Keelut

Also Known As: also written keelut; frequently and wrongly equated with the Qiqirn and with the Chukchi Ke’lets
Region/Culture: North America
Mythos: Inuit Mythology
Primary Type/Nature: Monsters and Beasts
Mythical Attributes: A malevolent spirit of the earth that takes the shape of a hairless dog.
Role in Mythos: The record gives it no myth, no episode and no named encounter, only a nature and a form.
Relation to Humans: The one line that survives calls the keelut malevolent, and says nothing about what it does to anyone or how it is met. Every account of it stalking travellers borrows its detail from other beings.

The keelut enters English on page 436 of the Larousse Encyclopedia of Mythology, in a single line: a malevolent earth spirit that takes the shape of a hairless dog. That line is the root of the whole thing. The glowing eyes, the fur-tufted paws that leave no print in the snow, the slow death by disorientation, the trick of shouting the creature’s name into the dark: none of it comes with the name. All of it was fetched in from elsewhere, and the elsewhere is traceable.

Most of it belongs to the Qiqirn. Franz Boas collected that one on Baffin Island in the 1880s and set it down in *The Central Eskimo*: a phantom in the shape of a huge dog almost without hair, keeping fur only at the mouth, the feet, and the points of the ears and the tail. Men and dogs that came near it fell into fits and stayed in them until it had gone. Boas then adds the detail that makes the Qiqirn strangely sympathetic. The thing is frightened of people. It runs the moment an angakkuq catches sight of it.

Nowhere does Boas say the Qiqirn leaves no tracks. The hair on its feet is a description, not a mechanism, and the unbroken snow is a later reader’s arithmetic that has been repeated often enough to pass for folklore. What Boas does give the creature is a season. In the weeks when the new ice is still barely bound, when the loosened floes drive against one another and break up with a noise like collapsing timber, the air fills with spirits and the lamps in the snow houses burn low. The wicked qiqirn pursues the dogs, he writes, and they die of convulsions and cramps as soon as they see him.

The second half of the modern keelut comes from the far side of the Bering Strait and a different people altogether. Waldemar Bogoras recorded the ke’let of the Chukchi: evil spirits and cannibal ogres who come from underground, who live out in the empty country and call human beings little seals, and who keep small black dogs that slip into houses after dark and carry souls back to their masters. In 1987 Manfred Lurker compressed that whole shifting plural class into one figure, spelled it Ke’lets, and called it a demon of death that hunts men down accompanied by dogs. No other source describes it that way. The stalking, the pack, the death sentence: that is where they live.

Popular accounts now list keelut, Qiqirn and Ke’lets as three names for one animal. They are not. Two of those names sit in the field records of two peoples separated by an ocean and a language family, and the third sits in a French compendium of world mythology with nothing attached to it but an adjective and a silhouette.

The name does not appear in Boas at all. Not in the long account of the tornait, not among the spirits that crowd the winter dark, not in the glossary at the back of the book, where Qiqirn is duly entered as a phantom in the shape of a huge, hairless dog. Whatever the Larousse editors had in front of them, it was not the standard Baffin record.

So what the keelut actually has is a shape and a temperament. Hairless, dog-formed, of the earth, and hostile. It has no parents and no origin, no story in which it turns up and does something, no named person who met it and lived to describe the meeting, no charm or song set against it. There is no second telling to hold the first one up against. Whether the word was used in Greenland or in Alaska, and what the people who used it meant by it, the record does not say, and the accounts that answer those questions confidently are answering them about somebody else.

Its powers are the powers of the gloss and no more. It is malevolent, and it rises out of the ground, and in that country a spirit of the earth is a serious proposition, because the ground is where Sedna keeps the dead. Its weakness is the part nobody wrote down. Nothing in the record says how to see it coming, how to send it away, or what it wants in the first place. The trackless snow and the shouted name are borrowed weapons against a borrowed animal.

Frequently Asked Questions

What is the Keelut in Inuit mythology?

Keelut is a malevolent earth spirit of Inuit tradition that takes the form of a hairless dog. That description is essentially the whole of the surviving record, which appears as a single line on page 436 of the Larousse Encyclopedia of Mythology. No myth, origin story or named encounter is recorded for it.

Is the Keelut the same creature as the Qiqirn?

No. The Qiqirn is a separate being recorded by Franz Boas on Baffin Island in the 1880s and described in *The Central Eskimo* as a huge, nearly hairless dog whose presence throws people and dogs into fits. Popular sources treat Keelut, Qiqirn and the Chukchi Ke’lets as three names for one creature, but they come from different records and, in the Chukchi case, from a different people entirely.

Does the Keelut leave no tracks in the snow?

There is no source for that claim. It appears to be an inference drawn from Boas’s description of the Qiqirn, which has hair at its mouth, feet and the tips of its ears and tail. Boas never says that hair prevents the creature from leaving prints, and the detail is not attached to the keelut in the line that records it.

How do you drive off a Keelut?

Nothing in the record says. The widely repeated advice to shout the creature’s name is not attested for the keelut; the nearest thing in the sources is Boas’s note that the Qiqirn flees as soon as an angakkuq sees it. The keelut has no recorded weakness, defence or ritual against it.

Where does the name Keelut come from?

The name is recorded in the Larousse Encyclopedia of Mythology, edited by Félix Guirand, where it is glossed as a malevolent earth spirit in the shape of a hairless dog. It does not appear in Boas’s *The Central Eskimo*, which is the standard nineteenth-century record for the Baffin Island spirits it is usually grouped with.