So here is, as they say, a thing. You know I do frontiers, obviously, and you may also be aware that there are more essay volumes by medievalists or including medievalists on frontiers, in which there is usually no explicit comparison between cases except by the volume editors, than anyone should ever have to deal with.1 Back in 2021 I was finally making my way through one of these that had been on my reading lists since early in my doctorate, Walter Pohl’s, Ian Wood’s and Helmut Reimitz’s The Transformation of Frontiers from Late Antiquity to the Carolingians.2 I didn’t think as much of this volume as I might have hoped given the people involved, though there are a few thoughtful papers in there, but there was also one curiosity offered in passing in Ian Wood‘s own contribution that seemed like blog material.3
1700s icon of Saints Stephen and Christopher as priest and dog-headed soldier, Recklinghausen, Ikonenmuseum, Web Gallery of Art WGA23491, public domain claimed at linked site
You may be aware that there was a medieval, and indeed ancient, idea that somewhere out in the world, at the edges where the monstrous peoples live, were a race of men who had heads like dogs, the so-called Cynocephali. Unlike a lot of the so-called monstrous races, the Cynocephali got some Christian thought devoted to them because of a persistent idea that St Christopher might have been one of them, a proof that the power of the Gospel covered all the world and so on. As one of our occasional commentators, Sam Ottewill-Soulsby, knows very well since he’s written about it, this even got as far as imagining whole urban settlements of these Cynocephali, allowing Sam actually to publish a piece called "City of Dog", an achievement that perhaps even beats Rory Naismith’s "An Offa You Can’t Refuse" and other punning titles that editors with more taste might have vetoed.4 (My current other favourite of these is a piece about the eleventh-century anti-pope Clement III subtitled, "Ceci n’est pas un pape", but I digress…5) But where did this peculiar idea come from? Coming across an instance of it in his paper, Professor Wood offers a possible answer. He notes that Bruno of Querfurt, in recording the deeds of the missionary bishop Saint Adalbert, says that his mission to the (original) Prussians included him being jeered at by Cynocephali.6 Now, that’s odd, because usually the whole point of the monstrous races is that they exist beyond where you can reach, and even the civilised Cynocephali—Professor Wood follows this observation with a page and a half on the theological debate over the cultural frontier beyond which this questionably-human people might or might not live, concluding that the consensus was that they were sufficiently civilised that they must have souls and could go to Heaven—certainly don’t, Saint Christopher aside, live among normal identifiable accessible humans. You don’t just meet them among crowds of sceptical human pagans. People (other than maybe John Mandeville, professional fourteenth-century authorial fiction) don’t claim to have met monopods or similar. In this respect the dog-heads are unusual even among "monstrous" peoples. And yet, says Professor Wood, with my emphasis:7
"Bruno’s awareness of the cynocephali may not simply have been the product of an over-vivid imagination. Dog-headed beings are a recurrent feature of accounts of the southern Baltic, appearing in the eighth-century Æthicus Ister and, less exotically, in a letter of Ratramnus of Corbie to Rimbert of Hamburg-Bremen. Remarkably lifelike dogheaded masks from ninth-century Haithabu reveal that men did disguise themselves as cynocephali."
