Monsters in general exist in order to define humanity. We apprehend what we are in opposition to what we are not. Classical thinkers like Aristotle envisioned a taxonomy founded upon a continuum, a sliding scale with man at one end and beast at the other. Not much separated man and beast beyond behavior and even that was not an absolute marker. Men could slide down the scale and become bestial and vice versa. This is evidenced by the various monstrous races that populate classical mythology which exhibit aspects of both men and beasts. Even the gods themselves, embodiments of forces in the natural world, contained such liminal attributes. Egyptian deities were thought to possess human bodies with the heads of beasts. Zeus was constantly shifting into animal forms in order to seduce mortal women. Romulus and Remus, sons of Mars, were suckled by a she-wolf. Clearly ancient peoples felt comfortable with issues of liminality probably because they saw themselves as related to beasts as members of the natural world.
After the advent of Christianity that belief system changed. Man was no longer seen as a part of the natural world but as the God-ordained master of the natural world. He was not an animal but keeper of the animal. This dichotomy was in keeping with the values of early Christianity which subscribed to a philosophy of moral absolutism. The world was perceived in black and white and creatures in the world were either good or evil, either sentient or not. But such a dialectical system would prove to be unstable.
Early Christian thinkers had categorically stated that all people were human. However, by the late Middle Ages some groups of people seemed to be less human than others. During the early Middle Ages, they were considered closer to animals. As the boundaries between humans and animals became increasingly blurred, marginalized groups seemed to slip below the human boundary. (Salisbury 15).One such “marginalized group” was women. On Aristotle’s scale woman fell into a place beneath man and was therefore closer to being a beast than man was. Early Christianity likewise viewed woman as inferior to man. This view presented a conceptual problem for the medieval mind. If all people are human then how can there be degrees of humanity? This problem was reinforced by medieval societal structures which similarly drew distinctions between social classes. The lower classes were perceived as inferior to the upper classes and were sometimes treated as being little better than animals.
Another problem that helped undermine the Christian perspective was the medieval people’s relationship with animals. In the Middle Ages people lived in much closer proximity to animals than people do today. They were in a position to bear close witness to animal behavior and to contemplate it in relation to their own. Man saw himself reflected in the beast.
To open the question and begin to describe the obscure figural ground humans share with animals, we will make the following observations: animals exhibit behavior; they have degrees of consciousness and language; their behavior and signifying practices are evolutionarily linked to ours; they apprehend reality, and they apprehend us; at such moments we are phenominalized by the animal gaze. (Ham and Senior 4).Taking all of these factors into consideration it would have been easy for medieval man to confuse an animal for a person and vice versa. It was likewise easy to imagine a man-beast and to believe in it as a man-beast possesses attributes that would have been readily recognizable to the medieval mind.
According to the monster theorist Jeffrey Jerome Cohen man-beasts were constructed initially in order to come to terms with other people with different customs. “Monsters are generated not only by modifying a suddenly plastic human body but also by involving such mutable signifiers as food, speech, habitat, clothing, weapons, customs, political ideology, religion, race, sexuality, and gender” (45). In other words the man-beast was a means of articulating a xenophobic fear of the Other, of people who look somewhat like us but do not behave like us. It allowed for the demonization of outsiders who could in the medieval age of conquest very likely mean harm to the insiders and it allowed for the externalization of anxiety regarding the liminal.
Of course on one level the monsters are just that: monsters. People believed in their existence and they were accepted at face value. For the Anglo-Saxons Grendel had real world antecedents. “The name Grendel is connected with an Old Norse term meaning ‘to bellow’—a booming growl of a large creature—and the word eventually came into the later Middle-English as ‘grindel’, meaning angry . . . Such creatures had a kind of material reality, as well as Otherworld identity” (Bates 82). Further evidence that Grendel was thought of as a real entity is the fact that English marshes for example were referred to as “Grendel pits” because those were places where creatures like Grendel were believed to have lived. Such creatures include “Grindylows,” marsh monsters of English folklore that eat children; the name of course is derived from Grendel. For the medieval imagination marshes were a perfect breeding ground for monsters. “Marshland and bogs had special significance as liminal areas of the landscape. They hovered between the known and unknown. They were neither dry land nor water. Seemingly fordable, they could, without warning, suck animals or people down into the darkness of the Lowerworld, the land of the dead” (Bates 83).
Because of this belief in their corporeality creatures like Grendel resist easy interpretation. They were not metaphors. They were not meant to represent anything beyond themselves. As J. R. R. Tolkien points out in his famous essay “Beowulf: The Monsters and the Critics,” the placing of Beowulf into a larger Judeo-Christian providential scheme came later.
