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Bestiary of Cryptids & Legendary CreaturesA tupilak is a being made to harm an enemy in Greenlandic accounts; its name also belongs to carved figures with grotesque, imaginative bodies.
Also recorded as Tupilaq
The old couple receive meat from the hunter’s bear, but they also receive an insult. They take the food home without eating it. In Kululuk’s tale, what should have been a shared meal becomes the beginning of a danger directed at the hunter’s children. [9]
Read the manuscriptInge Kleivan’s reference article gives the Greenlandic name the meaning “one who causes harm.” It distinguishes a secretly created being sent against an enemy from the small figures carved in tooth, bone, stone or wood and sold as craft. The two uses share a name, but buying a carving is not the event described in a story about a secret attack. [1]
A tupilak’s danger need not look monstrous at first. In ethnographer William Thalbitzer’s 1914 account, the maker Mitsivarniannga describes human, bird, seal and dog forms, sometimes consisting of only part of an animal. A recognizable creature may conceal a purpose directed at one particular person. The important question is not merely what has appeared, but who has sent it. [10]
Kululuk’s account appears in the section collected by Gustav Holm and translated into Danish by Johan Petersen. Grenville Grove supplied the English translation in the 1914 collected volume. An elderly couple visiting from the south call at a settlement where a hunter has killed a bear. He openly resents their arrival. Although they receive meat, blubber and a share of the paws, they save the food rather than eat it. After the hunter’s wife loses a child, the visitors take the dead child away. Back in their own country, they make a tupilak to kill every child she bears. [9]
Another child dies, and the grieving mother travels to Kernertuarsuk. People going to a drum contest take her into their boat. Her sorrow changes their plans: six angakut, spiritual practitioners, will perform instead to comfort her. Five offer her no answer. The sixth, Akerdlegsanalik, drums until the skin beneath him moves. When he throws the drum aside, it continues moving by itself. In the darkness he tells her that it seems she has a child in her bosom. [9]
She asks the practitioners to come to Umivik and kill the tupilak. After a meal there, the performance begins again. Akerdlegsanalik discovers the creature beneath the sleeping platform, but his first attempt to stab it goes wrong: he pulls the line, the harpoon head falls off, and it escapes. The following evening, a bundle of the mother’s garments becomes a trap. The being approaches through the passage, crying first like one creature and then another. Its sounds include fox, bird, boats, bushes and seals. [9]
Once it crawls into the garments, the people pull the fastening and strike. It slips through a small hole in the outer coat, bursting holes through the layers beneath. They light the lamps, inspect the damage and sew the opening shut. In darkness they try again. This time the trapped creature bites those beating it. At last it becomes quiet, and Akerdlegsanalik holds it against his body. The woman who made it keeps putting out the lamps while the others struggle to restore the light.
These accounts belong to Greenlandic histories, with different routes into print. Kululuk’s telling is preserved in the East Greenland collection; Mitsivarniannga’s descriptions come from the Ammassalik region. The 1914 volume brings narrated encounters and collected objects into separate sections. Even within the same book, a teller’s sequence of events and an ethnographer’s description of a figure do different work. [9][10]
Greenland’s National Museum gives a public heritage account in which a tupilak can resemble an ordinary animal, combine several beings or remain invisible. Some invisible forms frighten their victims to death or steal their souls. A carved face with staring eyes therefore represents one visual possibility, not the anatomy of every presence described by the name. [2]
Thalbitzer describes three objects made by Mitsivarniannga. One represents a bird-like tupilak the maker said he had seen moving across the water near Qernertuartiwin. Another is a wooden child-like figure associated, in the collector’s account, with a dream. The third represents a being with a dog’s body, fox’s legs and a human head. Mitsivarniannga said that he and his companion Perqilaak saw it approaching shore near Angeen mountain in Sermilik. Two inflated floats dragged behind it, attached after an earlier harpooning by an unknown hunter. [10]
Scholar Magdalena Zolkos sets the collector’s descriptions beside a family history. In that account, Mitsivarniannga’s mother made the child-like being to attack him, his wife Pisêrajik and their son Kârale after a conflict over the marriage. The bird-like being was his protective response. Kârale Andreassen passed the account to his daughter Elisa Maqe, who told her teacher Ove Bak; Bak published it in 1979. Zolkos reconstructs this chain through earlier publications. [6]
Thalbitzer expected replicas. The family account, as Zolkos presents it, gives the objects powers as well as shapes. Their later institutional journey also mattered: they went first to the maritime museum at Elsinore, outside the national-museum collections covered by the Utimut return negotiations. They entered Denmark’s National Museum only in 2017. A collection label and a family’s account can therefore preserve very different histories of the same surviving figures. [6]