To which part of me responds, "Who says they were men, not women? We only got the masks!" but a more impulsive, less intellectual part goes, "I bet the Hedeby finds are online now, somehow." And so it transpires. This is a bit of a trip into the uncanny valley, I’m sorry, but, look at this:
Textile dog mask in the Wikinger Museum Haithabu; photo by Klaudia Karpińska, presumed covered by CC BY NC 4.0 license of site of origin (linked)
Now, there is definitely a chicken-and-egg problem here. Even in his passing discussion Professor Wood pushes talk of the cynocephali back to the beginning of the eighth century and even then placed in the more distant past, and in fact it goes back at least to the Romans since it’s in Pliny’s Natural History. One can argue that Adalbert, or even Bruno, might well have expected dogheaded persons even before they got to the Prussians, and so seen what they expected even if somebody did mask up to greet the foreigners. One might also reasonably observe that Hedeby was at the other end of the Baltic from where the Prussians hung out, and that assuming that basically everyone in what would by the nineteenth century be German-speaking lands somehow shared this obscure cultural tradition, even the non-Germanic-speaking Prussians, has some problems. But still, there is this mask: someone at some point in the ninth century in a place connected with Hedeby was probably wearing a dog-face, and this isn’t the only one that’s been found there, despite the vast odds against textile survival from medieval contexts.8
So obviously it could all be nothing; this could just be a tool for a party trick or something from some really early theatre, or whatever. Even if more solemn in purpose, which we can’t necessarily assume, it might be evidence for ceremonial practice in this one Danish town that would not necessarily prove anything about what people were doing in tenth-century Old Prussia, and the story from Bruno of Querfurt could just be a way of emphasising how far beyond the known his subject had dared to travel for the propagation of his faith and not meant to mean that Adalbert really did see dog-headed people. Perhaps it’s even that Bruno, knowing himself of such Scandinavian practices, hoped that others would not when he wrote this up as a reference to the older legends. But it could, all the same, be as Professor Wood suggests: a future martyr fooled by pagans in dress-up into thinking he’d really met the cynocephali. It’s still quite a step from there to the delicately-floated suggestion that such Baltic-area practices, necessarily for this argument much older than our first records of them, were in fact the seed of the idea that dog-headed people were among the "monstrous races".9 But one can’t blame someone for making a suggestion which, before, no-one had thought of. If I’d been assiduous enough to read Sam’s piece maybe I would also know whether anyone has taken this up or further! But until I have, this is as far as I can go. I hope it’s of interest!
1. Oh, man, so many volumes. The ones I regularly cite are Robert Bartlett & Angus MacKay (edd.), Medieval Frontier Societies (Oxford 1989); Daniel Power and Naomi Standen (edd.), Frontiers in Question: Eurasian borderlands, 700 – 1700, Themes in Focus 6 (Basingstoke 1999); Walter Pohl, Ian Wood & Helmut Reimitz (edd.), The Transformation of Frontiers from Late Antiquity to the Carolingians, The Transformation of the Roman World 10 (Leiden 2001); David Abulafia and Nora Berend (edd.), Medieval Frontiers: concepts and practices (Aldershot 2002); and Florin Curta (ed.), Borders, Barriers, and Ethnogenesis: frontiers in late Antiquity and the Middle Ages, Studies in the Early Middle Ages 12 (Turnhout 2005), just because they’re the ones I’ve read properly (and a couple of them are really good); and I’m currently adding Ulrike Matthies Green and Kirk E. Costion (edd.), Modeling cross-cultural interaction in ancient borderlands (Gainesville FL 2018), on JSTOR here, to that, which despite its title is substantially medieval or early modern in focus; but I should also be as aware of things like David Harry Miller, Jerome O. Steffen, William W. Savage & Stephen J. Thompson (edd.), The Frontier: Comparative Studies, 4 vols (Norman 1977), vols I & II, which have several medievalist pieces in; Wolfgang Haubrichs and Reinhard Schneider (edd.), Grenzen und Grenzregionen. Frontières et régions frontalières. Borders and border regions, Veröffentlichungen der Kommission für Saarländische Landesgeschichte und Volksforschung 22 (Saarbrücken 1993), online here; Dionisius A. Agius & Ian Richard Netton (edd.), Across the Mediterranean Frontiers: trade, politics and religion, 650-1450. Selected Proceedings of the International Medieval Congress, University of Leeds, 10-13 July 1995, 8-11 July 1996, International Medieval Research 1 (Turnhout 1997); Walter Pohl & Helmut Reimitz (eds), Grenze und Differenz im frühen Mittelalter, Forschungen zur Geschichte des Mittelalters 1 (Wien 2000); Emilia Jamroziak and Karen Stöber (eds), Monasteries on the Borders of Medieval Europe: Conflict and Cultural Interaction, Medieval Church Studies 28 (Turnhout 2013), DOI: 10.1484/M.MCS-EB.6.09070802050003050405030506; A. Asa Eger (ed.), The Archaeology of Medieval Islamic Frontiers: from the Mediterranean to the Caspian Sea (Louisville CO 2019); and Kieran Gleave, Howard Williams and Pauline Clarke (edd.), Public archaeologies of frontiers and borderlands (Oxford 2020), to name but the ones I already have contents for. I’m less sure about Stanton W. Green and Stephen M. Perlman (edd.), The Archaeology of Frontiers and Boundaries, Studies in Archaeology (Orlando FL 1985); Anthony Goodman and Anthony Tuck (eds), War and Border Societies in the Middle Ages (London 1992); and Benita Sampedro and Simon R. Doubleday (edd.), Border Interrogations: Questioning Spanish Frontiers, Remapping Cultural History 8 (New York City NY 2008), whose contents lists do not draw me in so much – Goodman & Tuck is actually a sexily-titled set of studies of one particular Anglo-Scottish battle, for example; I guess their publisher decided deception was the only hope! – but they do help illustrate the size of the phenomenon. Once you start including non-medievalist stuff, it’s just incredible.
