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The Brown Man

108 statements
20 feature instances
2 referencing feature instances

The Brown Man	type	TVTItem
The Brown Man	label	The Brown Man
The Brown Man	page	TheBrownMan
The Brown Man	comment	"The Brown Man" is a short story by Gerald Griffin included in his 1827 ghost story collection Holland-Tide; or Munster Popular Tales, published at the latest in February. It is a take on ATU 363, The Corpse-Eater, of the Aarne-Thompson-Uther index, but with elements that suggest influence from "Little Red Riding Hood" and "The Story of Sidi Nouman" too. Reception of Holland-Tide was favorable, but "The Brown Man" was the controversial entry, being deemed juvenile and excessive. The framing device of Holland-Tide is that, in celebration of the first day of Hallowtide, the people of a town in the west of Munster, Ireland have gathered at a mansion and inevitably, at one point they sit down to tell one another ghost stories.In the west of Munster, Nora Guare and her mother are out of money and nearly food when a man with brown aspects, dressed in brown, accompanied by a brown horse and a brown dog, shows up and pays the mother well for the right to marry Nora. The alternative being starvation, all is agreed to and the Brown Man takes Nora with him to Mangerton Mountain near Mucruss Abbey. As it turns out, Nora's groom lives miserably himself with hardly any shelter, comfort, or food. The first night, Nora also discovers the Brown Man and his animals leave for about an hour after midnight when they think she's asleep. The second night goes by the same and the third night Nora investigates. She follows her husband to the abbey's churchyard and finds him, his horse, and his dog conversing and dining on a recently buried body. Nora's own shadow rises up to flee and Nora follows suit. The next morning, she asks the Brown Man to visit her mother, but he counter-offers to fetch the old woman to visit them instead. Having his suspicion that Nora saw him at the churchyard, he disguises himself as her mother to lure her into confessing. Nora falls for it and is given a few seconds to realize her error before the Brown Man stabs her with his fingers and lets her bleed out. She's his, his horse's, and his dog's meal that night.A French adaptation that does not credit Griffin was submitted by Alphonse René le Mire de Normandy for inclusion in Revue de Rouen et de la Normandie Volume II, which covers submissions from July 10th to December 10th of 1833. The translation is titled "Goule" or "Goule, conte fantastique", which reflects France's particular interest in the ghoul as horror staple. "Goule" is largely the same story as "The Brown Man", but it draws out the gothic elements with more environmental detail, more sympathy towards Nora and her mother, removal of the scene that prepares the audience for the Brown Man's deceit, and removal of all confirmation that the animals can talk. Between 1833 and 1857, "Goule" travelled southwards to the Pyrenees and became incorporated in the folk tale "Le Château du Vampire" as included by Ernest de Garay in Les Légendes des Pyrénées.Holland-Tide was purported to contain stories based on folklore, but while Muckross Abbey today is said to be haunted by the Brown Man, such assertions don't appear to precede Griffin's book. This leaves the origin of the Brown Man and what he represents up for debate. He and his animals may be some type of natural fae, because several of those are associated with the color brown, but none fit the Brown Man's description beyond that. Given the setting of an abbey, it is also possible that there was a legend of a man in brown haunting the churchyard before 1827 and this was the ghost of a monk in his brown habit. It is also possible that the Brown Man, as a predatory maybe-man-of-means, serves an allegorical function. In the 19th century, Ireland was dominated by England and the Irish-speaking Brown Man may be meant as a critique of that domination in general, without taking risks on the sales of Holland-Tide in England.
The Brown Man	fetched	2023-10-09T12:15:01Z
The Brown Man	parsed	2023-10-09T12:15:01Z
The Brown Man	isPartOf	DBTropes
The Brown Man / int_1f14978d	type	Talking Animal
The Brown Man / int_1f14978d	comment	Talking Animal: The Brown Man's brown horse and brown dog are intelligent and can talk. This is first hinted at when Nora cannot tell whether their joined noises are snorting, barking, or laughing. The second time she hears someone talk to her husband at the window, but can't see who it could be. It is after this happens that she follows her husband outside up to the Mucruss cemetery and sees him dining on a corpse with the horse and dog, all acting very humanlike and conversing, although Nora is too far away to overhear them.
