Of all the sins that might damn your soul for eternity, mumbling is probably pretty far down the list. Still, in medieval Europe, there was a demon for that: Tutivillus, who totted up all the mistakes clergymen made when singing hymns or reciting psalms. Every slurred syllable would be weighed against their souls in the final reckoning.
In one thirteenth-century version of the story, a holy man sees the demon in church, dragging a huge sack. According to a translation by historian Margaret Jennings, “These are the syllables and syncopated words and verses of the psalms which these very clerics in their morning prayers stole from God,” Tutivillus explains. “You can be sure I am keeping these diligently for their accusation.” You can see the scale of the stakes here: a tongue slip was no minor accident; it was theft from God.
In Tutivillus’s sack, the gathered syllables look like grains of salt, writes medievalist Kathy Cawsey. He stashes them in his secret storage halls until Judgement Day. One rendition of the story even displays a little sympathy for the devil, as Jennings shares. The put-upon Tutivillus complains that “I muste eche day he sayde brynge my master a thousande pokes full of faylynges, & of neglygences in syllables and wordes… else I must be sore beten.” It was worse, though, for his victims: In Hell, they would be weighed down under sackfuls of their errors.
In her exhaustive chronicle, Jennings traces the long folkloric history of monk-tormenting demons. Figures such as Tutivillus, dedicated to catching and collecting the sins of holy men, appear from the very early days of Christianity. One story of the Desert Fathers recounts a sighting of a demon perched on the top of the monastery, busily scribbling down all the faults of the brothers within.
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By the thirteenth century, this tradition had developed to the point that it seemed demons could be to blame for practically any problem a monk might encounter, from distraction to sleeplessness to drowsiness to coughing fits to pain in the legs. At least, that’s the impression given by the Liber Revelationum, a book of demonology written by Abbot Richalm of Schöntal. To his wary eyes, Jennings writes, demons were as numerous as gnats; they swarmed in the air like dust motes and fell from the sky like rain. He even saw demons plugging up the ears of one of his fellow monks in order to prevent him from hearing holy texts. But the most common way the demons attacked was by lulling their victims into sleep. They would even place the monks’ hands under their chins, to make it easier for them to nod off.
Listlessness was an occupational hazard for monks, with their long, ritualized, repetitive days. There was even a special word for the affliction: acedia. It was taken quite seriously. Sloth, after all, is a deadly sin, and it was often seen as the first step on the slippery slope to perdition. This is part of why those skipped syllables were treated not as simple mistakes, but as sins worthy of demon’s attention.
Tutivillus didn’t just target the clergy, however. He was also charged with recording any words churchgoers spoke out of turn, when they were supposed to be attending to the service. As Jennings notes, this was the result of the conflation of two separate folkloric strands. There was a distinct set of tales dealing with demons who collected idle chatter in churches, and, over time, these stories were folded into the expanding legend of Tutivillus.
A common version of the story has a deacon notice a little demon perched on a chattering woman’s shoulder. The fiend hastily jots down every word until he runs out of room on his parchment and tries to stretch the scroll with his teeth. The roll rips, and he bonks his head against the wall. In other versions, the demon preoccupies himself with people who’ve fallen asleep in church, carefully noting down every snore. One can easily imagine a priest, faced with a bored and distracted congregation, trying to frighten them out of their complacency with images of little recording demons under every pew.
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While one version of Tutivillus focused on clergy, the other typically targeted a misogynistic stereotype of the “gossiping woman.” The curious thing is that, in each case, the demon’s methods were different; that is, he stored clerical misspeech in a sack but recorded women’s words on a scroll. Cawsey argues that this was no coincidence, noting that
[i]n each case, language is described in terms of something the specific audience lacks. For the monks or clerics, it is presented as a material substance, carried like a sack of gold on the demon’s back; the metaphors used are monetary or economic, as though the monks owe ordered syllables to God instead of the monetary tithe their vows of poverty render unnecessary. For the chattering women, by contrast, the tool of power is writing; and for people who were almost certainly illiterate, the writing takes on almost magical characteristics.
One can easily read this as church authorities’ attempt to control the more unruly elements of their population. At the same time, as Cawsey points out, the legend of Tutivillus itself was like good gossip—colorful, wicked, and weird. Perhaps that’s why it’s stuck around so long.
But like all good yarns, the legend has continued to evolve. Today, Tutivillus has become a thoroughly modern fiend, the patron demon of typographical errors. “Blame it on Titivullus,” urges a small correction printed in Oliphant in 1991. And now that you know about him, you can too.
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