Image of a woman discovering a ghoul feeding on a corpse from an 1840 edition of the Arabian Nights
26 October 2020
The word ghoul comes to English from the Arabic ghul, and its definition in both languages is pretty much the same, an evil spirit or creature that robs graves and feeds on corpses. The Arabic noun comes from a verb meaning to seize.
(I haven’t watched the TV series Witcher or read the books on which it is based, but recently while watching a teen play a video game based on those stories, I became aware that in those stories there is a creature called an alghoul that is distinct from a ghoul, or technically it is a ghoul that has been feeding on corpses for so long that it craves fresh meat and so kills its victims itself. But in Arabic the al is simply the definite article, so al-ghul is just the ghoul.)
Ghoul enters English with the first translation of the Tales of the Arabian Nights in 1721. This translation is not directly from the Arabic, but from the French one by Antoine Galland, which was published in 1704–17 and was the first European translation of the collection of stories. From this 1721 English translation:
I ran presently down to the Door, which she left half open, and follow’d her by Moon-Light, till she went into a Burying-Ground, just by our House. I got to the End of the Wall, taking Care not to be seen, and look’d over, and saw Amina with a Goule.
Your Majesty knows that Goules of both Sexes are wandring Dæmons, which generally infest old Building, from whence they rush, but by Surprize, on People that pass by, kill them, and eat their Flesh; and for want of Prey, will sometimes go in to the Night, into Burying-Grounds, and feed on the dead Bodies that have been buried there.
And as with many such words for evil spirits, ghoul developed a figurative sense as well. Here is an early example from Washington Irving’s 1824 Tales of a Traveller:
Wolfgang arrived at Paris at the breaking out of the revolution. The popular delirium at first caught his enthusiastic mind, and he was captivated by the political and philosophical theories of the day: but the scenes of blood which followed shocked his sensitive nature; disgusted him with society and the world, and made him more than ever a recluse. He shut himself up in a solitary apartment in the Pays Latin, the quarter of students. There in a gloomy street not far from the monastic walls of the Sorbonne, he pursued his favourite speculations. Sometimes he spent hours together in the great libraries of Paris, those catacombs of departed authors, rummaging among their hoards of dusty and obsolete works in quest of food for his unhealthy appetite. He was, in a manner, a literary goul, feeding in the charnel-house of decayed literature.
While this type of literary ghoul is more pathetic than frightening, Irving, of course, is well known in the horror genre for his Legend of Sleepy Hollow, a perennial Halloween favorite.
Sources:
Irving, Washington (as Geoffrey Crayon). Tales of a Traveller, vol. 1 of 2. London: John Murray, 1824, 72–73. HathiTrust Digital Archive.
Oxford English Dictionary, second edition, 1989, s.v. ghoul, n.
“The Story of Sidi Nonman.” The Arabian Nights Entertainments, vol. 10 of 10. London: W. Waylor, 1721, 123. Eighteenth Century Collections Online (ECCO).
Image credit: "Amine Discovered with the Goule," illustration for "History of Sidi Nouman" in The Arabian Nights Entertainments, Edward Forster, trans., G. Moir Bussey, ed. London: Joseph Thomas, 1840, 398–99. Google Books.