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The qiqirn (pronounced kee-kurn), also known as the qiqion or keelut, is a dog spirit from Inuit mythology. Huge and nearly hairless, the qiqirn is greatly feared and causes convulsions in humans and dogs when they see it. Similar to the folk tradition of the Black Dog or “hellhound” of the British Isles, the qiqirn is often regarded as a sign of impending death or disaster. But unlike other ghost dogs, the qiqirn is quite timid and can be scared away by a powerful angakoq (Inuit shaman or spiritual leader). The qiqirn’s strange appearance—bald with hair only near its mouth, feet, ears, and the end of its tail—also links it to the tradition of other hairless dogs of the Americas, including the Xoloitzcuintle or “Xolo,” the Mexican hairless dog, and similar animals once revered by the Aztecs, Incas, and Mayas.
Most modern descriptions of the qiqirn trace back to the account recorded by anthropologist Franz Boas (1858–1942) during his landmark expedition to the central Arctic region of the Cumberland Sound, Davis Straight, and Baffin Island in 1883–1884. In his 1888 report, The Central Eskimo, Boas describes the qiqirn as “a phantom in the shape of a huge dog almost without hair,” except “at the mouth, the feet, and the points of the ears and the tail. If it comes near dogs or men they fall into fits and only recover when Qiqirn has left. It is exceedingly afraid of men and runs away as soon as an angakoq descries it” (Boas 1888, 597). Boas focused his collecting on tribes east of the Mackenzie River. He admitted that the folklore of western tribes was much less known, so whether the qiqirn was a widespread Inuit belief in the 1800s is difficult to confirm. Dogs were important to Inuit mythology, including a creation story that explained the different human races as the offspring of a woman who married a dog. Boas noted that this “dog-mother” story was shared by Eskimo and other tribes across the upper tier of North America and that stories from Eskimo folklore were also shared with the Chukchee peoples of northeast Siberia (Boas 1904, 1–4).
The qiqirn also fits within the folk tradition of the ghost dog or hellhound, of which the Black Dog of the British Isles is the most famous but not the only example. Ghost dogs have been reported from England to rural Kentucky, omens of impending death or signs that someone has already died or been murdered. Since ancient times, dogs have been associated with spiritual and shamanistic beliefs connected to death, often serving as guardians of the underworld. Scholars recognize that this symbolic double role of dogs—as both ancestor figures and as links to the land of the dead—is shared across many cultures from Europe, northern Asia, and North America, including Arctic peoples such as the Inuit (Laugrand and Oosten 2014, 155).
The most famous literary reference to the qiqirn was published by the English author Rudyard Kipling (1865–1936). His story “Quiquern” appeared in two magazines and then as part of his Second Jungle Book (1895). Kipling reportedly heard about the qiqirn from an explorer who visited him while the author was at Naulakha, the house he and his wife built in Dummerston, Vermont, and where they lived between 1893 and 1896 (Underwood and Radcliffe 2008). Some scholars also believe Kipling may have come across descriptions of the qiqirn in earlier Arctic journals published by English explorers such as Sir William Parry (1790–1855) and George Francis Lyon (1795–1832) or from Inuit members of Cumberland Sound whaling crews (Underwood, 2012). This may account for Kipling’s slightly different description of the beast: a toothless, six-or eight-legged hairless phantom that appears “just before things are going to happen” and “makes dogs go mad” (Kipling 1915, 220).
But caution should be used when interpreting Kipling’s account. His story is a literary tale inspired by the qiqirn rather than a variant of the original myth. In Kipling’s telling, the legend creates a sense of foreboding around the story of two Inuit children who undertake a dangerous journey to save their tribe from starvation. Their “quiquern” turns out to be two very real lost sled dogs rather than a mythological beast. The dogs, whose multiple legs and heads are entangled in one harness, appear monstrous only from a distance. Once disentangled, the dogs lead the children to a large pod of seals, and their struggling people are saved.
The qiqirn’s hairlessness also raises questions about links between the real and the imagined in myth. Nothing seems more otherworldly than a creature roaming the Far North without a protective coat of fur. Yet this striking physical description connects the qiqirn to the tradition of real hairless dogs from North and South America. Ancient breeds such as the Xoloitzcuintle, or “Xolo,” of Mexico and the Perro Sin Pello, or “Inca hairless dog” of Peru date back thousands of years and were once revered by cultures such as the Aztecs, Mayas, Toltecs, and Incas. Hairlessness in dogs is a dominant genetic trait, meaning that a dog only needs to inherit one copy of the gene from one parent for the trait to affect the dog’s appearance, something that can happen without human interference. Genetic studies suggest that some ancient hairless breeds are among the oldest dogs in the Americas and that they predate contact with later European dogs. Certain Arctic dogs, including the Inuit sled dog, the Eskimo dog, and the Greenland dog, also appear to be ancient breeds largely free of European influence (Van Asch et al. 2013, 5). Some scientists believe that all of these breeds may have emerged from the first indigenous dogs that crossed the Bering land bridge, and that some Arctic breeds may be related to pre-Columbian populations. There are no certain answers, but it is an intriguing question: somewhere in the distant past, did the ancient memory of a real hairless dog inspire the myth of the qiqirn?
One final note: in modern usage “qiqirn” has been adopted as the name of a set of characters in the multiplayer online role-playing games Final Fantasy XI and Final Fantasy XIV. While these figures share some game attributes with behavior described in the Inuit myth, they are pictured as blue-eyed rats and bear little resemblance to the creature of Inuit lore.
Leslie A. Przybylek
See also Black Dog; Dwayyo; Shunka Warak’in
Further Reading
Boas, Franz. 1888. The Central Eskimo. Washington, DC: Bureau of Ethnology. Accessed online at Project Gutenberg. http://www.gutenberg.org/files/42084/42084-h/42084-h.htm. Accessed June 2, 2015.
Boas, Franz. 1904. “The Folk-Lore of the Eskimo.” Journal of American Folklore 17 (64): 1–13.
Kipling, Rudyard. 1915. The Second Jungle Book. New York: Century.
Laugrand, Frederic, and Jarich Oosten. 2014. Hunters, Predators, and Prey: Inuit Perceptions of Animals. New York: Berghahn Books.
Rhae, Kelly, and Amy Fernandez. 1999. Hairless Dogs—The Naked Truth: The Chinese Crested, Xoloitzcuintle & Peruvian Inca Orchid. Woodinville, WA: Kelly Rhae.
Underwood, Allen. 2012. “Quiquern, Notes on the Text.” The New Readers’ Guide to the Works of Rudyard Kipling.http://www.kiplingsociety.co.uk/rg_quiquern_notes.htm. Accessed June 12, 2015.
Underwood, Allen, and John Radcliffe. 2008. “Quiquern.” The New Readers’ Guide to the Works of Rudyard Kipling.http://www.kiplingsociety.co.uk/rg_quiquern1.htm. Accessed June 12, 2015.
Van Asch, Barbara, et al. 2013. “Pre-Columbian Origins of Native American Dog Breeds, with Only Limited Replacement by European Dogs, Confirmed by mtDNA Analysis.” Proceedings of the Royal Society 280 (1766): 20131142. http://dx.doi.org/10.1098/rspb.2013.1142. Accessed May 25, 2015.