Welcome to The Ancient Monsters Blog!
What are we all about? Basically, we’re here to discuss any aspect of monsters and monstrosity from the ancient world—from anywhere around the globe, starting with the earliest mentions of monsters and continuing down through history into at least the first millennium CE, and sometimes even beyond.
Isn’t that a bizarrely broad chronological range, you might ask? Because we’ll be looking at monsters around the world, “ancient” will have different meanings depending on where we are. Sure, if we’re looking at, say, ancient Greece and Rome, we might see the fall of the Roman Empire in 476 CE as a cut-off date for “antiquity.” But if we’re looking at Mesoamerica, we might want to look all the way up to the sixteenth century, when the Spanish arrived and started their conquest and colonization of Mesoamerican peoples like the Aztec.
And, wait—what do we mean by “monsters”? Well, that’s going to be one of the main threads running through all our discussions! Not all cultures have the same conception of “monster.”
You can find many other blogs, podcasts, radio shows, and the like devoted to monsters. One of our personal favorites is Josh Woods’s The Monster Professor. We’ll be recommending many others as we go along. But The Ancient Monsters Blog is, as far as we know, the first one to focus mainly on monsters from antiquity and how they still capture our imaginations. We’ll be looking at these creatures in their earliest literary and artistic contexts as well as discussing the traditions and modern receptions of these ancient monsters, including their appearances in cinema, fanfiction, science, and more.
Many of our posts will take the form of interviews with monster experts from around the world. Some of them specialize in individual monsters, such as the Greek Scylla and Charybdis, first mentioned in Homer’s Odyssey. Others specialize in the monsters of specific regions, such as Thailand or Norway. Our goal is to help you appreciate the vast influence all these creatures have had over the millennia, and to understand why they still resonate with us today.
We publish bimonthly (on the 1st and 15th of each month) and are always seeking new content. Please contact felton@umass.edu if you might be interested in providing your take on an ancient monster from anywhere around the world.
This blog has been made possible in part by a grant from the UMass Amherst Public Engagement Project.