2. Pohl, Wood & Reimitz, Transformation of Frontiers.
3. Ian Wood, "Missionaries and the Christian Frontier", ibid. pp. 209–218.
4. Sam Ottewill-Soulsby, ‘City of Dog’ in Journal of Urban History Vol. 47 (Cham 2021), pp. 1130–1148; Rory Naismith, "An Offa You Can’t Refuse?: Eighth-Century Mercian Titulature on Coins and in Charters" in Quaestio Insularis: Selected Proceedings of the Cambridge Colloquium in Anglo-Saxon Norse and Celtic Vol. 7 (Cambridge 2007), pp. 89–118.
5. Tommaso di Carpegna Falconieri, "Popes through the Looking Glass, or «Ceci n’est pas un pape»", edd. Umberto Longo and Lila Yawn in Reti Medievali Rivista Vol. 13 (Firenze 2012), pp. 121–136, DOI: 10.6092/1593-2214/340.
6. Wood, "Missionaries", pp. 213-214.
7. Ibid. p. 214.
8. Wood cites (ibid. p. 214 n. 36) I. Hägg, Die Textilfunde aus dem Hafen von Haithabu, Berichte über die Ausgrabungen in Haithabu 20 (Neumünster 1984), pp. 69-72.
9. I take this, at least, to be the implication of the sentence, "The cynocephali were, therefore, not simply a product of the fevered imagination of missionaries: they were constructed by alien peoples." (Wood, "Missionaries", p. 214). That must mean that Professor Wood thinks, or thought in 1998, that the idea of being a dog-headed person originated among the pagans, mustn’t it? I’d ask him when next I see him, but it wouldn’t help…
A Corner of Tenth-Century Europe 
Your scepticism on the link between masks in Haithabu and accounts of Prussian behaviour is justifiable, but it’s perhaps a more valid connection than you make out here. By the late-tenth century the Danish kingdom and its various associated whatever-you-want-to-call-Jomsvikings were certainly very present in the southern Baltic. Seeing Forkbeard was married to a Polish princess, and there’s charter evidence for people with Slavic or Baltic names in Cnut’s court in England. Haithabu was on the Baltic so it’s reasonable to expect greater influence from Baltic-speaking groups here, so it’s not an unreasonable assumption there could be shared practices along the coast of the southern Baltic sea which have left archaeological traces there.
A useful intellectual exercise might be to consider how you’d feel if the missionary story had been set amongst the Germanic-speaking inhabitants of the Trøndelag in Norway. This too was in the Danish sphere of whatever-you-want-to-call-Jomsvikings with the Jarls of Lade another prominent component of Swein’s attacks on England. Would you feel happier that there was a plausible link simply because they spoke languages with a common origin (I don’t think there would be mutual intelligibility at this point)?
I actually agree with the scepticism here, but worry slightly about the logical formation expressed, especially the comment about languages, which seems to imply an assumed cultural similarity amongst speakers of a language family. Since linguists are perfectly happy that neighbouring but unrelated languages influence each other due to interaction, it’s not a great position to assume that linguistic differences require cultural differences. I’d prefer a formulation to the same effect more based on the fact that we lack evidence for any sort of supralocal cultural practices in the Baltic area that I know of till the later eleventh century accounts of the Wendish cult centre on Rügen and Adam if Bremen’s account of Uppsala. And those might be seen as filtered through a Christian worldview.
