Image from British Library Or. 2926 (1830-1833 CE), Shabrangnāmeh (“Book of the Night-Colored One”), anonymous poem interpolated into a manuscript of the Shāhnāmeh (“Book of Kings”) of Abolqāsem Ferdowsi (1010 CE).
As I research premodern narratives about monstrous and supernatural beings, I’ve become interested in how these entities shape collective and individual identity. Authors across the language traditions I work in--primarily Persian, Arabic, Welsh, Old French, and Middle English--regularly connect the origins of heroes, nations, and institutions to encounters with legendary creatures. Especially important in these contexts are the entities I call “parahumans,” the broad range of fantastical entities that resemble humans in appearance and/or behavior while remaining ontologically distinct from them--whether through their use of magic, their altered relationship to time, their hybrid appearances, or other traits. In the Shāhnāmeh of Ferdowsi, the history of Iran is punctuated by conflicts with the div, otherworldly “demons,” and azhdahā, chimeric “snake-men.” At the same time, many of the epic’s champions descend from unions between the human and parahuman, which implants its irreducible alterity at the heart of society.
In their interpretations of premodern texts, 19th- and 20th-century medievalists regularly read parahumans through the lenses of colonial ideology and scientific racism. Fairies, giants, and trolls were understood as coded symbols for primordial indigenes overcome by technologically advanced invaders. Through its long afterlife in modern fiction and the popular imagination, this racialization of the parahuman has influenced understandings of both ancient sources and modern identities. Over the next few years, I hope to gain a better understanding of the roles that medieval parahumans have played in constructing identity, both in the past and in our own era.