A wall of iron built to keep out Gog and Magog

The 14ft-high wicker figures of the giants Gog and Magog are being spruced up for the Lord Mayor’s procession, which they will lead in a few weeks’ time.

Sticklers insist that they should be called Magog and Corineus, placing their confidence in the 12th-century account by Geoffrey of Monmouth of the fight between those two heroic figures. But the City of London giants are carefully labelled Gog and Magog.

The names are found in the Bible, though it is unforthcoming about their nature. “Son of man,” says the prophet Ezekiel, “direct your face against Gog, of the land of Magog.”

The last book of the Bible, Revelation, takes up the names when it says that at the end of the world, after Satan has been bound for 1,000 years, he will be loosed and will “deceive the nations which are in the four quarters of the earth, Gog and Magog”.

What surprised me was to find Gog and Magog in the Koran. Muslims regard the Koran as the uncreated word of God. That need not present difficulties for the tales found in Sura 18 of the book, even though they bear similarities to folklore from other sources.

Sura 18 narrates briefly the travels of Dhu l-Qarnayn. The name means Two Horned, but it does not refer to Moses (who is often depicted with horns of power). Dhu l-Qarnayn has rather been taken to mean Alexander the Great. The name is explained in a narrative found in a sixth-century Syriac version and known as the Alexander Romance. “Thou has caused horns to grown upon my head,” Alexander says to God, “so that I may crush the nations of the world.”

Anyway, in the Koran, Dhu l-Qarnayn travels until he comes to “a people who could scarcely understand any speech”. They ask his help because “Yajuj and Majuj are wreaking mischief in the land”. Yajuj and Majuj are the Arabic names for Gog and Magog.

Dhu l-Qarnayn directs them to bring pieces of iron, which are melted in a fire to form a wall that can neither be scaled nor pierced, barring the way between two cliffs. This will keep out Yajuj and Majuj until the last days, when they are let loose. Yajuj and Majuj are conceived here as peoples rather than giants. They will be so numerous, commentators on the Koran wrote, that they will drink up all the waters of the Tigris and the Euphrates. When they fire their arrows against God, he will kill them all in one night.

Until the last days, according to the ninth-century Persian exegete al-Tabari, Yajuj and Majuj will try to dig under the wall each night, when the sound of their tools may be heard. But God repairs the breaches they make before the morning.

This striking detail reminds me of a story by the 19th-century myth-making author George Macdonald, who in The Princess and the Goblin has subterranean goblins digging away each night to break through into the king’s house. I don’t know his sources; it may just be a coincident.

As far as Islam is concerned, a reference to the iron wall against Yajuj and Majuj is made in a hadith that reports Mohammed hurrying into the room of Zainab bint Jahsh, his wife, and saying that so much (making a sign with his finger and thumb) had been opened up in the wall of Yajuj and Majuj. “Shall we all perish?” she asked. “Yes,” he replied, “if evil be widespread.”

There’s more of a moral there than in any legend of Gog and Magog familiar to the spectators at the Lord Mayor’s Show. I wonder how outsiders would judge our beliefs if they went by the emblems and traditions we perpetuate.