And that’s a very long way if agreeing with you, but suggesting that there’s a point to qualify there…
Hi Allan! Yes, I suppose it’s possible that in trying to steer clear of one particular logic that sounds like "they’re all the same really aren’t they?" I’ve leant into another, more traditionally linguistic, one. I suppose if I were to defend it, or just explain my thinking – which might be better as I’m not sure it’s defensible – I would take the line that linguistic commonality is a reason to suppose cultural contact and thus might explain cultural sharing, whereas without it there isn’t that default basis for assuming links. But as you say, here there are other bases.
I’ve got a strong bias against assuming culture and language are related, especially in areas where different linguistic groups are clearly interacting and therefore there is presumably a cross-linguistic exchange of ideas, so my response here is always likely to be a shout of “don’t confuse linguistic relationship with a cultural artifact”. I suspect though that my concern is that in an era of historians (such as yourself) capable of nuanced and critical thought about evidence, there’s still a tendency to consider linguistic boundaries have significance without actually first demonstrating that this is the case in the area if study, especially because (and this is clearly far more simple than your original point) a statement that group A can’t use item B in the same way as group C due to linguistic differences tends to disregard the entire issue of people speaking more than one language. You could seek to defend the Wood hypothesis here by positing the dog masks were part of a culture linked to a southern Baltic (Sea, not language – that’s not helpful labelling for English-language scholarship) lingua Franca for example, not that I see a need to do that.
I think language is too often seen as fixed and immutable, with a tendency for historians (and historical linguists regrettably) to therefore regard it as historically determinative. Yet there’s no reason I know to assume this to be true: language was dynamic and whilst a facet of identify and the creation of polities, it’s also extremely flexible. To give an example here there is an observation of the much-missed Duncan Probert that Boniface is always assumed to be English, but that his given name Wynnfrith would work equally well as a Brittonic personal-name. Considering he was apparently born in Devon this ambiguity perhaps allows us to do more than simply assume Devon must have been conquered by West Saxons at the time of his birth; thinking about this in terms of more than one language removes one of those factoids that prop up simple narratives of political history.
I think the point this is perhaps getting toward is that to study borders effectively language has to be seen as part of the dynamic mix in the border zone and not as a pillar of stability, at least outside the rare things such as Carolingian Latin or Winchester English where it looks like an attempt to control the chaos was made. I’m now wondering why no-one has actually sought to produce any substantial work on this, or at least why I’ve never read it if they have…
All good points! I’ve no specific interest in defending or promoting the Wood argument, either; his own students are here doing it for me, apart from anything else! But I do take the general point about languages being plural in contact zones. I don’t know if it counts as "substantial" for your purposes but it is something that Gloria Anzaldúa gave typically personal voice to in her work; I would reference her Borderlands / la Frontera: the new Mestiza, 4th ed. (San Francisco CA 2012), pp. 75-86, a chapter entitled "How to Tame a Wild Tongue", where she reckoned she spoke eight languages, all varying dialects of English, Castilian or both, and that her actual home-tongue was none of them but a perpetual switching between them.
FWIW Sam suggests here (https://salutemmundo.wordpress.com/2022/04/01/louis-the-pious-and-the-cynocephalus/) that ‘dog head’ used in this sort of context is an ethnic slur (used by Notker’s Charlemagne about Godfrid of Denmark, for example) rather than anything more literal…
Ha! But that would spoil everyone’s fun (except Bruno’s)…
Jonathan, it’s not a European thing, and by whom it came there I don’t know. I once had reason to trace its origin and found it first in Egypt, the form given priests of Anubis. Then in Hellenistic and early Greco-Roman Egypt, where it appears with some appropriate attributes of Hermes, principally the caduceus. And then in Christianised transformation it is found as far as the Black Sea as (if I recall) St. George. I suspect, but really think it impossible of proof either way, that the cult had once been well known in areas of Libyan influence and the removal of a particular group from the Libyan side of Egypt to what was the eastern border of the Persian empire might explain the appearance of dog-headed men there. It’s a subject worthy of a thesis for the light it may shed on diasporas and cultural exchange, but one evocative example from France is offered by the figure of Guinefort. There’s obvious some fusion with ideas about Sirius more common in the later Hellenistic period. I don’t agree with the view of an author (his book entitled in part The Holy Dog) that the figure of Guiefort came west from India as a kind of Aesop’s fable; seems to me it went both west and east from an Egyptian model and was a genuine religious cult … but that’s another issue. I don’t see why it couldn’t have reached Haithabu. It’s well accepted, I believe, that the type of the Phoenician ship informs the later Dragon-ships of the north.
