Dhegdheer
Dhegdheer, 'Long-ear', is the great ogress of Somali folktale, told of in variant versions across the Somali-speaking regions. Once a woman, she becomes through greed and cruelty a cannibal monster whose insatiable hunger falls above all on lost children and travellers; her single long ear hears the faintest footfall from afar, and her strength and speed make escape nearly impossible. In the widely told version retold by Marian A. Hassan, her depredations have turned the once-lush Hargeisa valley into a wasteland, and a grieving widow and her small son must slip through her grasp; other tellings end with the ogress finally outwitted or killed, after which rain and greenness return to the land. Somali parents still invoke her — 'watch out, or Dhegdheer will get you' — making her the archetypal cautionary figure of the oral repertoire, named alongside the tyrannical queen Arraweelo among the female characters at the core of Somali folktale collections.
Domains
- cannibalism
- wilderness
Powers
- to hear the faintest sound from far away with her long ear
- to run down her prey with more than human strength and speed
Sources
- Marian A. Hassan, Dhegdheer: A Scary Somali Folktale, illus. Betsy Bowen, Somali Bilingual Book Project (St. Paul: Minnesota Humanities Commission, 2007)
- Suzanne Lilius, 'New Collection of Somali Folktales' (review of G. L. Kapchits, comp., Faaliyihii la bilkeyday / A Soothsayer Tested: Somali Folktales, Moscow 2006), Bildhaan: An International Journal of Somali Studies (Macalester College)
- Ali Jimale Ahmed, 'The Somali Oral Tradition and the Role of Storytelling in Somalia' (St. Paul: Minnesota Humanities Center, n.d.)