In curator Stine Lundberg Hansen’s essay, the tongue gives a carved face much of its character. Aron Kleist’s animal-like figure has an upward-flicking tongue inside a crooked smile. Hansen also draws attention to open nostrils, staring eyes, ribs and bodies combining several creatures. A mouth may seem about to swallow, spit something out or tease its spectator. These are decisions made within carved imagery, with room for menace and comedy in the same expression. [3]
The National Museum describes a danger that may reverse. A strong intended victim, or an unjust purpose, can turn the being against its sender. Public confession can end its existence, but exposes the maker to condemnation. Silence preserves prestige only at the risk of a violent death. In these accounts, sending harm away does not free its creator from the consequences. [2]
The grieving mother in Kululuk’s tale finds help while travelling beside the fjord. A boat intended for a public contest becomes the means of bringing her into another gathering, where grief takes precedence over entertainment. Her request then takes the practitioners to her own settlement. The attempt to stop the deaths becomes communal: people prepare the trap, pull its fastening, strike the captive and work to keep the lamps alight. [9]
The shoreline encounter reported by Mitsivarniannga has another unsettling feature. The creature drags equipment from an earlier attempt to catch it. Its floats carry evidence of an encounter whose hunter the account cannot name. It has already entered someone’s ordinary hunting world before the two companions see it crawling toward land. [10]
Laura Lentz’s account of Inuk Silis Høegh’s 2003 sculptures Kunuk and Kaali introduces a different kind of composite. Kaali’s expressive driftwood body stands on six plastic toy legs. Kunuk is a square block with two plastic feet and faded writing on its back. The pair belonged to a group of eight figures. Their Greenlandised names correspond to Knud and Karl, while their materials bring old wooden forms into contact with manufactured toys. [5]
Kunuk’s reserve is part of the joke. The block supplies little of the exaggerated face that might immediately announce a monster, yet the feet suggest that it could move. Lentz sets this apparent shyness beside Kaali’s much more demonstrative body. The difference allows each figure a personality, rather than making one an unfinished version of the other. [5]
Kululuk’s tale begins with a breach of hospitality and ends with the survival of children. The hunter’s insulting welcome does not make the babies responsible for his words. The victims draw the mother into action, and the response she receives changes from an effort to comfort her to an effort to stop the source of the deaths. The ending measures success through a birth that does not become another funeral. [9]
Sogaard distinguishes animation from autonomous desire: a being may act while remaining directed by its maker. Her paper treats this as a theoretical question, not a settled collective doctrine. [7]
Nuuk Art Museum’s Tupilappassuit exhibition of 2018–2019 placed its carvings alongside graffiti-influenced painting, graphics and a ceramic necklace. Artist and animator Maria Kreutzmann gave collection figures movement in a stop-motion film. Music podcasts and workshops extended the exhibition: younger pupils could model a being, while older students made animations. Anne-Birthe Hove, Arnannguaq Høegh, Jessie Kleemann, Kârale Andreassen and Pia Arke were among the named contributors. The exhibition’s question concerned what a tupilak could become in contemporary Greenlandic art. [4]
Pia Arke and Anders Jørgensen’s 1999 Tupilakosaurus confronts a different authority. The Lofoten festival guide describes staged documentary footage of a Danish palaeontologist examining a purported skeleton in Copenhagen, interwoven with Arke reciting tupilaq legends. Scientific presentation becomes part of the artwork’s humour and criticism of the colonial gaze. The solemn examination of an invented specimen draws attention to who gets to name an object and explain its history. [8]
Thalbitzer’s descriptions identify what Mitsivarniannga said he saw; they do not turn the collector into a witness of those earlier encounters. The difference remains visible even in a precise description of a float or a wooden face. The figure can be examined, while its reported life depends on the account attached to it. [10]
The objects survive with competing accounts attached. Their features can be compared; what they meant to Mitsivarniannga’s family cannot be settled by the collector’s word “model.” [6]
Kululuk’s complete tale and Thalbitzer’s object descriptions occupy separate parts of the 1914 volume. Zolkos follows the family history. Sogaard records Nikkooq’s account; the museum essays and exhibition texts document particular public interpretations. [9][10][6][7][3][5][4][8]
Inge Kleivan · Lex / Den Store Danske · Last changed 2021-07-14 · Danish; working English paraphrase
Definition, etymology and modern-use paragraphs
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Nunatta Katersugaasivia Allagaateqarfialu institutional authorship · Greenland National Museum and Archives · Danish; working English paraphrase
Public heritage account; appearance and reversal paragraphs
Artwork
Select a folio to enlarge it. Its caption describes the account, landscape or artistic choices behind the image.
