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An ogre (feminine ogress) is a term used in myth and folk tales for a variety of brutish hominid monsters, uniformally large and unpleasant and typically cannibalistic or predatory towards normal human beings, infants and children. Ogres and similar creatures feature in mythology, folklore, and fiction around the world, appearing in many classic works of literature and fairy tales.
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Ogres vary in size depending on the depiction, ranging from moderately large and heavyset by human standards to inhuman and disproportionate giants. Common features include oversized heads and mouths, animal-like bodily hair, discoloured skin, extreme physical strength, a voracious appetite and a generally hideous appearance, odour and manner. Ogres overlap heavily with giants in mythology and may be considered a subtype thereof; they also overlap with human cannibals in fiction. The villainous giant in "Jack and the Beanstalk" and "Jack the Giant Killer" matches an ogre in description and is sometimes directly termed an ogre in variants, and other man-eating giants such as those in The BFG and the Giant Despair in The Pilgrim's Progress are highly comparable.
Further examples of famous folktales featuring ogres include Puss in Boots abd "Hop-o'-My-Thumb"; while the most famous ogres in modern fiction are the eponymous main character Shrek and his wife Fiona from the animated comedy film series of the same name. Other characters and monsters sometimes comparable to or described as ogres in trait include the titular husband in "Bluebeard", the Beast from "Beauty and the Beast", "Beowulf's" enemy Grendel, the Cyclops Polyphemus from Homer's Odyssey, the related cyclops in the tales of "Sinbad the Sailor", and the oni of Japanese folklore.
Ogre the bench
Etymology
The word ogre is of French origin, originally derived from the Etruscan god Orcus, who fed on human flesh. Its earliest attestation is in Chrétien de Troyes' late 12th-century verse romance Perceval, li contes del graal, which contains the lines:
Et s'est escrit que il ert ancore
que toz li reaumes de Logres,
qui jadis fu la terre as ogres,
ert destruite par cele lance.
"And it is written that he will come again,
to all the realms of Logres,
known as the land of ogres,
and destroy them with that lance."
The ogres in this rhyme may refer to the ogres who were, in the pseudohistorical work History of the Kings of Britain by Geoffrey of Monmouth, the inhabitants of Britain prior to human settlement. The Italian author Giambattista Basile (1575–1632) used the related Neapolitan word uerco, or in standard Italian, orco in some of his tales. This word is documented in earlier Italian works (Fazio degli Uberti, 14th century; Luigi Pulci, 15th century; Ludovico Ariosto, 15th–16th centuries) and has even older cognates with the Latin orcus and the Old English orcnēas found in Beowulf lines 112–113, which inspired J.R.R. Tolkien's Orc. All these words may derive from a shared Indo-European mythological concept (as Tolkien himself speculated, as cited by Tom Shippey, The Road to Middle-earth, 45). The Dictionary of the Academy of France alternatively states that the name is derived from the word Hongrois, which means Hungarian, as of western cultures referred to Hungarians as a kind of monstrosity. Ogre could possibly also derive from the biblical Og, last of the giants (or from the Greek river god Oiagros, father of Orpheus).
The word ogre came into wider usage in the works of Charles Perrault (1628–1703) or Marie-Catherine Jumelle de Berneville, Comtesse d' Aulnoy (1650–1705), both of whom were French authors. The first appearance of the word ogre in Perrault's work occurred in his Histoires ou Contes du temps Passé (1696). It later appeared in several of his other fairy tales, many of which were based on the Neapolitan tales of Basile. The first example of a female ogre being referred to as an ogress is found in his version of Sleeping Beauty, where it is spelled ogresse. Madame d'Aulnoy first employed the word ogre in her story L'Orangier et l'Abeille (1698), and was the first to use the word ogree to refer to the creature's offspring.