Wendol

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The Wendol are members of a fictional enemy race in the film The 13th Warrior and the Michael Crichton novel Eaters of the Dead on which it is based.

Although never explicitly identified as such, descriptions of dead wendol in the novel imply (also speculated in the afterword) that they are in fact a relict Human pre-historic population, or a Neanderthal population. It is possible that, in areas not suitable for populations of Homo sapiens (e.g., the freezing uninhabitable forests of Scandinavia), a population of Neanderthals might have flourished long past the time of their supposed extinction, down to the era in which Ahmad ibn Fadlan wrote his account. or maybe it's possible that the Wendol are pre-historic Homo Sapiens (something that may explain the presence of a small pre-historic statuette similar to Willendorf's Vénus)

In Crichton's novel, the Wendol are ruled by a queen alone, but in the film there is also a male warrior who wears "The Horns of Power." The Wendol often dress as and affect the behavior of bears. The Wendol are inspired by Grendel from the epic of Beowulf, and the queen is taken from Grendel's mother. As well, in the film, the "dragon" formed by the descending Wendol is a reference to the dragon that Beowulf fights at the end of the epic.