Gargoyle

Also Known As: from Old French gargouille, earlier gargoule, “throat” or “water channel”; French gargouille; German Wasserspeier, “water spitter”; non-spouting relatives are called grotesques or chimeras
Region/Culture: Western Europe
Mythos: Medieval Mythology, Christian Mythology
Primary Type/Nature: Monsters and Beasts
Mythical Attributes: A stone monster fixed to the roofline of a church that swallows the rain from the gutters and spits it clear of the walls.
Role in Mythos: It is the beast on the outside of the holy building, read by turns as a guard against demons, as a picture of sin, and as evil caught in the act of being driven out.
Relation to Humans: People built gargoyles, paid for them, and from about 1220 hung them over their own heads on every great church in northern Europe, yet no medieval writer troubled to say what they were for. Passers-by mostly met them as a hard stream of cold water in the street.

Rain on a cathedral roof has to go somewhere. It runs down the lead, gathers in the stone gutters behind the parapet, finds a hole, and then travels the length of a monster. It enters at the shoulders, passes along a groove cut in the creature’s spine, and leaves by the mouth in a rope of grey water that lands a good two metres out from the foot of the wall. On a wet afternoon a big church has dozens of these going at once, and the noise in the street below is a steady clatter, like a line of men emptying buckets.

That is the whole job. A gargoyle is a drain. The word comes from the Old French for throat, the same root that gives “gargle”, and it is on record in the form gargoule by 1294. Strictly it applies only to the carvings that carry water. The stone beasts that merely sit on a ledge and glower are grotesques or chimeras, though almost nobody outside the trade keeps the two apart.

Builders had been running rain through animal mouths for a long time. Egyptian temples used lion heads for it, and Greek ones set rows of marble or terracotta lions along the cornice. The Gothic kind is younger and stranger. The usual account, which goes back to the nineteenth-century architect Eugène Viollet-le-Duc, has the first of them appear around 1220 on the west front of Laon Cathedral in northern France: a few large beasts, each made in two pieces, a lower stone with the channel and an upper one laid over it as a lid. The idea worked. By 1240 the masons of Notre-Dame in Paris were fitting them in ranks, short stubby ones at first that needed a bracket underneath, then longer and longer ones as carvers learned how far a block could reach into the air before it broke off. The early ones were animals and monsters. People joined them toward the end of the century.

What they looked like depended on the carver and the decade. Dragons were early favourites in France. Lions, dogs, goats and winged things with borrowed parts filled out the ranks, their necks strained forward and their mouths held open as wide as the stone allowed. The later Middle Ages added human figures, and with them a coarser sense of humour. Some of these clutch their throats and vomit the rainwater. Others have been turned around so that the water leaves from the opposite end. It rained on the just and the unjust, and the masons made sure it rained from somewhere memorable.

Rouen had a story to explain them. A dragon called the Gargouille once lived in the marshes of the Seine and drowned the country with the water it spewed, until the bishop Romain led it into town on a leash made of his stole and had it burned. The body went to ash. The head and neck, tempered by a lifetime of its own breath, would not catch, so the townspeople fixed them to the wall of the church. The smoke cleared, the charred head stared out over the roofs, and the next time it rained the water ran off it. It is a good story, and it runs backwards: the monster is named after the drainpipe.

Nobody at the time wrote down what the carvings meant. That is the plain fact underneath every confident explanation. The handful of medieval references are oddly casual. A German poem of about 1250 lists gargoyles among the ornaments of the throne of God. In 1277 a clerk of Arras named Rikier Amion was reprimanded for putting some on his own house without asking the bishop. The English poet John Lydgate, in the early fifteenth century, mentions them on roofs as any tourist might. A century before the first gargoyle, Bernard of Clairvaux had raged against the carved apes, lions and two-bodied beasts in monastery cloisters and asked what such things were doing in front of monks at their reading, but he was looking at column capitals indoors, and he did not get an answer either.

The best-known theory is that gargoyles frighten devils away, ugliness set to guard holiness. It is modern. It was argued in an unpublished German dissertation of 1953, and the only old document offered for it is a booklet on witches from the sixteenth century. The medieval Church, for its part, called protective images superstition and had its own approved defences in bells, holy water and prayer. Another reading makes the monsters the sins that wait outside the door. A more recent one notes that a church was exorcised when it was consecrated, and sees in the gargoyles the evil that was expelled that day, caught in mid-flight on the outside of the wall and still pouring away with the dirty water.

The most famous gargoyles in the world are neither medieval nor gargoyles. The brooding horned figures on the gallery of Notre-Dame in Paris, chin in hands above the city, were designed by Viollet-le-Duc and carved during his restoration of 1843 to 1864, in the afterglow of Victor Hugo’s novel about the cathedral. The medieval originals had weathered to stumps. The new ones carry no water. One of them, named the Stryge after an old word for a night-flying witch, became the face of the whole species through an etching by Charles Méryon. The stone creature that wakes after dark and climbs down from its perch is younger again, a product of modern fantasy fiction and film with no medieval text behind it.

A gargoyle’s strength is reach and patience. It throws water farther than a plain spout, it protects the mortar and the foundations beneath it, and it can do so for six or seven hundred years. In the eyes of those who read it as a sign, it keeps the building’s enemies on the outside, in the weather, where the congregation can look up and see them.

Its weaknesses are those of any stone held out over a street. Water wears its features to a blur. Frost splits it. Heavy ones have fallen, and the fright they caused helped along their replacement by the lead downpipe, which London made compulsory on new buildings in 1724. Restorers are the last hazard. A worn gargoyle is recarved or swapped for a fresh one, so that many “medieval” monsters are a century or two old, including a rhinoceros and a hippopotamus at Laon that no thirteenth-century mason could have known, and a figure put up at Paisley Abbey in Scotland in the 1990s that looks very like the creature from a science fiction film of 1979.

Frequently Asked Questions

What is a gargoyle?

A gargoyle is a carved stone waterspout that projects from the roof of a building, most often a medieval church. Rainwater runs along a channel in its back and out through its mouth, which throws the water clear of the walls. Gargoyles are usually carved as monsters, animals or, later, human figures.

What is the difference between a gargoyle and a grotesque?

A gargoyle carries water and a grotesque does not. Carved monsters that only decorate a building are properly called grotesques or chimeras. The famous figures on the gallery of Notre-Dame in Paris are chimeras, not gargoyles, because they do not drain water.

When were the first gargoyles made?

Animal-headed waterspouts were used on ancient Egyptian and Greek temples, usually in the form of lion heads. The first Gothic gargoyles are generally dated to about 1220 on the west front of Laon Cathedral in France. By 1240 they were being used systematically at Notre-Dame in Paris.

Do gargoyles ward off evil spirits?

No medieval text says that gargoyles ward off evil spirits. That idea was argued in a German dissertation in 1953 and has little early evidence behind it. Other readings treat gargoyles as images of sin kept outside the church, or as evil being driven out of the building like the rainwater.

Are the gargoyles of Notre-Dame medieval?

The best-known monsters of Notre-Dame in Paris are not medieval. They were designed by the architect Eugène Viollet-le-Duc and carved during the restoration of 1843 to 1864, because the medieval originals had weathered away. Notre-Dame did have true medieval gargoyles, fitted in ranks by about 1240.