He [the poet] was still dealing with the great temporal tragedy, and not yet writing an allegorical homily in verse. Grendel inhabits the visible world and eats the flesh and blood of men; he enters their houses by the doors. The dragon wields a physical fire, and covets gold not souls; he is slain with iron in his belly. Beowulf’s byrne was made by Weland, and the iron shield he bore against the serpent by his own smiths: it was not yet the breastplate of righteousness, nor the shield of faith for the quenching of all the fiery darts of the wicked. (28).Of course the poem as we have it today does construct Grendel as a servant of a Judeo-Christian concept of evil. We are told that he and the other non-human creatures that stalk the world are descended from Cain. They are the natural enemies of man and are therefore aligned with Satan. This conflation of Grendel with Satanic forces is, according to Tolkien, understandable. “Monsters of more or less human shape were naturally liable to development on contact with Christian ideas of sin and spirits of evil. Their parody of human form . . . becomes symbolical, explicitly, of sin, or rather this mythical element, already present implicit and unresolved, is emphasized” (41). Furthermore the drawing of explicit parallels between such pre-Christian man-beasts and anti-Christian values becomes a valuable tool for religious conversion.
But the construction of Grendel as a descendent of Cain is a deliberate and conscious one. It does not explain why he was feared in the first place. For the pre-Christian Anglo-Saxons Grendel was not a servant of Satan. They feared him for other reasons. Tolkien claims that critics tended to disregard Grendel as a mere figment of superstitious nonsense. “The key to the fusion-point of imagination that produced this poem lies, therefore, in those very references to Cain which have often been used as a stick to beat an ass—taken as an evident sign (were any needed) of the muddled heads of early Anglo-Saxons. They could not, it was said, keep Scandinavian bogies and the Scriptures separate in their puzzled brains” (23). This strikes me as an effective means of conversion as it places Christian messages into the Anglo-Saxon frame of reference allowing for an easier assimilation of those messages. And it may be true that the Anglo-Saxon frame of reference was founded on superstition but that does not mean that it is without reason. What is superstition but a means of ascribing reason (however faulty) to otherwise inexplicable phenomena? Grendel may have been a figment of superstition but he was created to articulate a fear of something in the world.
By deconstructing Grendel we can attempt to reconstruct what the Anglo-Saxons feared. We know that Grendel lived in a marsh, forbidden territory in the natural world. We can reasonably presume that such places were forbidden because of the inherent physical threat they posed to life and limb and their innate liminality lends them an eerie otherworldliness that can be off-putting. From a “superstitious” perspective Grendel could embody the threat of sudden death that could befall the unwary in such places. After all if travelers enter a place from which they do not return something must live in that place that killed them, right? The problem with this explanation is that Grendel goes to Heorot, Heorot doesn’t go to him. That is, his victims are not the unwary who stumble upon his lair they are people that he seeks out. We are told that he attacks because like the dragon of the poem he has been disturbed: “Each day, one evil dweller in darkness / spitefully suffered the din from that hall / where Hrothgar’s men made merry with mead” (79-81). The point is also made that “He had lived long in the homeland of horrors” (95). The meaning of this last phrase is ambiguous. Seamus Heaney’s famed translation suggests that it means that Grendel came from a hellish place: “he had dwelt for a time / in misery among the banished monsters” (104-05). However the “homeland of horrors” could be a reference to Heorot itself since the slaughter that occurs in the hall gives it a reputation as a cursed place. Reading the text this way would give us the meaning that Heorot is built on land that was originally inhabited by Grendel. Grendel therefore can be read as a member of a people supplanted by the Danes, an interpretation reinforced by the artifacts found within the dwelling he shares with his mother. “He [Beowulf] beheld in a hoard of ancient arms / a battle-blessed sword . . . finely forged by giants of old” (1379-83). Again like the dragon Grendel is the guardian of the relics of a lost race.
If we agree to read the text in this way we can draw further inferences about this lost race. The presence of Grendel’s mother and the fact that she is depicted as perhaps being an even greater threat than Grendel himself would suggest a matriarchal social structure. They are also quasi-cannibalistic as both Grendel and his mother are seen to eat their victims. I say “quasi”-cannibalistic as cannibalism is defined as the eating of one’s own kind. If Grendel and his mother are not human then their feeding habits do not fall into this category but since they are both described as possessing human characteristics--“monsters of more or less human shape,” as Tolkien says--that gives their actions a certain cannibalistic flair. The Cain association reinforces that aspect of their nature; Cain murdered his brother, a crime like cannibalism against his own kind. I do not mean to suggest that the race Grendel represents practiced cannibalism as Michael Crichton suggests in his retelling of the story in Eaters of the Dead. Like Cain’s crime it could well be a metaphorical cannibalism.
