I was listening to a podcast about Edgar Allen Poe in which they claim he is referred to as the Father Of the Horror Story. I assumed there were earlier horror stories (maybe?) and that got me to wondering what is considered the earliest.
For the purposes of this thread you may defend your definition of horror as you wish, but I’m referring to fiction stories concocted to scare the reader.
I’d only heard of Poe as the Father of the detective novel.
Daniel Defoe’s The Apparition of Mrs. Veal is often considered the first modern ghost story
Pretty much all the major Gothic novels precede Poe by over 50 years, and I’m sure they were written mainly to scare the reader.
Poe and ‘The Murders in the Rue morgue’ was considered the first modern detective story.
I’m sure many Native American tales were spooky stories.
Dante’s Inferno certainly has some horror-like elements.
Scary campfire stories were certainly oral tradition.
As were many of the folk tales recorded by the Grimm Brothers - the later versions that became popular kids stories were heavily sanitised.
You could make an argument for Beowulf – there’s certainly spine-tingling passages in that epic that could scare the bejeebers of listeners to bards reciting it around the central hearth in the evening.
Shakespeare wasn’t exactly un-scary.
Witches and murderous goings on.
And all those shrews.
Just passing along what the podcast reported, however this site makes that claim.
This was one of my first thoughts as well.
I think that many biblical stories could qualify as horror stories. The Book of Job and the flooding of the world come to mind. And then there is that last book about the end of times.
You could make the same case for the Odyssey, which is more than thousand years older.
My understanding is that biblical stories were presented as truth.
Ghost stories seem to be near-universal.
The ancient Greeks and Romans told stories of werewolves.
A few references to men changing into wolves are found in Ancient Greek literature and Folklore. Herodotus, in his Histories,[19] wrote that according to what the Scythians and the Greeks settled in Scythia told him, the Neuri which was a tribe to the north-east of Scythia, were all transformed into wolves once every year for several days, and then changed back to their human shape. He added that he is not convinced by the story but the locals swear to its truth.[20] This tale was also mentioned by Pomponius Mela.[21]
In the second century BC, the Greek geographer Pausanias related the story of King Lycaon of Arcadia, who was transformed into a wolf because he had sacrificed a child in the altar of Zeus Lycaeus.[22] In the version of the legend told by Ovid in his Metamorphoses,[23] when Zeus visits Lycaon disguised as a common man, Lycaon wants to test if he is really a god. To that end, he kills a Molossian hostage and serve his entrails to Zeus. Disgusted, the god turns Lycaon into a wolf. However, in other accounts of the legend, like that of Apollodorus’ Bibliotheca,[24] Zeus blasts him and his sons with thunderbolts as punishment.
Pausanias also relates the story of an Arcadian man called Damarchus of Parrhasia, who was turned into a wolf after tasting the entrails of a human child sacrificed to Zeus Lycaeus. He was restored to human form 10 years later and went on to become an Olympic champion.[25] This tale is also recounted by Pliny the Elder, who calls the man Demaenetus quoting Agriopas.[26] According to Pausanias, this was not a one-off event, but that men have been transformed into wolves during the sacrifices to Zeus Lycaeus since the time of Lycaon. If they abstain of tasting human flesh while being wolves, they would be restored to human form nine years later, but if they do not abstain they will remain wolves forever.[22]
Lykos (Λύκος) of Athens was a wolf-shaped herο, whose shrine stood by the jurycourt, and the first jurors were named after him.[27]
Pliny the Elder likewise recounts another tale of lycanthropy. Quoting Euanthes,[28] he mentions that in Arcadia, once a year a man was chosen by lot from the Anthus’ clan. The chosen man was escorted to a marsh in the area, where he hung his clothes into an oak tree, swam across the marsh and transformed into a wolf, joining a pack for nine years. If during these nine years he refrained from tasting human flesh, he returned to the same marsh, swam back and recovered his previous human form, with nine years added to his appearance.[29] Ovid also relates stories of men who roamed the woods of Arcadia in the form of wolves.[30][31]
Virgil, in his poetic work Eclogues, wrote about a man called Moeris, who used herbs and poisons picked in his native Pontus to turn himself into a wolf.[32] In prose, the Satyricon, written circa AD 60 by Gaius Petronius Arbiter, one of the characters, Niceros, tells a story at a banquet about a friend who turned into a wolf (chs. 61–62). He describes the incident as follows, “When I look for my buddy I see he’d stripped and piled his clothes by the roadside… He pees in a circle round his clothes and then, just like that, turns into a wolf!.. after he turned into a wolf he started howling and then ran off into the woods.”[33]
You beat me to it.
That list of Lycaon’s sons would come in handy for automakers and pharmaceuticals bereft of new product names
The Israelites had literature outside the official canon, that might or might not have been considered truth. Stories of demons like Lilith and Asmodeus. The Witch of Endor and Saul’s ghost might have been Gospel, but there were probably other stories of witches and ghosts that were just campfire stories.
This is one of my pet peeves. Early Jews and Christians weren’t stupid*. They were well-acquainted with myths and fables, and metaphors.
I doubt any listeners to the story of Noah believed that he sexed every living species and somehow fit them all on a single ark.
They probably viewed it as a cautionary tale, a great story. And a scary one, if the teller did a good job portraying Noah’s scoffing neighbors being washed away…
.
*That’s reserved for the right-hand fringe of religious people today…
Neither one of us were around back then, without the advantage of modern science, so we don’t know what they believed. But suppose that’s true, where is the cutoff? Did they believe in the Ark of the Covenant, the burning bush, the stone tablets from God? And what about a magical, omnipotent being who lived in the sky and created the earth in 7 days? Or Christ rising from the dead or oceans parting?
These are modern preoccupations. Nobodyt could possible read the bible as journalism until the literary genre of journalism was invented. The question of how reliable the bible is as journalism could not be asked at a time when there was no journalism.
It’s likely that pre-modern readers took bible stories as presumptively literally true unless and until they had evidence that they weren’t. But the question didn’t bother them greatly — there was no great angst about the fact that the scriptures present the world as flat (and, indeed, as having corners) when it was well-known, among educated people at any rate, that this is not so. Accepting that a story wasn’t literally true was mostly no big deal — simplistic literal truth was never the point in the first place.