Ijiraq

In this week's episode, we're heading up to Canada and the Arctic circle for another child-napping monster, the Ijiraq from Inuit mythology is our monster this time! How can you tell this isn't a normal guy? Why do Inuit parents tell their kids about these? Find out this week!

Transcript

INTRO:
Hello and welcome to Myth Monsters, my name is Erin and I’ll be your host for these little snack bite size podcasts on folklore and mythical monsters from around the world. 

These podcasts focus on the actual cryptids, folklore and mythic monsters from global mythology, rather than focusing on full stories of heroes and their big adventures.

I’ll also be dropping in some references that they have to recent culture and where you can see these represented in modern day content so you can learn more, and get as obsessed as I am about these absolute legends of the mythological world.

I’ve been doing a lot of travelling lately, so I’ve been able to bash out a couple of episodes on the train - however, the problem with being a mythical monsters podcaster is that when you’re writing about them on a train, the people nearby typically look at my screen and think I’m a psychopath for reading about them.

DESCRIPTION:

This week’s monster made me a victim of this, because it’s a horrible one that I had to do a lot of kidnapping and drowning research for - so let’s head on up to meet a menace of the Arctic Inuit people, the Ijiraq in this episode!

As always, I’ve looked up pronunciations so I will try my absolute best - but I might get this wrong, so if you know how to pronounce anything I don’t, please let me know kindly - I’m always happy to be corrected and educated if you’re nice about it! 

So what is an Ijiraq I hear you ask? They were typically described as shapeshifting monsters from Inuit mythology, made from shadow so they can easily escape human gaze. Any attempts to look at one face on would mean that they would vanish into the white snow, ready to appear in the edge of your sightline once again.

However, a couple of tell tale signs would give them away which were bright red, glowing eyes - which would remain red when they were shapeshifted into animals or other people. And when they appear in a human form, their eyes and mouth are sideways, so unless you’re on something or hallucinating from exposure, you would recognise one disguised as us anyway I would hope.

They don’t typically dance about in the shadows, but would take on the guise of someone and stay as them until the jig was up and they were discovered. They were able to take on the disguise of anything and anyone though, so there was no guarantee that strange looking squirrel isn’t one either. 

Their main power is their shapeshifting, they’re not known for much else other than something you would actively try and avoid, especially if you had children or were a child yourself. This is because the Ijiraq’s main MO was to kidnap and abandon children to the arctic wilderness to freeze to death. 

They would kidnap lone children from the ice and take them back to their home before they would get bored of them, and then just leave them, helpless to the raging storms of the Arctic circle - where their devastated parents would find their frigid bodies later on. Some say that the children could talk to the Ijiraq to convince them to leave them alone, and the child would follow the inukshuk back home, which are stone cairns made by the local people as waypoints and guides back to settlements.

However, aside from kidnapping children, they could also confuse the local adult population too - leaving people disorientated and lost, leading to exposure and death. However, they could also help you in your journey if they were feeling kind, so there is an element of good to them too, we believe this is from offerings, but not overtly sure on this one.

They are most likely to be seen in the Arctic, specifically in Freeman's Cove on the northern Bathurst Island in Canada where there are loads of caribou to hunt. On this island, there is an almost oasis, surrounded by volcanic mountains, but they’re also seen on Baffin Island, another northern island of Canada.

However, spiritually, the Ijirait are said to inhabit a place between two worlds. Some groups believe that some Inuit went too far north in the chase for game, and became trapped between the world of the dead and the world of the living, and became the Ijirait in turn. Some elders will avoid being around northern Inuit people, fearing they are evil Ijiraq ready to steal their kids away.

We don’t know what they eat, if they can die or if they can reproduce, however if we work on the idea that they are shadows or spirits, then we assume they do none of the above - but there’s just not much detail on that part of them I’m afraid!

ORIGIN:

Moving onto etymology, Ijirait is from the Inuit language, but of the North Baddin dialect. It literally translates into shapeshifter, and the plural version of this is Ijirait - which you may have heard me use a couple of times throughout the episode already. Unfortunately, not massively interesting for such a different monster this week, but we have what we have I suppose.

