The Tikbalang Who Lost His Way

About the legend

Being

Tikbalang / Forest Trickster

Cultural meaning

The tikbalang is a tall forest being from Filipino folklore, with a horse's head and limbs so long that his knees reach above his head when he sits. He is said to live in forests and mountains, in bamboo clumps, banana groves and big old trees such as the balete. In the old stories he leads travelers astray, so that they walk in circles and cannot find their way.

Fun fact

When rain falls while the sun is shining, a common Filipino saying goes "may kinakasal na tikbalang": a tikbalang is getting married.

Cultural notes

The earliest written record of the name comes from 1589, when the Franciscan friar Juan de Plasencia listed the Tigbalaang among the phantoms the Tagalog people spoke of. He wrote down a name people already used; horse features appear in the written record only later. Old advice for a traveler who keeps coming back to the same place is to turn your shirt inside out, to ask permission aloud before passing, and not to make too much noise in the woods. Tabi-tabi po, "excuse me, may I pass?", is a courtesy used near places that may belong to unseen beings. The folklorist Maximo D. Ramos gathered and compared the tikbalang tales in Creatures of Philippine Lower Mythology (1971).

About this retelling

Original story inspired by folklore An original reversal in which a tikbalang lost on a forest path needs a traveler’s help.

Tiko, Andoy, Grandma and the story itself are new to Filipino Tales. Here the old pattern is turned around: the tikbalang himself is lost and finds the courage to ask a traveler for help. Andoy tries the old shirt trick, and it does not help, because no one is tricking him: the mist is confusing them both. The old tales also tell of catching and taming a tikbalang by taking one of his special hairs. We leave that out, because Tiko is a friend to be helped, not a creature to be tamed and ordered about.

Sources

• Filipino oral tradition around the tikbalang
• Juan de Plasencia, "Customs of the Tagalogs" (1589), in Blair and Robertson, "The Philippine Islands, 1493–1898", Volume VII (Project Gutenberg)
• Maximo D. Ramos, *Creatures of Philippine Lower Mythology* (University of the Philippines Press, 1971; Phoenix, 1990) (WorldCat)
• The Aswang Project, "Tikbalang: History and Origins of the Horse-Headed Being" (The Aswang Project)

Themes

• Empathy
• Mutual Help
• Respect for Nature

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