Monopod

What it is

Monopods, or skiapods, are a mythical people described in Greek and Roman writing. Each has a single large foot, set under a leg that rises from the centre of the body. The names are Greek: monopod means 'one-foot', skiapod means 'shadow-foot'. Stories placed them in India or Ethiopia and gave them great speed. In the heat they were said to lie on their backs and use the foot as shade. The same figure appears in medieval maps and in Old Norse saga, where a one-legged man is called an einfœtingr.

Where it comes from

The first surviving Greek mention is in Aristophanes' The Birds, performed in 414 BC. Pliny the Elder set down travellers' reports from India and named Ctesias's Indika, a Persian account that survives only in fragments, as an earlier source. Philostratus made Apollonius of Tyana ask the Indian sage Iarkhas whether skiapodes existed in India and Ethiopia. Augustine listed them among monstrous races and said it was uncertain whether they existed. Isidore of Seville placed them in Ethiopia, and they were drawn on the Hereford Mappa Mundi and on a map by Beatus of Liébana.

Peoples and places

Greek and Roman writers set monopods in India and Ethiopia. A separate Chinese figure, the kui (夔), appears in the Zhuangzi, where it speaks with a millipede about movement. Old Norse tradition has an einfœtingr, a one-legged man, in Eiríks saga rauða: Thorfinn Karlsefni's party meets one in North America, and Thorvald Eiriksson dies from an arrow wound. A 1427 map by Claudius Clavus marks unipedes maritimi in Greenland.

What people believe

The monopod belongs to a view of the world in which far-off places held strange peoples, and in which travellers' reports could pass into natural history. Pliny recorded such beings as facts of report. Augustine asked whether monstrous races came from Adam or from Noah's sons and left their existence open. Medieval writers kept the one-foot and shade-foot details. In the Zhuangzi, a Chinese text, the one-footed kui (夔) speaks with a millipede about movement, and the millipede answers with a spitting image: things fall in drops and mist, too many to count, moved by a heavenly mechanism.

How scholars and sceptics see it

Carl A. P. Ruck connects the Indian reports with Aja Ekapad, a Vedic title of Soma; he reads the single foot as the stalk of a plant or fungus with mind-altering properties. John of Marignolli, travelling in India in the 14th century, rejected the idea of a one-footed people. He said Indians carried a small tent-like sunshade on a cane, called a chatyr, and that poets had turned this into a foot. In 2025 Karl Brandt proposed that thresher shark remains, with a long tail fin like one huge foot, may lie behind the tale; he also recalled an old assumption of symmetry between land and sea creatures, which Pliny already accepted.

Compare and confuse

The monopod is one of several one-legged beings in myth. Old Norse tradition calls its version einfœtingr, and the Chinese kui is a separate one-footed figure in the Zhuangzi. Reference lists also place it near the fachan, the invunche, the kasa-obake, the nasnas, the patasola and the Brazilian saci. Monopod, skiapod and sciapod are variant spellings of the same Greek-derived name.

Today

The creature now lives mainly in retellings and fiction. C. S. Lewis put monopods in The Voyage of the Dawn Treader, part of The Chronicles of Narnia: the Duffers, foolish dwarves on an island near the edge of the Narnian world, have been turned into monopods by the magician Coriakin as a punishment and have made themselves invisible; Lucy Pevensie makes them visible again. Brian Sibley suggests Lewis may have used the Hereford Mappa Mundi as a model. Umberto Eco gives a sciapod named Gavagai in Baudolino and includes sciopods among the carvings in the chapter house of The Name of the Rose.

Questions people ask about Monopod

Good reading and sources

• Monopod (creature) on WikipediaEncyclopedia
• More photos on Wikimedia CommonsPhotos and video
• Wikidata recordOpen data