Illustration from from Jonathan Swift’s novel Gulliver’s Travels (1874 edition). Image: Flickr.
A researcher from The Australian National University (ANU) believes she may have solved one of English literature's most enduring mysteries - the author's inspiration for the 'Yahoo' characters in Jonathan Swift's iconic 1726 novel Gulliver's Travels . In the book the Yahoos are a race of human like creatures encountered by the book's protagonist Lemuel Gulliver. Researcher Dr Debbie Argue said the clues to unravelling the mystery were found in North American folklore. "Swift gave quite a detailed description of what the Yahoos looked like, how they acted and what they ate," Dr Debbie Argue said. "As I read about the Native American descriptions of the sasquatch I noticed they had similar descriptions. "I designed a table of characteristics between the two and the correlation was striking. "England had a lot of involvement with Native American Indians in the early 1700s, and it's conceivable that Swift could have been inspired by their stories." The book makes reference to three specific dates, two of which are known to correspond with significant events in Swift's own life, but the relevance of the third has remained a mystery.
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