Finally it seems that Grendel and the Danes coexisted peacefully until Grendel’s peace was disturbed by the building of the great mead hall which was built by “craftsmen summoned / from many kingdoms across Middle-Earth” (68-69). Heorot becomes a gathering place for disparate groups of people from across the known world, groups that are alien to Grendel and his race. This seems to be the flash-point for Grendel’s rage and violence. Grendel attacks the hall and only the hall where the various invaders of his land congregate. Looking at these facts from an historical perspective Grendel’s experience seems to parallel that of the Britons in the fifth century, roughly contemporaneous with the events of the poem. Most Celtic tribes had the matriarchal structure we see displayed here. To my knowledge the Celts did not practice cannibalism but there is evidence and anecdotes that suggest they did practice human sacrifice. Also England in the 400’s was a sort of gathering place for various invading forces such as Romans, Picts, Angles, Saxons and Jutes; it was a literal Heorot. The English landscape as noted was dotted with “Grendel pits,” marshes, fens and bogs and was a place believed to have at one time been populated with a lost race of giants. All the details fit.
But whether Grendel represents the Britons or not is purely academic. It is clear that he represents a xenophobic fear of the alien Other, of people who are like us but not like us. Europe in the Middle Ages offered a plethora of such liminal Others. The Celts were Others to the Anglo-Saxons, possessing similar qualities but marked by fundamental social differences. Likewise Jews and the later Muslims were Others to Christians, all possessing religious sensibilities that sprang from the same source but were different enough to be perceived as perversions of each other. It is natural to fear those who “pretend” to be us but are not and to construct them as monsters, as "pod-people" and man-beasts.
As the Middle Ages progressed though a shift occurred in how the man-beast was constructed. No longer was he a creature that was clearly and identifiably alien. He became more insidious, a creature that passed as human and infiltrated our society. Anxiety about the liminal moved from the external world to the internal. He was not the Other, he was Us. “The proliferation in literature and art of such creatures on the edges between humans and animals reveals the change in mind-set that began to return medieval Europe closer to the classical view that saw humans and animals along a continuum. This trend culminated in treatment of metamorphosis—the shape-shifting between human and animal” (Salisbury 12-13). The most common of these shape-shifters seen in the literature of the time is the werewolf.
The werewolf inhabits a very particular liminal space. Like the monstrous hermaphrodite whose body exhibits an outward sexual indeterminacy the behavior of the werewolf suggests an inward sexual ambiguity which today would be considered homosexual. First of all the wolf is a classic metaphor of male sexual aggression. Consider the "Big Bad Wolf" in the Little Red Riding Hood folktales as evidence of this aggression. Furthermore it must be remembered that werewolves are traditionally male. The word “werewolf” itself is a compound of the Old English wer, meaning man, and wulf, or beast; it is truly a “man-beast” not a “woman-beast.” It is only in the late twentieth century that female werewolves—if technically they can be called such—began to appear in keeping with the era’s emphasis on gender equality. This is not to deny the werewolf a feminine identity as that is what gives the werewolf its significance. The werewolf’s physiology is linked to the phases of the moon, an object universally identified with the female. In mythology the moon is always personified by a goddess (Luna, Diana, Phoebe, Artemis, Inanna) which is perfectly appropriate considering the moon’s role as fertility symbol. It is the lunar cycle which governs the agricultural calendar as well as menstruation, the signifier of female fertility. For a man to fall under the thrall of a clearly feminine influence, to lose control of his faculties once a month as women were perceived to do is to render that man effeminate. Unlike the hermaphrodite who was monstrous for possessing the external signs of both male and female the werewolf was monstrous for possessing the outward appearance of a male while having the inward desires of a female.
The threat posed by the werewolf however was not one of aberrant sexual behavior. The problem it poses is more intellectual; it is a problem of signification. “This monster is also a warning concerning the power of cognition. How do we know what we know?” (Williams 124).
Consider Marie de France’s lai “Bisclavret.” This disjunction between appearances and behavior and the blurred line separating humans from animals is a recurring motif of Marie’s writing. Her fables construct humans as animals, serving to critique human nature and behavior as bestial. Similarly her lais frequently employ metamorphosis so as to objectify human behavior in order to examine it. With “Bisclavret” Marie looks at the role appearance plays in the construction of civilization. “In Marie’s hands, the story of the man compelled by fortune (aventure) to spend part of his existence as a beast of prey in the forest becomes a parable about the forces of bestiality that exist within human nature and how they should (and should not) be confronted, used, or transcended” (Hanning and Ferrante 101).
