ABSTRACT
As ubiquitous inhabitants of the Weltmiirchen world, ogres, bogies, goblins and other ‘frightening figures’ are emblems of imaginative processes which generate fiction as a modality of historical experience. This chapter is concerned with dealing with two recurrent figures in world eschatology and is in its own way a plea for the intrusion here of more child-focused consideration. The ogre profile is here as finely etched as any other in the folkloric pantheon such that the sheer breadth of tales and their thematic integration eclipses all other traditions in Huli culture. Additionally, the very presence of the trickster in ogre epics compels us to accept that perhaps the intelligibility of both these figures is mutually interdependent. In privileging a child-centric viewpoint of the nature and meaning of Huli ogrology the chapter declares an avowed interest in how children experience such figures, through what ranges of cultural phenomena and with what implicit intentionalities these monsters are mimicked, invoked and reproduced.
