hoax: a young man named Formosus fakes a haunting in his miserly father’s house so that a bogus astrologer can blame the spirits for three thousand crowns that the son has actually stolen for a dowry. There is no monster in it.

Why does “bugbear” now mean a pet peeve?

Because the creature was always defined as a fear larger than its cause, the word slid naturally into meaning any dread out of proportion to its object. Samuel Johnson’s dictionary of 1755 already records it as a false terror used to frighten children, and the modern sense of a persistent irritation grew out of that same deflating usage.