The Clan of Cain: Ogres, Elves, Evil Phantoms and Giants

I recently had the opportunity on a long drive to listen to Seamus Heaney reading his own translation of Beowulf from start to finish. It was a real treat, and I highly recommend it. I had read Beowulf before in other translations, but long ago, and the words are of course meant to be spoken rather than read; it is a much more powerful experience that way, especially (and strangely) when delivered in Heaney's decidedly un-Germanic Irish brogue. 

I was very struck by the poem's syncretism (more on this in future posts) and the way in particular Germanic myth and Old Testament legend are able to fit alongside one another almost seamlessly. Hence:

Grendel was the name of this grim demon haunting the marches, marauding round the heath and the desolate fens; he had dwelt for a time in misery among the banished monsters, Cain's clan, whom the Creator had outlawed and condemned as outcasts. For the killing of Abel the Eternal Lord had exacted a price: Cain got no good from committing that murder because the Almighty made him anathema and out of the curse of his exile there sprang ogres and elves and evil phantoms and the giants too who strove with God time and again until He gave them their reward.

The idea that the creatures of Northern European myth were born from the murder of Abel by Cain is just too wonderful not to spur the imagination (as is the idea of giants literally fighting against God himself), and it would be incredible to me if no other RPG bloggers or writers have noticed it or done something with it. Nonetheless, it very much makes me want to do something with it - perhaps along the lines of the single class paladin campaign, with paladins conceptualised as warriors who specifically battle the 'clan of Cain' and protect humanity against them.

The interesting thing about the 'clan of Cain' - aside from the fact that it groups elves with the bad guys, which is always how I have thought elves work best - is the distinct division into four categories: ogres, elves, evil phantoms ('orcneas' in the original Old English, the only instance of the word appearing to our knowledge, and apparently thought by Old English scholars to be a compound of 'hell corpse') and giants. This is suggestive of four clear archetypes into which monstrous threats can be divided.

The easiest is the last: giants here are clearly meant to be genuinely huge giants capable of actually struggling with the almighty. (The Old English has 'gigantas', which speaks to me of something truly gigantic and also demigod-like, stemming as it does from an ultimately Greek source.) The vision I have is of titanic cthonic or celestial beings of immortal character and scale, rather than just a big person in the traditional D&D mode.

Another easy one is elves - understood as capricious and malevolent, or perhaps simply incapable of empathising with humanity. Not the elves of Tolkien but something more like the Aelf of The Wizard Knight who come in the night to steal babies or mislead travellers, and are of many different varieties. 

Then there are the 'evil phantoms', clearly simplest to understand as the undead, but perhaps also encompassing demonic and devilish spirits born from Hell or the Abyss (or, indeed, the dead brought back to life as demonic spirits). Here, I imagine everything from D&D-style zombies and skeletons all the way up to Lord Soth, and on the other hand the lemures, manes, pit fiends, succubi and so on that we tend to think of as 'demons' in the classical sense. It's all grouped under the orcneas category.

And finally we come to the most difficult category to define, the ogres. The original has 'eotonas', which obviously has a similar root to 'jotunn', but this conjures in the mind precisely the same kind of image as 'gigantas' - a demigodlike, supernatural figure of immense size and power. This is clearly the meaning of the word in the Eddas. Wikipedia provides us with the interesting information, however, that the word's root is the proto-Germanic word 'etunaz', which is connected with 'etanan' ('to eat'), and that from this were derived various Old Norse and Old English words connected with consumption, gluttony and greed. Could this make 'ogre' a catchall then for the type of creatures that we might traditionally think of as goblinish or orcish, and which make their living from catching and eating people? Or maybe even evil dwarves, acquisitive, avaricious and grasping - like perhaps the duergar or derro?

I like this basic idea of dividing threats into four categories, and one could even thereby subdivide paladins into four types, each specially equipped for taking on one of the monster types in particular: the giant-killer being especially difficult to kill and physically strong; the elf-killer being especially knowledgeable in/resistant to magic and charms; the phantom-killer being very good at smiting evil spirits; and the ogre-killer being very skilled in melee. This would allow some differentiation by archetype, even while maintaining the basic framework of the 'everything is paladins' motif. 

You could even call it The Clan of Cain.