The Ogre is the man-eating giant of European fairy tale and folklore: a huge, brutish, monstrously strong and ugly humanoid creature that dwells in castles, caves, or the wild, preys upon human beings — above all relishing the flesh of children — and is overcome not by strength but by the cleverness of the hero. It is the man-eating giant, the brutish devourer of the fairy tale.
The Man-Eating Giant
The Ogre (a word popularised by the French fairy-tale tradition, perhaps from Orcus, the Roman god of the underworld and death, or from “Hungarian/Hun”) is the classic monstrous man-eater of European folklore and fairy tale — a large, hulking, hideous humanoid, often a kind of giant, with great strength, a brutish and stupid nature, a fearsome appearance (huge, ugly, sometimes with horns, tusks, or a grotesque face), and an insatiable appetite for human flesh. The female is the ogress. Ogres dwell in remote castles, dark forests, caves, and the borders of the wild, where they menace and devour the people who fall into their clutches.
The Taste for Children
The ogre’s defining trait is its cannibalism, and especially its relish for children — “Fee-fi-fo-fum, I smell the blood of an Englishman.” The fairy tales are full of ogres who capture, fatten, and devour children and travellers: the ogre of “Hop-o’-My-Thumb” (Le Petit Poucet) who means to eat the lost children but is tricked into killing his own ogre-daughters; the ogre of “Puss in Boots” who can shapeshift and is tricked by the clever cat into becoming a mouse and eaten; the giant of “Jack and the Beanstalk” (an ogre in all but name). The ogre embodies the primal childhood terror of being eaten by a monster.
The Triumph of Cleverness
And yet the ogre, for all its size and strength, is almost always undone — not by force, which no human could match, but by cleverness, trickery, and wit. The small, weak, clever hero (or heroine, or helpful animal) outsmarts the big, strong, stupid ogre: tricks it into transforming, into eating the wrong victim, into a fatal boast or bargain, or simply outwits and robs it. This is the great moral pattern of the ogre tale — intelligence triumphing over brute monstrous force — one of the most satisfying and enduring shapes of the fairy tale. From this tradition the ogre has become a stock figure of fantasy and a byword for a brutish, cruel, devouring tyrant. In the Ogre, Europe gave form to the man-eating giant — the huge, brutish, child-devouring monster of the fairy tale, overcome not by strength but by the cleverness of the hero, the brutish devourer of folklore.