For their history, unfortunately, we don’t have very much. Due to the still tribal culture in these regions, not much gets written down and we don’t get much as outsiders to this culture and its folklore beyond the surface level stuff. 

However, what I can fill this out with is more information on the history of this folklore and mythology, as well as the history of the land behind it too. 

The northern Canadian islands, known as Nunavut, were originally inhabited over 4,500 years ago by who would become the Inuit people, the Thule and Dorset people. Then in around 1000 AD, specifically 986, Erik the Red, a Norse explorer, got swept off course when trying to get to Greenland. 

Erik the Red was not red because he was bloody by the way, if you thought the story was going that way, he was just ginger. 

He was followed by Bjarni Herjólfsson - another Norse explorer, the same year. It is semi-debated who got there first, with the history leaning more towards Bjarni. 15 years later in 1000 AD, the Norse Greenlanders came over and settled in the islands. 

In 1576, Martin Frobisher, an English sailor claimed the islands for queen and country, being Queen Elizabeth I at the time and the capital of Nunavut was renamed from Iqaluit to Frobisher Bay. The Brits then did what we did best and conquered the rest of Canada and North America, making it formally a British colony in 1867, including Nunavut.

But then in 1926, Canada was given self-governing rights and then in 1982, Canada was signed out of British rule - but decided to stay in the Commonwealth, where they still remain to this day. Nunavut though is still the least populated Canadian region, with only about 25,000 residents, and still 80% of them are Inuit.

Inuit folklore is built on word of mouth, passed through ancestral lineage and across tribes and never really passed onto outsiders or written down. If you’ve listened to any of my other Inuit mythology episodes, you’ll know that most of their monsters focus around the dangers of the icy water, sea creatures that’ll eat you or just the harsh permanent-winter weather in the Arctic circle, and the Ijiraq is no different here. 

There is a story around the Ijiraq - however, I can’t find any sources to back this up or find anything on this so called ‘infamous’ explorer in them - so you can take or leave these. 

In one story, the ‘infamous’ explorer, Cory K. Buott and his wife Enoogoo were said to be out hunting at Freeman's Cove, and Buott, despite being a renowned navigator, became completely lost. Him and his wife had been there before and they could clearly see their camp where their kids were, but he had to follow the rock line back. They blamed this temporary confusion on the influence of the Ijirait, and when they did return to their camp, they found a polar bear was circling the camp. Why they left their children ALONE, I do not know.

This also happened a year before to another hunter, in the exact same spot - although he wasn’t silly enough to leave his children on the ice on their own to be polar bear chum. 

So what do we think the Ijiraq could be outside of a cautionary tale for not running off as a child in the snow? We do actually have a potential scientific reason. There are, in these islands, many gas deposits that can pop off when the ice melts around them. They contain hydrogen-sulfide gas, which does cause hallucinations in humans in large quantities. 

Now I think this is actually quite dismissive of folklore, to say that the inhabitants were hallucinating monsters stealing their children is, at least I think, quite patronising - so I guess take this interpretation with a pinch of salt.

What I do think this could be though is a cautionary tale, told to children to keep close to their community and their family to ensure they didn’t get nabbed by an animal or slip into the water, or even just getting lost and dying from hyperthermia I guess. There are loads of these types of cautionary monsters throughout world folklore and especially Inuit folklore, so this makes sense.

For similar monsters, the big one is the Tariaksuq.They are also typically described as shapeshifting monsters from Inuit mythology, who in their usual form are half-man, half-caribou or deer, who wear long mossy robes and bone jewellery. They also kidnap kids and are often put together with the Ijiraq as a combination of monsters, or even as different variations of the same one.

There’s also the Qualupalik, who is another Inuit mythical monster who I covered a few years ago. A water based sea-creature who also snatches children from their parents and used as a cautionary tale to stay away from the icy depths to avoid such a fate.

Lastly, the Wendigo is also one that could be similar to this. The Native American monster that is also sometimes spotted in Canada, changes shape to entrap prey in the woodlands. Although these monsters don’t typically hunt children, they will take anyone who ventures into the woods and bothers them. I covered these in another episode if you’re interested - it’s one of my more popular monsters too.

