Swine Folk

The Swine Folk are from William Hope Hodgson's "The House on the Borderland (fiction)".

Description

It had a grotesquely human mouth and jaw; but with no chin of which to speak. The nose was prolonged into a snout; this it was, that, with the little eyes and queer ears, gave it such an extraordinary swine-like appearance. Of forehead there was little, and the whole face was of an unwholesome white colour. The mouth kept jabbering, inanely, and once emitted a half-swinish grunt. I think it was the eyes that attracted me the most; they seemed to glow, at times, with a horribly human intelligence.... It appeared to be supporting itself, by two claw-like hands upon the window-sill. These claws, unlike the face, were a clayey brown hue, and bore an indistinct resemblance to human hands, in that they had four fingers and a thumb; though these were webbed up to the first joint, much as are a duck’s. Nails it had also, but so long and powerful that they were more like the talons of an eagle than aught else.
— William Hope Hodgson's "The House on the Borderland (fiction)"

"Swine Folk", so-called because of a superficial resemblance between the creature's face and that of a pig, is a troglodytic race of emaciated, wiry, crooked, pale-skinned, sentient creatures with glowing red eyes, pig-like snouts, sharp fang-like teeth, pointed ears, and clawed talons. They are attracted to space-time anomalies, and are accomplished dreamers and travelers across various planes of space-time, able to perceive and walk through the thin places between dimensions.

The Swine Folk also seem to have been openly active among men on the lost continent of Mu, where they taught men the Naacal language and founded a monastery and library dedicated to teaching Mythos lore to man; the pig-snouted and clawed beings active there seem to have fled to Earth from a mysterious world called Yaddith of the Five Moons.

Heresies and Controversies

• A permanent, technologically advanced settlement of Swine Folk is believed to be located somewhere in the tunnels in the depths of the Hollow Earth, where the creatures collaborate with or serve the terrible Deros and other subterranean races, swearing allegiance to their nightmare gods and interfering with human civilizations above. (YSDC)
• Swine Folk camps quietly migrate from plane to plane across time and space, seeking arcane secrets to plunder for mysterious reasons of their own, bringing misfortune with them, building strange artifacts and disturbing ritual sites at their campsites, and leaving a trail of chaos and trouble behind them. Some of the strangest and most mysterious archaeological sites have built or modified by the Swine Folk for their ritual use, affecting many such sites with Bermuda Triangle-like distortions in time and space resulting in technological anomalies, hauntings, and cryptid sightings associated with the locations. (YSDC)
• The cult Monks of Yahlgan's founder, the high priest Zakuba, is described as "pig-snouted and clawed", and seems to have been a Swine Folk. (YSDC, inspired by a throw-away reference apparently originating in a Robert E. Howard(?) story)

Associated Mythos Elements

• location: Hollow Earth
• location: Dreamlands
• location: Seven Planes
• location: Mu
• language: Naacal
• cult: Monks of Yahlgan

References

• fiction: William Hope Hodgson's "The House on the Borderland (fiction)"
• sourcebook: Malleus Monstrorum