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.