Panotti

Also Known As: also Panotii, Panotioi, Phanesii, Fanesii; from Greek pan and ous, “all ears”
Region/Culture: Southern Europe
Mythos: Greek Mythology, Roman Mythology, Medieval Mythology
Primary Type/Nature: Monsters and Beasts
Mythical Attributes: Their ears are large enough to serve as clothing by day and bedding by night, leaving the rest of the body bare.
Role in Mythos: They mark the inhabited limit of the world in Greek and Roman geography, and later stand among the distant nations of medieval Christian art and cartography.
Relation to Humans: No source records a Panotius harming, helping, or even meeting anyone, and they exist entirely as a thing reported about a place nobody had been. Medieval moralists supplied the missing relationship by reading their ears as the mark of the eavesdropper and the gossip.

On a bare island somewhere past the last charted headland of the northern ocean, a body lies down in the wind and vanishes. There is no tent, no hide, no fire worth the name. The sleeper draws one ear flat along the shingle, lies down on it, and pulls the other across, and what is left on the beach looks less like a person than a heap of pale sailcloth rising and falling with the breathing. Spray comes over the rocks and beads on the outer surface. Underneath, it is warm and it is very quiet.

That is the whole biography. The Panotti, the all-ears people, are one of the smallest and most durable inventions in the western catalogue of distant peoples, and everything anyone ever claimed about them fits in a sentence: their ears are so large that they wear them.

The name is plain Greek arithmetic, pan and ous, all and ear, and it was applied by outsiders. The earliest surviving notice is not the famous one. Pomponius Mela, writing his geography of the world around the middle of the first century, set them in the northern sea near the Orkneys, sharing that scatter of islands with the Oeonae, who lived on oats and the eggs of marsh birds, and the Hippopodes, who had the feet of horses. Three islands, three peculiarities, not one story between them.

A generation later Pliny the Elder took the reader over the Ripaean mountains and along the shore of the northern ocean, past the same horse-footed islanders, and arrived at what he called the Panotiorum, the All-Ears Islands, where the natives have very large ears covering the whole of their bodies, which are otherwise left naked. The line that fixed them in every later retelling followed from that: ears big enough to serve as blankets by night. It is a detail of housekeeping rather than of horror, and it is the reason the Panotti survived while grander marvels dropped out of the record.

Nothing in the classical notices describes a face. That gap got filled in England around the year 1000, in the Old English text known as the Wonders of the East, which survives in two manuscripts, one of them the codex that also carries Beowulf. There the fan-eared people are large, with big heads and milky white bodies. Fan is exactly the word the drawings support: ribbed, broad at the top, narrowing where they meet the skull, hanging well below the waist, closer to a sail than to anything a mammal grows.

They were not born in anybody’s mythology. No community ever claimed descent from them, feared them, made offerings against them, or told a tale in which one appears. They came out of geography, and the trait itself came from much further east. Megasthenes, who actually went to India as an ambassador, reported a people called the Enotocoetae whose ears reached their feet, so that they slept inside them, and who were strong enough to pull up trees and snap bowstrings. Strabo passed the report on and made his own scepticism perfectly clear. Ctesias, working earlier from Persian hearsay, had already stocked India with long-ears and dog-heads. The rumour of enormous ears then lost its Indian address and was reassigned to the opposite rim of the world, which for a Roman meant the freezing islands north of Scythia. Centuries later, when the map filled in from the north, it drifted back east again.

Isidore of Seville carried the Plinian peoples across the collapse of the classical world into the Middle Ages, and the Etymologies circulated so widely that its monstrous nations became common knowledge. From there they climbed onto the great maps, Hereford and Ebstorf, and into the bestiaries and the illustrated copies of the Wonders. They also went into stone. On the lintel of the central portal at Sainte-Marie-Madeleine in Vezelay, in the crowded row of the world’s peoples ranged below Christ sending out the apostles, a family of Panotii stands with their ears folded down over their shoulders like closed wings, waiting their turn to be preached at.

The moralists took the obvious line. Ears of that size, they decided, were the mark of the eavesdropper and the malicious gossip, well fitted for the hearing of evil. The Vezelay carving quietly disagrees. Twelfth-century masons put the all-ears people at the edge of a scene about a message being carried to every nation on earth, and a listener built entirely out of listening is not an obstacle to that message. He is the best audience available.

The map kept moving them. Henricus Martellus placed the Panotii in southern Asia on his world map of about 1491, a detail recovered only in 2015 when multispectral imaging pulled the faded text off the parchment at Yale. The Nuremberg Chronicle gave them a woodcut portrait in 1493. Antonio Pigafetta, sailing with Magellan, wrote down a Moluccan pilot’s account of a people a foot and a half high who lived in caves, ate the pith of a tree, and had ears as long as their bodies, one to lie on and one to pull over.

Their powers are entirely domestic. They carry their shelter with them, need no loom, no tannery and no roof, and are presumably very hard to sneak up on. Their weaknesses follow just as directly. They are naked apart from the ears, unarmed in every account, and they have no weapon, no cunning and no god. The greater vulnerability is structural. A people who exist only to occupy the last island cannot survive the last island being visited, and as northern waters were charted the Panotti retreated first to southern Asia and then off the edge of the record altogether.

Nobody ever met one. What is left is a woodcut in a German chronicle, a smudge of ink at the rim of two medieval maps, and a small family carved into a French doorway with their ears over their shoulders, standing in a line of nations that begins in Jerusalem and ends wherever the sculptor decided the world stopped.

Frequently Asked Questions

What are the Panotti?

The Panotti are a legendary people of Greek and Roman geography whose ears were so large that they covered the entire body. Ancient writers described the ears as functioning like clothing during the day and like blankets at night, with the rest of the body left bare. The name comes from the Greek words for “all” and “ear.”

Where did the Panotti live?

Classical sources placed the Panotti on islands in the far northern ocean, beyond Scythia. Pomponius Mela located them near the Orkneys, alongside the oat-eating Oeonae and the horse-footed Hippopodes, and Pliny the Elder called their home the All-Ears Islands. Much later mapmakers moved them east instead, and Henricus Martellus put them in southern Asia on his world map of about 1491.

Which ancient writers described the Panotti?

Pomponius Mela recorded them first, around the middle of the first century, and Pliny the Elder described them in the Natural History a generation later. Isidore of Seville carried the account into the Middle Ages, and the Old English Wonders of the East, preserved in the Beowulf manuscript, added that they had large heads, fan-shaped ears and milky white bodies.

Are the Panotti dangerous?

No source describes the Panotti attacking, eating, or troubling anyone. They are unarmed and naked apart from their ears, and no myth records an encounter with them at all. The only hostility attached to them is interpretive, since medieval moralists treated their ears as a sign of the eavesdropper and the gossip.

Where can the Panotti be seen in medieval art?

A family of Panotii is carved on the lintel of the central portal at Sainte-Marie-Madeleine in Vezelay, among the peoples of the world beneath Christ sending out the apostles. They also appear on the Hereford and Ebstorf world maps, in the Douce bestiary, in illustrated copies of the Wonders of the East, and in a woodcut in the Nuremberg Chronicle of 1493.