CULTURAL SIGNIFICANCE: 

Now onto modern media, of course for this one, there is very little in media because it is a lesser known mythology and monster, so I’ve filled this in with shapeshifting monster bits.

For art, have a look at independent work this week because there is absolutely nothing on this one outside of this! There are some really cool D&D style pieces on deviantart and such for this one, so do check those out if you’re interested.

In movies, we have Devil In The Dark, Ghostkeeper, The Lone Ranger, Deadtime Stories, Antlers, Dark Was The Night, Don’t Say It’s Name, Maneater, The Retreat, The Last Winter, Dawn of the Beast, Wendigo, The Lost Coast Tapes, Ravenous, The Rake & Pet Sematary. 

In TV, we’ve got Charmed, Digimon, Lost Tapes, Fear Itself, The Edison Twins, Grimm, Hannibal, Mona the Vampire, The Forest Rangers, Blood Ties, Haven, Supernatural, Teen Wolf, Ducktales, The Incredible Hulk, Centaurworld, My Little Pony: Friendship is Magic, Transformers: Robots in Disguise, Wolverine and the X-Men, Legend Quest, Hulk and the Agents of SMASH, X-Files, Sleepy Hollow & Rabbit Fall.

For video games, we have ones such as Bloodborne, Gems of War, Final Fantasy, DUSK, Fallout, Diablo 2, Weird West, Brave: The Search for Spirit Dancer, Grim Dawn, Dead Space 3, Ghost Master, Hexen, West of Dead, Kona, Outward, Blood West, Shin Megami Tensei, Until Dawn, X2: Wolverine’s Revenge, AdventureQuest Worlds, The Granstream Saga, X-Men Arcade, World of Warcraft, Warcraft 3, Oh Deer, The Secret World, The Legend of Dragoon & Spooky’s Jump Scare Mansion.

My book recommendation this week is The Hidden: A Compendium of Arctic Giants, Dwarves, Gnomes, Trolls, Faeries and Other Strange Beings from Inuit Oral History by Neil Christopher for some great Inuit mythology stories that we have access to in the Western world that they’ve very kindly shared. 

DO I THINK THEY EXISTED? 

Now it’s time for, do I think they existed?

A weird one this week because it’s tempting to say yes actually. 

Do I believe this monster is physically out there grabbing people to leave for the cold to take? No, but do I believe that they’re a good bogeyman to stop stupid kids from going out into the deadly cold without their parents? Yes - most definitely, the danger is still very real and so if there's a folklore figure who dissuades them from doing that, then that’s a good thing. 

I do think the idea of a side-ways face monster that never lets you see it is pretty scary - although the technical issue of being kidnapped by something that can’t ever be looked at fully is pretty weird. Maybe once it’s got you, it doesn’t need to hide anymore and you can look at it, maybe that’s how we know they have these sideways faces - gross. 

I think this one is a really cool monster though, it definitely covers the idea of stranger danger but also that bogeyman of the Arctic figure - so this one is maybe from me in a spiritual sense I suppose.

But what do you think? Did the Ijiraq terrorise Innuit children and kidnap them for fun? Let me know on social media!

OUTRO: 

What a super interesting monster, I really love covering Inuit myths as they’re unsung and super spooky! I also really like learning more about it as I just don’t know much about that mythos, so I hope you enjoy the ride as much as I do.

Next week, we’re heading back over to barmy Britain, for a monster that’s been turned into an icon from the Harry Potter films. Get ready to shout Peskipiksi Pesternomi, or Immobulus if you actually want to get rid of the legendary Pixies next time on the show.

For now, thank you so much for listening, it’s been an absolute pleasure. If you enjoyed this podcast, please give it a rating on the service you’re listening on - I’ve got loads of social media for any questions, or suggestions on what monsters to cover next and I’d love to hear from you. The social media handles for Tiktok, YouTube and Instagram are mythmonsterspodcast, twitter is mythmonsterspod and BlueSky is mythmonsters. But all of our content can be found at mythmonsters.co.uk, and you can also find us on Goodpods, Buymeacoffee and Patreon if you want to help me fund the podcast too.

Come join the fun though and share this with your pals, they might love me as much as you do.

But for now, stay spooky and I’ll see you later babes.