Addendum 9/3/2021: You can read an academic style write-up about the grootslang at A Book of Creatures.
So I learned of another legendary creature, the grootslang from Dahomey. Its name literally translates to "great snake" and it basically behaves like the traditional treasure hoarding dragon. Some things never change, even across continents. Several explorers claimed sightings of it over the centuries.
Of course, the internet misinformation machine had to screw it up. It's commonly depicted as an elephant/snake hybrid in modern art, even though I couldn't find any primary sources describing it as such. There's also a story circulating about its origins as the ancestor of snakes and elephants, which I could not find in any primary source either; in fact, I suspect this story originates from the Pathfinder RPG directly. Some sources claim the grootslang has a red gem or diamond in its forehead, or even that it has such gems for eyes and/or bewitching powers over onlookers. These are similar to some other stories of dragons, particularly the French vouivre I blogged about before.
There's a bunch of other misinformation floating around too that I can't source either. I suspect the artistic depiction of an elephant/snake hybrid originated as a misunderstanding of it being "elephant-sized." Somewhere along the line an artist or writer misunderstood this as "elephant-shaped" and we got our modern elephant-headed snake. Again, I wonder if Pathfinder originated this too, as I can't find any older art on Deviantart.
Funnily enough, Final Fantasy depicts it as a generic giant snake.
Basically, it's a very typical example of the terrifying treasure-guarding dragons. One detail that is often omitted is that grootslang is the Afrikaans name for the creature and may be more description than actual name. Other accounts call it "Kiman."
Sober accounts tell of a great snake called Kiman cruising the remote canyons between Augrabies and the Richtersveld, preying on stock. The colourful ones claim the snake has a diamond embedded in its forehead, that it entices young girls into the water and knocks men down with its breath. (p258. Dicey, William. Borderline. South Africa, Kwela Books, 2004.)
At Groot Derm I first learnt of the Groot Slang, the Big Snake of the Orange River. The Hottentots believed this snake had a diamond in its head which scintillated in the moonlight, and was brilliantly visible for long distances during the day. (p127. SWA Annual: SWA Jaarboek. SWA Jahrbuch. Namibia, South West Africa Publications, Limited, 1973.)
Enticing girls? Yeah, that's obviously omitted by a lot of the elephant hybrid stories. As you might have noticed by the "colourful" appellation, stories of the great snake are subject to embellishment. Learning more about the actual accounts is very difficult because they're in books that aren't freely available on Google Books. Darn copyright laws.
So Kiman is a very typical dragon all things considered: giant snake, lives in water, hoards treasure, hunts livestock, seduces women, terrifies men, beautiful gem in its forehead, etc.
So I was reading Masters and Minions Horde Book 2: Maze of the Minotaur when I came across the nonce word "minotrices," which the book called female minotaurs. I found this rather interesting, since while it looks like a Latin word it isn't real Latin and doesn't follow the standard rules for inventing Latin words.
The Latin word for Minotaur is Minotaurus. This is a masculine proper noun for which no feminine inflection exists because the name is a compound of Minos (the historical king of Crete, whose name itself became a royal title) and taurus (a bull), thus meaning "the bull of Minos" or "the king's bull" (and which could be further shortened in English to kingsbull, by analogy to kingsman). The Latin word for a cow is vacca and so the feminine counterpart would logically be the Minovacca rather than, say, the Minotaura. (Compare with my prior post on incubus/incuba and succubus/succuba.)
Yet the nonce word "minotrices" doesn't follow this pattern. The suffix -trices is the plural form of the Latin suffix -trix. This suffix is the feminine form of -tor, which indicates an agent noun (e.g. executor, executrix). Even stranger: the book writes the singular form as "minotrice," which is ungrammatical as -trice is in the ablative case and not the nominative.
Apparently the author of the book misinterpreted the English word Minotaur as a Latin agent noun based on superficial phonetic similarity and went from there. While this may seem nonsensical, you may perhaps contrive a functional meaning by delving further into the etymology of Minos. While in Cretan it means "king," it may descent from a Proto-Indo-European word meaning "ascetic" (although such a reading is debated). So as an agent noun (albeit redundant, unless one is aiming for wordplay), it would mean one who lives ascetically e.g. in caves or mazes.
Or you could just call a female minotaur by "minotauress," a neologism dating back as far as at least 1916.
While reading Legends of the Fire Spirits by Robert Lebling, I learned than Tunisian folklore tells of genies associated with the air, the sea, and the land. (This is also repeated in Between Sand & Sea for Ars Magica, if you want game-ready details for a "medieval authentic" game.) This inspired me to assign new names to some tribes of genies in the OGL rules, as an optional rule for those who prefer folklore authentic jargon rather than the inventions of Gygax and co.
In the OGL rules, the five tribes of genies are Djinn (air), Efreet (fire), Marid (water), Shaitan (earth), and Jann (n/a). Under this option, the Djinn, Marid, and Shaitan would be renamed Leriah (الرياح), Baharia (بحرية), and Siadna (سيادنا), respectively.
