The Monstrefact: The Bog Octopus

Published May 4, 2022, 10:01 AM

In this episode of STBYM’s The Monstrefact, Robert discusses tentacled lurkers in the bog from the worlds of gaming, fantasy literature and industrial music…

Welcome to Stuff to Blow Your Mind, a production of My Heart Radio. Hi, my name is Robert Lamb and this is the Monster Fact, a short form series from Stuff to Blow Your Mind, focusing in on mythical creatures, ideas, and monsters in time. If you listen to enough nineties industrial dance music, you'll come across an interesting track by the German group by God twenty with vocals by Front to forty two's Jean Luc Demayer. It's titled The Bog, and within this infectious swamp of synth and drum machine beats, the vocalist narrates a tale of a hunter pursuing ducks at the edge of the fin quote no presence of foul. The Finn is a desert, said a man of poise with drawing voice. The grounds are alive and the wind has dropped. The thin in is awakened and follows the steps. Here we're told something is watching the hunter, and the final stretch of the song details the tentacled horrors ravenous thoughts as it drags the man down into the Bog. The music video is also worth looking up. There aren't really any tentacled monsters in it. Per se, but you do get to see two brain guy looking men in robes, ringing bells and sort of dancing about. I've long wondered about this horror about though, where did it come from? What inspired it? I haven't found anything in artist interviews to suggest a definite direction here. While it might well just be pure creative invention on by God twenties part, perhaps inspired by weird tales and haunting rural environments, I've also considered one I think strong possibility. So The Song of the Bog came out in a few years earlier, in six the first edition of games Workshops Warhammer Fantasy role Play came out, featuring a creature profile for something called a bog octopus, described as you guessed it, a large octopus that lives in a bog quote. These creatures live in the cold and forbidding marshes and bogs of the Old World. Their entire lives are spent squelching, menacingly around and stinking mud and quagmires, surfacing occasionally to drag down and eat some passing creature. Living in such a dense medium, they are incredibly strong, and once caught by a tentacle, it is very hard for all but the strongest creatures to escape, so could at least one of the three members in by God twenty have been a role playing fan. The creatures profile even includes special rules for dragging key creatures into the bog with its tentacles, and while the monster doesn't seem to have remained a standard in the Warhammer universe, I can imagine how inspiring this passage in mind have been. Now in the natural world, bogs are full of biodiversity, but they are ultimately freshwater wetlands, and the fact is that no freshwater octopuses or freshwater cephalopods in general, are known to exist. What's more, they likely never did exist either. A cephalopod expert and author Mark Norman points out in a interview with Australia's ABC Science, cephalopods likely never developed a sodium pump to allow for osmotic change in freshwater environments, and even if they had, they would have likely lost the ability due to the tight economics of evolution. The cephalopod body is finely tuned for survival in the marine environment. Of course, this hasn't stopped crypto enthusiasts from reporting freshwater octopuses from time to time, and it shouldn't stop us from enjoying some purely fictional fantasy horror action as well. After are all. Even The Lord of the Rings features an encounter with a fresh water tentacled horror. The Watcher in the water quote out from the water, a long, sinuous tentacle had crawled. It was pale, green and luminous and wet. Its fingered end had hold of Froto's foot and was dragging him into the water. Maybe not quite a bog octopus, but close enough. Tune in for additional episodes of The Monster Fact each week. As always, you can email us at contact and Stuff to Blow your Mind dot com. Stuff to Blow Your Mind is production of I Heart Radio. For more podcasts my heart Radio, visit the i heart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.

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