Status Updates From The Little Encyclopedia of ...

Are you...serious? ALMOST THE ENTIRETY OF THE WORKS CITED PAGE IS COMPOSED OF WIKI LINKS! WTAF?!?!?!?!?!?!??!?!? Instant 1 star.

So, the author believes in Bigfoot and thinks it could be a whole species? Well, that makes two of us, but I'm of the opinion that it could be an evolved Homo erectus that has spread through Asia, Australia, North America, and South America. How else do you account for the long history of human-like creatures living in the forest but exhibiting signs of human-like intelligence?

Seriously? Yggdrasil is the final entry? I'm sure if you look hard enough, there are creatures in folklore who live in forests with Y and Z.

So, the author looked up the origin of the word "Yggdrasil" but not "troll"? Lazy.

Really? Werewolves barely get an entry? Come on!

This wakwak tree sounds similar to an idea I had in my homebrew DnD world.

"The folklore of the Cherokee Nation features another woman who metamorphosed into the Wampus Cat after she spied on a sacred ritual by hiding under a mountain lion's pelt. As a result, she forever lives deep in densely wooded areas, possessing a bone-chilling scream that strikes fear into the hearts of anyone who hears it." I mean, that's just the usual sounds a mountain lion makes.

I've seen the wampus cat in DnD 3rd party material, but I did not know it came from Native American tribal folklore.

Interesting. I did not know that Turkish mythology had its own version of Yggdrasil called "Ulukayin."

I like how the entry for trolls indicates the gradual changes of how they are depicted and regaled in stories over time. It also shows that the writer did not do research into the word "troll," which comes from "trøll," which is Norse for magic or magician.

"Amid the forests of Minnesota and Wisconin, there is said to dwell a doglike creature of short stature, with cat eyes and a curious habit of walking backward. Rarely seen but occasionally heard, this being of lumberjack lore gets its name from the steam that emerges from its snout and the high-pitched whistle it makes, not unlike, well, a teakettle." This is the shortest entry I've seen on a creature I've never hear

So, we have an entry of a Maori god, but it's not Maui. I guess this shows that this book came before the Disney movie because everyone now knows Maui.

"In West African folklore, the sasabonsam is a vampirish creature who lives in forest trees. It is said to have long legs and feet and the ability to dangle its legs out of tree branches and snatch its victims from above." I love how different cultures have different versions of the vampire and incorporate the environment that they come from.

Okay, the Rusalka sound interesting. I want to read some stories about them. They are essentially mermaid-ghost-naiads. They used to be women who had died near a body of water, only for their spirit to haunt that water and drown others who approach...by tickling?

So, we have a couple of pages and a picture dedicated to pixies. Well, at least that's something.

There's all sorts of tourist spots dedicated to Paul Bunyan up in Minnesota. I think I even had a coloring book that detailed his legend and there was even a Disney cartoon about him.

Papa Bois just sounds like a Caribbean version of Pan or of fauns that was brought over by Europeans.

So, the owl gets a ton of pages and different examples from various cultures, but not the Northern Cardinal? I really don't like the inconsistent nature of this book.
I will say, the Lepidopteran Owl almost sounds like Mothra with the butterfly wings.

So, the King of Fairies, Oberon, gets a couple of pages but not fairies themselves? That's whack.

Can you give me a bit more of a reason why the "Northern Cardinal" is in this book?

Okay, I had thought that the loup-garou was just the French version of a werewolf, not a skinwalker. How much of this information is true?

There was a recent news article of an Irish town redesigning a new roadway because it would've gone through a hill known to house Leprechauns.

Interesting. I did not know that multi-tailed foxes were not solely indigenous to Japanese folklore; The huli jing are Chinese and the kumiho are Korean.

The Jersey Devil is a funny one. It's weird how these North American folktales and cryptids have a very brief moment of their stories rising, and then within a century or two, they are gone.

I wish there was a picture of a huldra/hulder in this book. Sounds like an evil dryad.

"Some cultures believe that hellhounds eat corpses, and other cultures believe hellhounds can shoot fire out of their mouths." That's a feature in the DnD statblock.

"One look into its devilish eyes will erase your memory of ever having seen [the glawackus]." So, how did people think it existed in the first place? It's even blind, so why does it have eyes?! The lore of this creature is so contradictory that I'm not even going to consider homebrewing it.

And then we jump straight to faun. No fairies!

We get ents but no elves? That's some serious BS.

How come dryads had four pages dedicated to them and not dragons or elves or fairies?