Blemmyae

The Blemmyae are a legendary race of headless beings whose eyes, nose, and mouth are situated on their chests, a monstrous form that appears in the medieval bestiary tradition and is physically carved into the tympanum of the abbey church in Umberto Eco's The Name of the Rose. Their presence in the novel's sculptural program marks them as inhabitants of the unknown world, creatures that the Physiologus and travelers' reports describe as living at the edges of the known earth, and they serve as a visual emblem of the monstrous other that the abbey's doorway both displays and contains.

Identity and Origins

The Blemmyae belong to the catalog of monstrous races that medieval learning inherited from Pliny the Elder, Solinus, and other ancient authorities, and they are depicted in the church's doorway alongside other marvels such as the Sciopods, Cynocephali, and Cyclopes. In the novel, Adso of Melk, the young novice, describes the doorway's carvings as including "blemmyae, born headless, with mouths in their bellies and eyes on their shoulders" , a description that emphasizes their inversion of the human form. The Blemmyae are not merely decorative; they are part of a theological and cosmological scheme in which all creatures, however grotesque, sing the praises of the Creator and testify to the diversity of His creation. The doorway itself is a joyous promise of concord, showing that the Word has reached all the known world and is extending to the unknown, and the Blemmyae are included among the peoples destined to receive the Gospel.

Narrative Role and Thematic Significance

In the novel, the Blemmyae function as a symbol of the monstrous and the unknown, representing the limits of human understanding and the fear of the other. They appear in a context where the abbey's library guards forbidden knowledge, and where the blind librarian Jorge of Burgos warns against the pride of seeking to know what should remain hidden. The Blemmyae, like the other monsters carved on the doorway, are part of a world that is both fascinating and terrifying, a world that the novel's detective, William of Baskerville, seeks to understand through reason and observation. The Blemmyae also serve as a contrast to the ordered, rational world of the library, representing the chaos and disorder that the library's guardians seek to suppress. In the novel's climactic confrontation, Jorge of Burgos, who has murdered to protect the secret of Aristotle's lost book on comedy, embodies a grim, headless devotion to a truth that excludes laughter and doubt, a truth that is as monstrous as the Blemmyae themselves.

Connection to the Novel's Themes

The Blemmyae are part of the novel's exploration of the relationship between the normal and the monstrous, the known and the unknown. They appear in a passage where Adso, after his encounter with the girl in the kitchen, tries to distract himself by contemplating the beauty of nature and the goodness of creation, acknowledging that even the most horrid beasts sing the praises of the Creator. The Blemmyae, like the other monsters, are a reminder that the world is full of things that defy easy categorization, and that the human desire to impose order on the world is both necessary and ultimately limited. The novel's title, The Name of the Rose, suggests that only the name remains after the thing itself has passed away, and the Blemmyae, as a name for a race that may never have existed, embody this theme of the gap between language and reality, between the sign and the thing it signifies.