Manuscript checked 2026-10-13. Artistic interpretations © Scott Schubr / Luminary Oddities.
Return to the Bestiary ↑When they can see clearly, the captive resembles a small child with bird’s feet in its chest and a covering of dogskin on its head. Feathers fall away under the practitioner’s breath. The redness around its mouth comes, the teller explains, from the children’s souls it has eaten. Its assembled parts are removed and heap up around it. The people carry it to the mountain above Umivik and boil it. The mother’s next child survives, as does the child born before the tupilak was made. Kululuk closes with the capture accomplished and the deaths stopped. [9]
A shorter tale reaches Sofie Sogaard’s 2024 master’s paper through an anonymous Kalaallit participant. Nikkooq, an old fisherman, trades his sculpins for meat caught by a neighbouring group of brothers. After he catches a walrus, the middle brother misses the shared meal, claiming weakness and asking for a portion later. He repeatedly returns empty-handed from hunting and begins leaving before the others wake. Nikkooq follows, finds him directing a tupilak against him and rushes at him. Startled, the brother chokes on his breath and dies. Nikkooq returns home in silence. The settlement later finds the body, stones the creature and scatters its pieces. That night something bubbles beneath Nikkooq’s pillow, keeping him awake. [7]
Historical accounts cited by the museum are represented here through its published summary.
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Stine Lundberg Hansen · Nuuk Art Museum · 2016 · English
Opening collection discussion; Aron Kleist example; The Many Languages of the Tupilak
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Nuuk Art Museum curatorial team · Nuuk Art Museum · 2018 · English
Exhibition overview, education paragraph and artists list
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Laura Lentz · Nuuk Art Museum · 2021 · English
Introduction; Kaali 2003; Kunuk 2003
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Magdalena Zolkos · University of Jyväskylä repository / European Journal of Scandinavian Studies · 2023 · Repository published-version PDF; DOI 10.1515/ejss-2023-2003 · English
Repository PDF pp. 2–13; original journal 53(1), pp. 80–98
The family history follows Zolkos’s reading of Oreskov and Bak.
Checked 2026-10-11
Sofie Sogaard · University of Chicago Knowledge repository · June 2024 · Master of Arts paper, University of Chicago · English
pp. 4 (Nikkooq), 9 (methods), 10–11 (background), 35–37 (theory).
The anonymous participant contributed the tale to online research conducted through Facebook and email.
Checked 2026-10-11
Lofoten International Art Festival curatorial/editorial team · Lofoten International Art Festival / North Norwegian Art Centre · 2017 · English and Norwegian; English entry consulted
2017 festival guide, printed p. 22 (PDF p. 13), Pia Arke & Anders Jørgensen; title spread and work list p. 60.
This description follows the festival guide, not a viewing of the film.
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Kululuk; collected by Gustav Holm, translated into Danish by Johan Petersen · Meddelelser om Grønland, vol.39; printed by Bianco Luno, Copenhagen · 1914 · English historical translation · Translated by Grenville Grove, English translation of Parts I–VI
Part V, “Legends and Tales from Angmagsalik,” no.29, pp.280–283; editor’s preface for translation credit.
The English edition preserves an account attributed to Kululuk through Holm and Petersen; its spelling is retained in the title.
Checked 2026-10-13
William Thalbitzer · Meddelelser om Grønland, vol.39; printed by Bianco Luno, Copenhagen · 1914 · English historical translation · Translated by H. M. Kyle, English translation of Part VII
Part VII, pp.642–644, complete Tupilak subsection and figure365 descriptions; editor’s preface.
The three descriptions combine the collector’s observations with encounters reported to him by Mitsivarniannga.
Checked 2026-10-13