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The Brown Man / int_2e8441c9	type	The Bad Guy Wins
The Brown Man / int_2e8441c9	comment	The Bad Guy Wins: To keep his secrets safe, the Brown Man kills Nora and uses her remains for a meal to feed himself, his horse, and his dog. No one will ever know what happened to Nora, no one will stop the trio from plundering the Mucruss Abbey's cemetery for corpse meat, and it is likely Nora wasn't the first nor will be the last.
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The Brown Man / int_2fcf9bbc	type	Gratuitous Foreign Language
The Brown Man / int_2fcf9bbc	comment	Gratuitous Foreign Language: Like all of Holland-Tide, on rare occasion, characters in "The Brown Man" use Irish words for no particular reason amidst their otherwise English dialogue. For instance, the Brown Man refers to his horse as "ma-coppuleen" ("mo capaillín", "my little horse") once and "horse" is used throughout the rest to the text. And it's not a term of endearment either because barely a sentence later he equally addresses his dog with the English "my little dog".
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The Brown Man / int_48d9e12d	type	Funetik Aksent
The Brown Man / int_48d9e12d	comment	Funetik Aksent: Like all of Holland-Tide, "The Brown Man" contains a sprinkling of phonetically written words to remind the reader that these characters are Irish, but not so much that it affects the reading speed. For instance, one of the first lines spoken is: "Ax my mother fusht, if you plaise, sir."
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The Brown Man / int_853e5786	type	Repeated for Emphasis
The Brown Man / int_853e5786	comment	Repeated for Emphasis: "The Brown Man" has at various points a fairytale-like quality to it. Such is the case with its opening line that poetically emphasizes the isolated nature of the setting: "In a lonely cabin, in a lonely glen, on the shores of a lonely lough, in one of the most lonesome districts of west Munster, lived a lone woman named Guare."
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The Brown Man / int_859ec5d8	type	The Fair Folk
The Brown Man / int_859ec5d8	comment	The Fair Folk: The Brown Man is most likely some sort of fae, but whether he is a natural one or qualifies as fae because he is a member of the undead is unclear. His trait of note is his all-brown appearance. His hair is brown, his eyes are brown, his clothes and accessories are brown, his horse is brown, and his dog is brown. The latter two animals are more likely to be natural fae, because they are intelligent and can talk. The three form a group that sneak out at night to eat corpse flesh at the cemetery and hunt for food whenever that's the better option.
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The Brown Man / int_85b1e741	type	Creepy Crossdresser
The Brown Man / int_85b1e741	comment	Creepy Crossdresser: As per the usuals of the ATU 363 tales, the Brown Man disguises himself as Nora's mother to draw a confession from her that she saw him eat a corpse. Despite that some of his behavior unsettles her, Nora's happiness of having her mother with her makes her fall for the disguise long enough for the Brown Man to hear all and kill her for his next meal.
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The Brown Man / int_96144372	type	Aristocrats Are Evil
The Brown Man / int_96144372	comment	Aristocrats Are Evil: Very little is shared about the Brown Man, but at least when he is introduced to the reader and the Guare Family, he comes across as holding a good station in life. The image of proper gentry, he rides a horse and has a dog to obey him. He pays Nora's mother a purse of gold — two, even, in "Goule" — and promises he'll give Nora the life of a lady with servants and fineries. The promises are a deception: his home is barely fit to live in, but he also doesn't come across as human enough to need more himself, so it's Nora's problem only. He makes her life miserable, and that's aside from the little matter that he digs up corpses to feed on and that he may or may not have married Nora solely to eat her.
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The Brown Man / int_ad62678e	type	Living Shadow
The Brown Man / int_ad62678e	comment	Living Shadow: In a scene that borders on absurdity and is not explained, when Nora witnesses her husband and his animal sidekicks eat a human corpse, she makes sure to keep still so as not to draw their attention. Her shadow, however, can't stop its fearful trembling. Without Nora's input, it points towards the path leading back to the hut, then it rises from the ground and walks over to Nora's hiding spot, from where it makes a run for it. Nora follows immediately after.
