Ogre

Also Known As: feminine ogress; Italian orco, Neapolitan uerco, Old Spanish huerco
Region/Culture: Western Europe
Mythos: French Mythology, Italian Mythology, European Mythology, Medieval Mythology
Primary Type/Nature: Monsters and Beasts
Mythical Attributes: Enormous strength and a hunger for human flesh, particularly the flesh of children, backed by a nose that can smell a hidden child through a closed room.
Role in Mythos: He is the danger waiting at the end of the forest path in European fairy tale, the householder-monster whose kitchen the lost child must survive.
Relation to Humans: He eats them, and prefers them small and tender, which makes him the standing threat of the European nursery tale rather than a being anyone worshipped or appeased. He is also, almost without exception, beaten by the smallest and least promising person in the story.

The mutton on the spit was still raw and bloody when he came through the door, and that was how he wanted it. He sat down, asked whether the wine had been drawn, and then began to sniff, turning his head to the right and to the left over the smoke and the fat. His wife told him it was the calf she had killed and skinned that afternoon. He said again that he smelled fresh meat, and looked at her in a way that ended the conversation. Then he got up and went straight to the bed.

That is the ogre at work, from Charles Perrault’s Le Petit Poucet, published in Paris in 1697, and it is about as close to a portrait as the tradition ever gets. He has no temple, no genealogy, no cult and no myth cycle of his own. He is a category rather than a character, and every ogre is more or less the same ogre: very large, very strong, unbothered by the moral weight of what he eats, and living in a good solid house a long way into the woods.

The name has travelled further than the creature. Its earliest known appearance is in Chrétien de Troyes’s Perceval, the unfinished grail romance of the late twelfth century, in a line about the kingdom of Logres, which was once the land of the ogres and which the lance would one day destroy. Then the word goes quiet for the better part of five hundred years before surfacing again in the Paris of Louis XIV, in Perrault and in the tales of the Comtesse d’Aulnoy, from where it entered English and never left. Behind the French sits Latin Orcus, the Roman god of the underworld and a plain word for death, which gave Italian orco and Old Spanish huerco, the devil. Giambattista Basile was writing his Neapolitan uerco into Lo cunto de li cunti a full lifetime before Perrault. So the lineage runs, over roughly fifteen centuries, from a god of the dead to a heavy man in a cottage with a whetstone. A rival theory ties the word to the Byzantine name for the Hungarians, on the assumption that somebody once confused them with the Huns. Nothing supports it.

What he looks like is a real gap, and it is worth being honest about. Perrault never once describes the ogre’s face. He describes his kitchen, his knife, his boots, his wife and his seven small daughters, who between them supply the only detailed anatomy in the tale: fine clear complexions from eating fresh meat, little grey eyes quite round, hooked noses, and long sharp teeth well spaced from each other. They had already taken to biting children in order to suck their blood, and their father regarded this as promise rather than a problem. The ogre himself is mostly a size and a smell.

The story that made him runs like this. Seven brothers, abandoned twice in the forest by parents who cannot feed them, come at nightfall to the only lit window for miles. The woman who opens the door tells them plainly whose house it is and lets them in anyway. The ogre finds them under the bed, decides they will keep until morning, drinks a dozen glasses more than usual and goes to sleep. The youngest brother, no bigger at birth than a thumb, gets up at midnight and swaps his brothers’ caps for the golden crowns the seven ogresses wear in bed. When their father comes groping through the dark with his knife, he feels for the caps, finds them, and cuts the throats of his own daughters. Charles Perrault filed all this under a moral about the usefulness of small children.

His powers are the powers of appetite. He is enormously strong, he never seems to sleep hungry, and his nose is the sharpest thing about him. He owns things, too, which sets him apart from the ordinary monster: in Puss in Boots the finest castle in the country is his, along with every field the king drives past on the way there, and he can turn himself into a lion when he wants to make a point. His seven-league boots carry him from mountaintop to mountaintop, over rivers as if they were streams, and they are enchanted to shrink or swell to whatever foot puts them on. The trait breeds true. The prince’s mother in Perrault’s Sleeping Beauty is of ogre stock, and while her son is away she orders her grandchildren cooked and served to her with sauce Robert, one at a time, until the cook runs out of lambs and kids and hinds to substitute.

Set against that, the record of ogres in actual combat is dismal. The Aarne-Thompson-Uther index gives an entire block of tale types, numbers 1000 to 1169, to the stupid ogre, and the classification is fair. He loses the children because he drank too much and could not tell a cap from a crown in the dark. He loses his boots because he sat down on the rock they were hiding under and fell asleep in them. In Puss in Boots he is talked into becoming a lion, then flattered into becoming a mouse, and the cat eats him off the floor. His strength is never once the deciding factor in a story that features him. He is beaten by a seven-year-old, by a cook with a lamb, by a cat with good manners, and the shape of the joke does not change across three centuries: the thing that eats people is not, in the end, very bright.

Marina Warner has read him as the shadow of the father, the counterpart to the wicked stepmother and lodged just as deep, which is a fair account of why he outlived every god he descends from. He is still working. He turns up in nursery threats, in the standing figure of the man who takes children, and in the word itself, which is now most often used of a landlord or a boss.

Frequently Asked Questions

What is an ogre?

An ogre is a large, brutish, man-eating humanoid of European folklore and fairy tale, notorious for a preference for children. Unlike most mythological beings he has no pantheon, no worship and no origin myth, and functions instead as a recurring monster-type, usually living in a well-stocked house deep in the forest.

Where does the word ogre come from?

It comes from French, and most likely from Latin Orcus, the Roman god of the underworld, which also produced Italian orco and Old Spanish huerco. The earliest known use of the word is in Chrétien de Troyes’s late twelfth-century romance Perceval, and it reached wide circulation through Charles Perrault’s Histoires ou contes du temps passé in 1697.

What does an ogre look like?

No source gives a firm description of an ogre’s face; the tradition emphasises enormous size and a monstrous appetite instead. The most detailed physical account in Perrault belongs to the ogre’s seven daughters, who have very fine complexions from eating fresh meat, small round grey eyes, hooked noses, and long sharp teeth set well apart.

How are ogres defeated in fairy tales?

Almost always by cleverness rather than force. In Le Petit Poucet the youngest of seven brothers swaps his brothers’ caps for the golden crowns worn by the ogre’s daughters, so the ogre kills his own children by mistake in the dark; in Puss in Boots the cat persuades the ogre to turn himself into a mouse and then eats him. The Aarne-Thompson-Uther index devotes tale types 1000 to 1169 to the stupid ogre.

What are seven-league boots?

They are the ogre’s boots in Le Petit Poucet, which carry the wearer from mountain to mountain and across rivers as if they were streams. They are enchanted to fit whoever puts them on, which is how a very small boy is able to steal them off the sleeping ogre’s feet and use them himself.