Dogs

Figures that bear it

A model judged each figure against its own description, one term at a time. Is: the figure is, or is partly, this thing. Bears: it carries the thing or is marked by it. What a figure does is filed under motifs and powers. Open "why" for the sentence the judgement rests on.

• Adlet is Inuit mythology
  why

  Ten children come of the match, and their mother divides them: five are dogs, and she sets those adrift in a boat across the water, where they become the ancestors of the strangers who arrive from that direction; the other five are the Adlet, and they remain.

• Bake-danuki is Japanese folklore
  why

  In Japanese folklore, Bake-danuki are raccoon dogs with magical powers.

• Black Dog is British folklore
  why

  Unlike ordinary dogs, the Black Dog possesses an air of supernatural menace.

• Cù Sìth is Scottish folklore
  why

  It is closely related to the wider British Isles tradition of spectral black dogs, standing as a Highland cousin to figures such as the Barghest, the Gwyllgi, and Black Shuck, though the Cù Sìth is distinguished from most of that cluster by its fairy origin and its color, which is usually green rather than black.

• Cwn Annwn is Welsh folklore
  why

  Cwn Annwn — the name means hounds of Annwn, the Welsh Otherworld — are a pack of spectral hunting dogs recorded across Welsh folklore, most fully in the collections gathered from Wales in the nineteenth century.

• Garm is Norse mythology
  why

  Eddic sources describe him as blood-stained about the chest and, in one formula, as the finest of dogs — a guardian figure stationed at a threshold rather than a free-ranging monster.

• Furies bears Greek mythology
  why

  Descriptions of their appearance vary, with some sources giving them serpent hair, foul odor, and bat-like wings, or the heads of dogs, emphasizing their role as something between hunting hounds and hags, relentless once set upon a guilty target.