I would have to admit that I find the idea of Romans looking at statues of Anubis quite enough to explain how this idea might have got into their ethnology, and thus into almost everyone else’s for two thousand years or so. But there’s no reason that process couldn’t have begun sooner, I suppose, given the age of the statues…
There’s a nice image of the Greco-Egyptian characcter, called Herm[es]=Anubis in the wiki article.
The Roman version – an example known from Germany – usually has sea-legs. But see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hermanubis
I didn’t know about this! Thankyou.
PS – I seem to recall (sorry, I did that study some time ago) that I found an example carved on a church in what is now France. Not represented as mythical figures, but in a line of normal-looking people. I’ll look it up again if that’s of interest to you.
PPS – I should have added that the removal of those Egypto-Libyans to the border region between pre-Hellenistic Persia and India is an attested one, not speculation on my part.
Great post! (Although I am of course shocked and appalled that not every word I have ever written has been burned into your brain by faithful reading and re-reading).
I always liked to imagine the dog masks as the final culmination of a series of pranks, as people realized the missionaries were actually buying the stories of cynocephali and decided to escalate…
If you want me to memorise your work, Sam, you’ll have to slow down producing it a bit; at the moment I am reading something like four books a year and there is a queue… But while you wait you could catch up with mine :-P And as for your interpretation, I mean, the thing is it’s hard to rule out, isn’t it? They could have been sort of caught in it once Rimbert and co. tried to stay. "What? But now I’ll have to wear it whenever I go out! They’ll bury me with this silly mask on at this rate…"
Are the dogs dogs or are they wolves? I ask because of a throwaway remark by a historian. Wolverhampton, he wrote, was named after wolves but he didn’t know whether they were two-legged or four-legged variety.
That is to say, were they thieves and brigands or a pack of canines?
Said historian needed some better information! Wolverhampton is so named for Saint Wulfruna, whose name was added to the original Hamtun at some point in the tenth or eleventh century. Now, her name has "wolf" in it, same as Wulfstan, Æthelwulf ("wise wolf") and so on, but I don’t think this is a dog cult by itself. Where that leaves the bigger point, though, I don’t know. The post of Sam Ottewill-Soulsby’s which Fraser’s linked to, though not 100% serious, as well as Sam’s actual article which despite its title is, are quite good on how the cynocephali get figured both as animal and as human by different commentators. Since, these poor missionaries aside, no-one presumably ever thought they’d met one, this is more about what purpose they served in a cosmology than what they really were; but that could definitely vary between several poles, possibly including the ones you suggest.
The slight flaw with Wood’s article is that it’s not entirely clear Bruno was referring to the Prussians as cynocephali, rather than just comparing them to dogs. Tim Barnwell gives a good overview in his Leeds PhD thesis, “Missionaries and Changing Views of the Other from the Ninth to the Eleventh Centuries”, pp. 224-228 (which for some reason isn’t in the White Rose repository).
(For the record, I do think Wood has a lot of good stuff to say about the cynocephali. But he’s on much firmer ground when addressing Aethicus Ister and the correspondence of Rimbert and Ratrammnus in his other articles on the subject. Bruno seems to me a bit of a red herring.)
It’s unusual for anyone to be on firmer ground when dealing with Æthicus Ister! But I guess that’s the measure of the man… Thanks for the insight!
Always happy to talk cynocephali!