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The Brown Man / int_b53c57d5	type	Epigraph
The Brown Man / int_b53c57d5	comment	Epigraph: "The Brown Man" and "Goule" each have their own epigraphs. "The Brown Man"'s epigraph are eight lines of the fourth stanza of the ballad of "The Dragon of Wantley". The ballad concerns a near-invulnerable dragon whose appetite effectively cannot be sated, and therefore ties in with "The Brown Man" on grounds of voracity. "Goule"'s epigraph is the line "It is a tremendous thing, I say." It goes unsourced and its connection to "Goule" is unclear.
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The Brown Man / int_b869b5b1	type	Color Motif
The Brown Man / int_b869b5b1	comment	Color Motif: One can immediately tell something is off about the Brown Man because he's really dedicated to the color. His hair is brown and his eyes are brown, so far that's not unusual, but he's also fully dressed in brown and both his horse and his dog are brown too, with their eyes being confirmed to also be brown later in the text. That's a little too much of a single color to not look odd.
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The Brown Man / int_b9f6cc0a	type	The Bluebeard
The Brown Man / int_b9f6cc0a	comment	The Bluebeard: The Brown Man acquired Nora as his wife through deception and treats her poorly. While it doesn't seem he meant for her to learn about his grave-dining at the Mucruss Abbey, it does appear to be the kind of excuse he'd been waiting for to kill and eat her.
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The Brown Man / int_bd39588d	type	Desecrating the Dead
The Brown Man / int_bd39588d	comment	Desecrating the Dead: The Brown Man, his brown horse, and his brown dog have an unnatural appetite. They do hunt, as shown by Nora's death and the dog bragging about having caught a special doe, but for their meals they also rely heavily on the dead bodies being buried in the cemetery of Mucruss Abbey.
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The Brown Man / int_bf927e82	type	Non-Human Sidekick
The Brown Man / int_bf927e82	comment	Non-Human Sidekick: The Brown Man owns or leads a brown horse and a brown dog, who may look like ordinary if color-themed animals, but are just as intelligent as any human and as voracious and cruel as the Brown Man. Each time a corpse is available at the nearby Mucruss cemetery, they come to fetch their master for a midnight meal.
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The Brown Man / int_c3c18143	type	Hope Spot
The Brown Man / int_c3c18143	comment	Hope Spot: Nora discovers that her husband and his animal sidekicks are dangerous and has no one nearby to turn to, both for distance and assured trustworthiness. She therefore asks her husband if she can go see her mother, which he refuses but he does promise to go fetch Nora's mother for a visit. Instead, he tells Nora's mother that her daughter is in need of one of her finer dresses and disguises himself as the old woman. Nora is elated to see her mother again and feels safe enough to spill what she's witnessed her husband do. By the end of her tale, she sees through the disguise, and the Brown Man gives her just enough time to let her fate sink in before he kills her. In "Goule", the scene of the Brown Man asking Nora's mother for her clothes is omitted, and so it's not only Nora who suffers false hope, but the French audience too.
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The Brown Man / int_c6fe99cf	type	Creepy Cemetery
The Brown Man / int_c6fe99cf	comment	Creepy Cemetery: The Brown Man lives in a clay hovel within short walking distance of the Mucruss Abbey and its cemetery. Whenever there's been a recent burial, he, his horse, and his dog sneak over to dig up the corpse and consume its flesh.
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The Brown Man / int_cde51255	type	Antagonist Title
The Brown Man / int_cde51255	comment	Antagonist Title: "The Brown Man" refers to the human-eater who deceives people, maltreats his wife, desecrates graves, and eventually kills his wife.
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The Brown Man / int_d2d520f4	type	Our Ghouls Are Creepier
The Brown Man / int_d2d520f4	comment	Our Ghouls Are Creepier: In "Goule", the antagonist by virtue of the title is identified as a ghoul. He is not notably different from the maybe-fae antagonist from "The Brown Man". Both sneak out at night to eat corpse flesh at the cemetery and hunt for food whenever that's the better option. The antagonist's horse and dog are ghouls too.
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The Brown Man / int_e0ce2471	type	Absurdly Sharp Claws
The Brown Man / int_e0ce2471	comment	Absurdly Sharp Claws: The Brown Man kills Nora by stabbing her with inhumanely sharp and strong fingers in the chest and letting her bleed out.
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The following is a list of statements referring to the current page from other pages.

	The Brown Man	hasFeature	Halloween Episode / int_a5448ba8
	The Brown Man	hasFeature	Our Ghouls Are Creepier / int_a5448ba8

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