The problem facing the protagonist of this lai is his inability to keep things hidden. In the beginning, although he is reluctant to reveal his secret to his wife, he states openly, “There’s nothing you could want to know, / that, if I knew the answer, I wouldn’t tell you” (40-41). This openness to his character proves to be foolish as it leads him into confessing that he is a werewolf and that it is his human clothing that disguises that fact. His wife, who has forced his secret into the open--out of the closet, as it were--hides his clothing, forcing his hidden identity into public view. The clothing which serves to give the appearance of civility becomes the mechanism by which the bestial aspects of human nature is concealed. “The wife’s treason and the loss of the werewolf’s clothing are reciprocal metaphors; both embody a loss of that civilizing force in life—symbolized at the surface level by apparel, at a deeper level by the love relationship—which saves humanity from perpetual servitude to its lower, amoral impulses” (Hanning and Ferrante 102-03).
Marie seems to be using the loss of the clothing as more than a mere metaphor though. If the loss of clothing and nakedness reveals a person for who he or she really is then it follows that clothing is a construct that serves to obfuscate reality. Clothing is an illusion and Marie seems to be saying that one must look beyond appearances and consider actions as the King does in the story. “In the werewolf tales, those who rely on the material sign mistake the werewolf for a ferocious beast; only the wise who look beyond appearances, those who read through the sign, are able to see the true nature concealed beneath the wrong form” (Williams 124). This reinforces the idea that it is behavior that separates humans from beasts. “Once the clear distinctions between the species had blurred, humanity became not what you are, but how you act” (Salisbury 18). In order to participate in the civilized human world you have to first behave in a civilized human manner which involves keeping secrets. “Before his final metamorphosis, the werewolf demonstrates a final civilised virtue, shame: he refuses to don his clothes in public . . . He has, in effect, learned his lesson about the need for privacy, and thus fully deserves to return to full humanity and social integration” (Hanning and Ferrante 104).
It is no coincidence that the end of the Middle Ages is marked by an explosion of social liminality. The Reformation split the Christian church into factions, each confident that it alone was the true faith. The others were false Christians claiming to be one thing but who were really another. Previously poor peasants were gaining wealth and status, moving beyond their ordained stations in society. They too were seen as pretending to be something they were not. The man-beasts of the middle ages with their ambiguous natures represent anxieties about this drastically changing social landscape that turned the world upside down.
The monster exists in order to define humanity; we know what we are by knowing what we are not. “The monster’s function of resistance is actually produced within the very power/knowledge system that it appears to threaten. The monster resists so that the system continues to function; the repulsion of the monster is an integral part of the totalizing system, allowing it a certain (and certainly illusory) completeness” (Cohen 43). Man needs his monsters. They remind us of our values. The warn us about the depths to which we may fall. They provide a scapegoat for our failings. They are an integral part of us which is always there. “For the monsters do not depart, whether the gods go or come. A Christian was (and is) still like his forefathers a mortal hemmed in a hostile world. The monsters remained the enemies of mankind, the infantry of the old war, and became inevitably the enemies of the one God, ece Dryhten, the eternal Captain of the new” (Tolkien 27).
Works Cited
Bates, Brian. The Real Middle-Earth: Exploring the Magic and Mystery of the Middle Ages, J. R. R. Tolkien and “The Lord of the Rings.” New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2002.
“Beowulf.” Trans. Alan Sullivan and Timothy Murphy. The Longman Anthology of World Literature, Volume B: The Medieval Era. Ed. David Damrosch, et al. New York: Pearson Longman, 2004.
---. Trans. Seamus Heaney. The Norton Anthology of English Literature, 7th ed, Volume 1A: The Middle Ages. Ed. Alfred David. New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 2000.
Cohen, Jeffrey Jerome. “The Order of Monsters: Monster Lore and Medieval Narrative Traditions.” Telling Tales: Medieval Narratives and the Folk Tradition. Eds. Francesca Canadé Sautman, Diana Conchado, and Giuseppe Carlo Di Scipio. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1998.
Ham, Jennifer and Matthew Senior. “Introduction.” Animal Acts: Configuring the Human in Western History. Eds. Jennifer Ham and Matthew Senior. New York: Routledge, 1997.
Hanning, Robert and Joan Ferrante. “Bisclavret.” The Lais of Marie de France. Grand Rapids, MI: Baker Books, 1978.
Marie de France. “Bisclavret.” The Lais of Marie de France. Trans. Robert Hanning and Joan Ferrante. Grand Rapids, MI: Baker Books, 1978.
Salisbury, Joyce E. “Human Beasts and Bestial Humans in the Middle Ages.” Animal Acts: Configuring the Human in Western History. Eds. Jennifer Ham and Matthew Senior. New York: Routledge, 1997.
Tolkien, J. R. R. “Beowulf: The Monsters and the Critics.” The Beowulf Poet: A Collection of Critical Essays. Ed. Donald K. Fry. Englewood Cliffs, N. J.: Prentice-Hall, Inc., 1968.
Williams, David. Deformed Discourse: The Function of the Monster in Mediæval Thought and Literature. Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 19
