Here Be Demons: New Map of Folklore Reveals the Dark Heart of Europe
Wake up honey, new map of demonic Europe just dropped. If you want to sort your incubi (male sex demon) from your spiritus domestici (vaguely helpful poltergeist), your gnomes from your mermaids, now you can find out all you need to know from one map (and it’s free, too).
The map, painstakingly compiled by researchers from the Polish Academy of Sciences and published in the Journal of Maps, is catchily titled POMERANIÆ POLONICÆ ET GERMANICÆ PHÆNOMENA SUPERNATURALIA NOVA ET EMPLA DESCRIPTIO GEOGRAPHICA (A New and Extensive Geographical Description of Supernatural Phenomena in Polish and German Pomerania). It details the origins of creatures of European folklore from the heart of old Europe.
The map draws on 1,200 folk tales and accounts across some 600 locations across the historical region of Pomerania, on the modern-day border country between Germany and Poland. The sources, which come from the 19th and 20th centuries, were compiled and mapped by a team led by Włodzimierz Juśkiewicz, and you won’t catch me saying that in the video.
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The map is intended to resemble one from the Renaissance, an artistic expression as well as a factual document. The region was selected, in part, because it represented an area “steeped in historical turmoil and frequent territorial shifts.” Such disruption brought a high level of ethnic diversity alongside wild and ravaged lands regularly wiped free from human occupation, a perfect breeding ground for a broad spectrum of monstrous fairytales to emerge.
Alongside the map the researchers have categorized these creatures of folklore into twelve sections, from Devils to Mermaids to the Wild Hunt. Fans of the Witcher books and video games could well be forgiven for thinking they were looking at a map of Redania or Skellige, filled with monsters and lacking only a white-haired Henry Cavill carving his way through.
So, what can we learn from the map? Unsurprisingly monsters like to hide in unoccupied areas and near odd features of the landscape, things like large boulders which attract tall tales of giants putting them in place. Rivers are also popular, understandable given how dangerous they could be to the unwary traveller trying to ford them.
But the overall impression from the map is that its creators have made something beautiful, a fantastical history of central Europe and a marked departure from the achingly factual, quasi-military maps with which the modern world is familiar. Such documents tell us something about our past, and any traveller to these regions would do well to take a copy of this map along with them.
Original Study: https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/17445647.2024.2434015.
Header Image: The map in all its glory, but you’re really going to want to get the original and zoom in to appreciate it. Source: https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/17445647.2024.2434015.
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