The zoogs are rather quaint creatures, and in some ways they remind me a little bit of hobbits. The live in burrows, have hearths in their homes, and tell "piquant tales to beguile the hours." Randolph Carter is able to communicate with them in their fluttering language. Even so, they can be dangerous, for they are rumored to have a taste for meat "either physical or spiritual." One is left to ponder what spiritual meat might look like, but perhaps many a zoog has grown strong and healthy eating such fare.
Charming or dangerous, or both, the creatures are certainly enigmatic - "furtive and secretive." They have "small, slippery brown outlines." Are they something like otters or beavers? Or something like this...?
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A Mighty Zoog?
We know that their civilization is not entirely peaceful - they fight wars with cats. Thus we have the stirring scene when "the marshalled zoogs were about to strike the whole feline tribe in a series of surprise attacks, taking individual cats or groups of cats unawares, and giving not even the myriad cats of Ulthar a proper chance to drill and mobilise." Perhaps there is even something vaguely Daoist about them. After all, the great military strategist Sun Tzu, influenced by Daoist thinking, said "Victory is gained by surprise... Therefore those skilled at the unorthodox are infinite as heaven and earth, inexhaustible as the great rivers" (Thomas Clearly translation). Do the zoogs of the Dream Lands share something of that inexhaustible infinity?
Image: American Museum of Natural History
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