Sandman

Here’s my take on the Sandman (or Marchand de sable to french people, or Sandmann for the Germans), this famous folkloric character personifying sleep known throughout several European countries, under more or less similar names and appearances. Even today, we do not know what his exact origins are, and his legend was largely enriched by specific works of fiction, which did not always give him the same nature and powers. Nevertheless, overall, the collective imagination makes him a being of more or less human appearance who, once night falls, discreetly visits humans (sometimes focusing on children) to throw sand in their eyes, causing them to close inexorably and inducing sleep.

The first written traces associating sand and sleep come from French expressions. Thus, in the Universal Dictionary, containing generally all French words both old and modern & the terms of all sciences and arts of 1690, among the definitions of the word "sand", we can read: "It is said proverbially of a person who falls asleep, that the little man threw sand into his eyes, as if that forced him to close them" – sadly, nothing more is explained about the "little man" in question. And a little over a century later, in 1798, the fifth edition of the Dictionary of the French Academy attested that "It is said familiarly, of someone who wants to sleep, that he has sand in his eyes. » Also, according to William Shepard Walsh’s book Heroes and heroines of fiction, classical mediæval, legendary (1914), the Scandinavians once believed that rheum was the result of the work of the Sandman – however, as no other source attests to this belief, this information should be treated cautiously.

But it is to the writer Ernst Theodor Amadeus Hoffmann that we owe the first major appearance of such a being in literary fiction, in his short story The Sandman, published in 1817 – which, however, does not speak so much of the eponymous character. The young protagonist, then a child, asks several adults to inform him about this folkloric figure. His mother, who at bedtime often said “Here is the Sandman, I hear him coming” to him and his siblings, replies that it is not really a person. She adds that by saying this she means "You are sleepy, and you cannot keep your eyes open, as if sand had been thrown into them." However, later in the story, an old woman gives the young hero a much more precise and terrifying description of the Sandman : according to her, he is a wicked man who comes to children who refuse to go to bed, to throw sand in their eyes ; this has the effect of making the latter pop out of their sockets, all bloody and ready to be picked by the Sandman ; after which he stuffs them in his bag, and carries them to his nest on the Moon, to serve them as food to his half-human, half-birds young.
However, this malevolent version of the Sandman is found nowhere else. But Hoffmann was probably inspired by the Nachtkrapp, a Germanic "bogeyman" in the form of a giant raven, which carries off naughty children to its nest.

Then, in 1841, it was the turn of the Danish author Hans Christian Andersen to portray a character similar to the Sandman, in his children's story Ole Lukøje, which can be translated as “Ole the eye-closer”. Ole Lukøje is described as a little elf with slippers that make no sound, dressed in a silk suit of changing colors, and carrying an umbrella under each arm, one covered with beautiful pictures, and the other having no pattern. He comes to the children at the evening, and before they have time to see him, he delicately throws milk into their eyes, causing them to close them. Then he breathes into their necks to make their heads heavy, and, as soon as they are well and truly asleep, he tells them stories in his own way. Instead of simply talking to them, he uses his magic umbrellas : he opens the one decorated with drawings above the good children so that they have sweet dreams, and the one that is plain above the rascals, so that they sleep a dreamless sleep.
Therefore, this elf also has power over dreams, and does not use sand, unlike the Sandman. Later in the tale, Ole Lukøje tells the young protagonists that he has another Ole Lukøje as a brother, who turns out to be Death, but who does not look like a skeleton ; the latter, in a hussar's uniform, pays only one visit to each person, and carries them away at night on his horse while telling them stories. In addition, the elf explains to the children that he was once a pagan deity, called the "god of dreams" by the Greeks and Romans. It is then implied that Ole Lukøje would be Hypnos, the Greek god of sleep and brother of Thanatos, the god of death. However, since dreams are the responsibility of the Oneiroi and not Hypnos’, there has been a confusion, intentional or not.

And I don't have room for the rest of the description...