Teryel

Summary

Teryel, Kabyle tteryel, is the ogress of the Amazigh tales, best known from the tales of Kabylia in the Djurdjura. She is a wild old woman who lives in the wilderness and eats people, children above all, and she has one beautiful daughter whom heroes come to seek. In Morocco she has other names, among them tamẓa.

Abdellah Bounfour describes her in the Encyclopédie berbère as the tales draw her: a horrible, wicked old woman, very hairy, with a mane rather than hair, her eyes always "sick", her large teeth always making a noise, her strong arms armed with claws, and, most emblematic of all, her two huge, heavy breasts, which she throws over her shoulders. Her voice is loud; she is cunning and sometimes dresses up to seduce, and in Kabyle tales she can take the form of a beautiful woman. She eats children, and in some regions carrion and forbidden meat such as donkey. Water deters her, and so does nursing: a child who seizes one of her breasts and suckles makes an alliance with her, and she then helps the child instead of eating it.

Dallet's dictionary of the At Mangellat dialect says that tteryel is the Kabyle ogress who attacks people and eats them; she is "the anti-woman", "the woman who stayed wild", who "represents anti-fertility". She appears in Kabyle tales more often than the male ogre, and the ogress known by her own name in Kabylia is Yemma Jida, with her daughter Yemma Nuja. He records two sayings: "the blue-eyed man has an ogress among his ancestors", and "ogress's ears" as the name of a kind of mushroom.

Among her tales is "The Prince and the Ogress", recorded by J. Rivière in the Djurdjura in 1882. A king's son rides his horse over an old woman at a spring, and she says: you have not married the ogress's daughter. He makes her tell him where the girl lives and goes there. The daughter, Loundja, receives him and says: if my mother finds you she will eat you, for she devours everyone she meets; and hides him in the pit for crushing olives. The ogress comes home and asks: Loundja, who came into the house? No one, mother: you are the ogress, I am the ogress's daughter, and we are alone. In the night they flee; the girl throws a stone into the mortar and says: "Turn, turn, mortar: a man is taking Loundja, the ogress's daughter", and the mortar turns, so that the mother thinks it is her daughter. Then she pursues them; a jujube tree and a river bar her way, and from a hill she calls to them: Loundja, if you find eagles fighting, do not part them. The prince parts them, the great eagle takes him under its wing, and he is freed only when his father feeds the eagles and strikes the seventh.

The idea the ogress turns on is a woman who eats instead of feeding. A mother nurses; the ogress eats children. A mother bears sons; the ogress bears only a daughter. A mother lives in the house; the ogress lives in the wild. But the tale leaves her two doors into the human world: her breast, which makes her a mother to the child who suckles it, and her daughter, who leaves her house by marriage for the house of people. Camille Lacoste-Dujardin, as a review of her book summarizes, reads Teryel as an independent woman without a husband who refuses to bear sons and has only one daughter, "the beautiful Nouja".

We read the name in the Arabic tongue like this, as a reading proposed on the method. The Amazigh Semitic essay says that ti- at the front of Amazigh names is a feminine marker, as in Tifinagh, and Destaing writes the name taryal, with the t and vowel that begin feminine nouns. If the t is taken as the feminine marker, r, y and l remain, the letters of rāla yarīlu: in Lane rāla is said of a child that "slavered", and riyāl and ruwāl are slaver, ruwāl being said of a beast. So Teryel on this reading is "she whose mouth waters", hungry for the flesh of the young, with great teeth that can be heard.

Linguistic Root

Dallet files the word under the root TRYL, counting the t as part of the root, gives Destaing's taryal beside it, and for the masculine refers to a different word altogether, awaɣzen, so the ogress has no masculine built from her own letters. He also records that Kabyle says lɣul for ogre and ogress, the Arabic word ghūl taken into Kabyle with its article: Arabic and Amazigh stand side by side here, the Amazigh word and the Arabic one next to it.

The Amazigh Semitic essay says that ti- in Tifinagh is a feminine marker, which is what Amazigh does in feminine nouns: they begin with t, and many also end with it, as tifrit, the diminutive of ifri, the cave. If the t of tteryel is the feminine marker, r-y-l remain, the letters of r-y-l in place with no reordering or substitution. In Lane under r-y-l: rāla, yarīlu, "he (a child) slavered", and riyāl, "slaver", without hamza; under r-w-l: ruwāl, the slaver of a beast, and mirwal, "a man having much slaver".

The weak points are that Dallet himself counts the t as radical, that the word lacks the second t that closes many feminine nouns, and that slaver is a weak sense beside "ogress": it describes her appetite, not her. Neither of the project's Amazigh essays names Teryel, so the reading is proposed on the method.

Key Mythic Narratives

The ogre's names in Morocco

Bounfour lists many names for the ogre and the ogress in Moroccan tales: bexxu, the bogeyman, tamẓa, akukku, majjəɣyul, tteriel, tergu, agṛuḍ, taɣʷzənt, tayu and zabbar. Émile Laoust translates majjəɣyul as "eater of donkeys"; Bounfour thinks him "certainly wrong" and proposes an old compound meaning "donkey's ear".

Symbolic Reading

The Amazigh essay rereading the myths reads the cave as the dwelling of spirits and ancestors, and the wilderness and desert as an environment their people keep in their stories. The ogress is a daughter of that wilderness: she lives outside the village, where there is no council and no custom, and eats what people do not eat. So the tale draws the border between the house and the wild, and makes nursing and marriage the only bridges between them.

Cross-Cultural Parallels

Diodorus of Sicily tells that in Libya, on the general Ophellas's road from Cyrene towards Carthage, at the foot of a high rock, was a cave thick with ivy in which Lamia was born, a queen of great beauty; all her children died, and envying other women their children she ordered newborns to be snatched from their mothers' arms and killed, so that her face turned to a beast's, and down to his own day her name was the most terrifying to children. He quotes Euripides: "Who does not know the name of Lamia, Libyan in race?" So the child-eating ogress was Libyan in Greek books centuries before the Amazigh tales were written down.

In Mesopotamia Lamaštu comes to a woman in childbirth and takes the infant; on amulets she has claws, and a puppy and a piglet suckle at her breasts. Teryel too has claws and breasts thrown over her shoulders; but a child who suckles Teryel's breast is protected by her, while Lamaštu's breasts nurse animals, not children.

In Japan the yamauba, the mountain woman, eats children and nurses them, and raises in the mountains the child Kintarō who became a hero: like Teryel she eats and nurses; see Yamauba.