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And now you know! Or, you will know, once you read this post.
1) H.P. Lovecraft
Lovecraft wrote about Abominable Snowmen in 1930 in his story, "The Whisperer in Darkness".The New Annotated H.P. Lovecraft has this to say:
"Like most young men with a sense of adventure during the late 1800’s and early 1900’s, Lovecraft would have been aware of any news stories coming out of Tibet. It was a mysterious country—until 1984 visited by fewer than 2000 Europeans and North Americans, and the majority of those were among the Younghusband expedition of 1904."
For his own monstrous invention, Lovecraft borrowed the Tibetan word for Yeti: Mi-Go, aka Migyu.
That sounds a heck of a lot like Mogwai, the mysterious furry cryptids from the Gremlins movie.
Coincidence?
Incidentally, the Gremlin in the Twilight Zone film looks a lot like a Yeti.
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| Custom by Joshua Glover |
Anyway, while I'm still (barely) on the topic, Lovecraft also drew inspiration from Theosophy for his Cthulhu mythos. Read more about Theosophy and Yeti here.
2) Santa/Krampus/KLAUBAUF
Did you know? There's a Yeti chilling with Santa. Or maybe Santa has just been Yeti all along?
I've blogged about it here, here, here, here, and here, and over the course of this blog's lifetime, Krampus the Christmas Yeti has just gotten more and more well-known and mainstream.
This whole pagan thing is exactly why yeti got horns. I mean, besides the popularity of Wampa and WoW.
3) Yeti's Haircut
I discovered that Yeti got a mop top or a pointyhead hairstyle depending on the fashion of the time.- Beatlemania made the 1960s yeti depictions have mop tops.
- And the Pangboche scalp was found in 1954 and it's super pointy so yeti went pointyheaded.
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| CB Gorby from “The Ecology of the Yeti” by Thomas Kiefer, Dragon magazine No. 127, November 1987 |
4) Top Tropes
From TVTropes, there are three big tropes to be aware of:My personal favorite, however, is the one I call "You are the Yeti". It pops up all over, in the first ever comic featuring yeti in 1952, and even in a very recent video game. I have trouble finding its exact descriptive match in TVTropes, but it's basically:
Seek the beast and you shall find him... for he will be you.
This sounds a lot like an old Sherpa saying (er, no way to actually prove it's a Sherpa saying, but that's what people like to say on the Internet anyway), which goes:
"There is a Yeti in the back of everyone’s mind; only the blessed are not haunted by it."
5) Nazi Yeti-Hunting Expedition
Here's the first sentence of this article about the Nazi Yeti Hunters:"1938 was a big year for Hitler. He won Time magazine’s person of the year, invaded Czechoslovakia, doomed the world to the bloodiest conflict in human history, and also decided to hunt down the f$#%ing Abominable Snow Man."
I don't see why there isn't already a BBC dramatic series about this..,
6) Kissing Cousins
The were-bear: |
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The snowlem:
7) Wampa's Grampa
I always assumed it was Yeti, but it may have been Edgar Rice Burroughs. Read this.That makes Tarzan, Wampa's father??
"No, Wampa. Me... your father."
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8) Illustrious Titles
- The Great Woolly Anthropoid
- Dinanthropoides nivalis
- Immaterial Snow-sham
- His Holiness the Hirsute Himalayan Hominid
- Shy Shaggy Shuffling Sherpa-Shunning Shapeshifting Shaman
- The Ablobinable Smudgeman
- Icesquatch
9) Theories
Rule-of-thumb: If yeti is actually not yeti, he is a robot. And if he's not a robot, he's a smuggler, and if he's not a smuggler, he's a warrior-monk/shaman. (See the 2nd trope in # 4 above). And if he's none of the above, he's you.I suggest reading these three posts for additional theories:
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10) ¡Gracias, Enchiladas!
True story: Tex-Mex food led to Conan the Barbarian......which led to savage ape-men in fantasy stories, which led to Yetis in all video games. Read how this happens here.
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