by Debbie Felton, with Cathy Greenhalgh
Cathy recently travelled to Nuuk and other cities of Greenland. Omnipresent in museums was the tupilaq (also spelled “tupilak”), a carved figure intended to protect its owner against enemies.
In Inuit mythology, which dates back 4,000 to 5,000 years, the tupilaq was originally conceived of as a hybrid avenging monster-spirit created by an angakkuq, an Inuit shaman. The angakkuq created the tupilaq from parts of dead animals and human corpses, including bone, skin, and hair; because of its composite nature the creature could look very different depending on what animal and what parts it was made of. The tupilaq could therefore be a creature that walked, crawled, swam, or crept along the ground. It could have the head of a seal, the body of a polar bear, human legs, and walrus tusks if you wanted it to. For the same reason, the individual tupilaq’s abilities could vary greatly. Of primary importance was that it should look grotesque and terrifying to strike fear into the shaman’s enemies.
Recurrent features of the tupilaq include dilated nostrils (possibly evocative of a predator’s sharpened senses), symmetrical lines on its face (possibly pointing back to tattoo traditions), and large eyes with black pupils. Often, the tupilaq has huge teeth, sometimes including fangs. They can have male or female characteristics (or neither).
Above: Animal-human composite tupilaqs. Photo by Cathy Greenhalgh. Greenland National Museum & Archives, Nuuk.
According to the lore, the tupilaq was brought to life by the shaman singing a spell that drew the avenging spirit into the material figure. The figure was then put out to sea so that the inhabiting spirit could seek the person whom it was supposed to destroy. Such an avenging action had its own risks, though: if the tupilaq’s victim had greater magical powers than the shaman who created it, the victim could not only repel the tupilaq but send it back to kill its originator.
When the Europeans originally came to Greenland they heard stories of the tupilaqs, but because these mysterious and powerful objects were made in secret and of perishable materials, there were none to see. So, the Inuit began to carve representations of them out of whale and walrus teeth. Today, tupilaqs are mainly artistic expressions, made of such materials as wood, stone, ivory, animal bone, and reindeer antlers, and sold as art objects and souvenirs.
Above: Grotesque humanoid tupilaqs. Photo by Cathy Greenhalgh. Greenland National Museum & Archives, Nuuk. Below: Inuit Tupilak from Greenland, 1900 or earlier, made of wood, bone, and pigment. Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York.
If you’ve read Dan Simmon’s 2007 novel The Terror or seen the 2018 AMC television series based on it, the tupilaq might sound vaguely familiar. The Terror presents a fictionalized account of Captain Sir John Franklin’s disastrous expedition with the HMS Erebus and HMS Terror to find the Northwest Passage (a sea lane between the Atlantic and Pacific oceans through the Artic Ocean) in 1845–1848. The ships become trapped in ice near King William Island west of Greenland where, in addition to dealing with mutiny and cannibalism, the crew are stalked by a mysterious Inuit beast, the Tuunbaq. In his novel, Simmons describes the creature as having a long neck and walking on two legs, while the television adaptation’s Tuunbaq resembles a monstrous human-polar bear hybrid, likely in a nod to the Arctic’s real and very terrifying predator in addition to reflecting environmental concerns as well as the effects of colonialism. The Tuunbaq seems to have been based on the tupilaq in terms of its animal-human form as well as its role in the story, taking vengance on intruders and enemies of the native peoples.
Stills from AMCs 2018 production of The Terror, showing the Tuunbaq.
For more images of Inuit tupilaqs, see Dayne Skolmen’s The Tupilak: Mystical Artifacts of Greenland’s Inuit Culture.
Debbie Felton, Professor of Classics at the University of Massachusetts Amherst, is the editor of The Oxford Handbook of Monsters in Classical Myth (2024) and the upcoming A Cultural History of Monsters in Antiquity (Bloomsbury).
Cathy Greenhalgh is an award-winning artist, film-maker (director-cinematographer), lecturer, and media anthropologist. She makes ethnographic essay documentaries and short art films for cinema and gallery spaces. After being based in London for many years, she recently relocated to Northumberland. You can find her on IMDb and Instagram.