SELIM02.pdf


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THE USE OF MONSTERS AND THE MIDDLE AGES

The Hesiodic Theogony describes how the violent emasculation of 
Uranus by his son paradoxically engendered numerous offspring;
among these were the giants, who in later classical mythology at-
tempted to overthrow the gods by scaling Olympus. The giant’s violent
and persistent presence in Western culture begins with this notion of 
the Gigantomachia and continues today, even while the modern phrase 
“gentle giant” obscures his transgressive birth and suggests new
encrustations of meaning. Ovid placed the Gigantomachia in the Iron 
Age, the contemporary epoch, and rendered it a fable of political
anarchy; Augustine worried about the souls of these giants and of the 
other monstrous races, concluding that they might be saved at the Fi-
nal Judgement. David’s encounter with Goliath established a narrative 
pattern of polarized virtue and validation endlessly repeated in the 
medieval romances, so that giants became the embodiment of all that 
was antagonistic to the chivalric ethos; Guillaume d’Orange adopted 
the Saracen giant Rainoart, whom Dante later placed among the
Christian heroes in the fifth circle of heaven. Depictions of the menac-
ing aboriginal giants of England stood enchained in London’s Guildhall
until destroyed in the Great Fire, were rebuilt in 1708, and were 
destroyed again during the bombing in World War II, potent symbols 
of aristocratic supremacy; Mikhail Bakhtin created a rather fanciful 
anthropology of what he called “folkloric  giants” , friendly figures of 
popular culture who function more as a modern wish-fulfillment fan-
tasy of escape from the oppressive regime of Stalin’s Russia



49

(Bakhtain’s true “medieval, official culture”) than as a real component
of French history.1 The 1950s science fiction thriller Attack of the 
Fifty Foot Woman originally encoded a societal anxiety about the 
women’s movement with its depiction of a huge housewife run amuck, 
but today that same housewife has become more campy feminist hero 
than crazed and fearful horror. Fear and envy, attraction and
repulsion, prohibition and liberation, “Other” and “Us” -these contra-
dictions characterize the reception not only of the monster called the 
giant, but of nearly all monstrous figures. An examination of the cate-
gory monster and its genesis, then, can provide useful tools for ap-
proaching a new understanding of the Middle Ages, revealing the way 
in which the monstrous was used then and the ends to which its study 
can be adapted now.

The English noun “monster” derives from Latin monstrum, a divine
portent, usually of misfortune. Augustine, following Cicero (De
Divinatione I.xlii.93), thought the Latin noun to stem from mostrare,
“to show” (De Civitate Dei, XXI.8); Isidore of Seville, following
Varro (De Lingua Latina), glossed monstrum as contra naturam
and connected it to monere, “to warn”.2 The connotation of the word 
has always been negative and remains so today, even if modern mon-
sters are as likely to be misunderstood innocents as violent ravagers. 
Generally speaking, medieval monsters are characterized by abnor-
mality, dangerousness, and exaggeration; the logical questions which 
follow from these traits are: “What is the standard of normality, and by 
whom is it being promulgated?” “To whom or what is the monster 
understood as threatening?” and “Which qualities have become exag-

1.- See, for example, Richard M. Berrong, Rabelais and Bakhtin: Popular Culture in 
Gargantua  and Pantagruel. (Linciln, NE: 1986).
2.- See Norman Smith, Loathly Births of Nature: A Study of the Lore of the Portentous 
Monster in the Sixteenth Century (dissertation, University of Illinois at Urbana-
Champaign, 1978), p. 3.



50

gerated attributes, and why?” This may all at first seem a mere exer-
cise in description, but once we move toward answering such ques-
tions, the anthropological value of monsters as social phenomena be-
comes more clear.

In addition to these three pervasive characteristics, monsters are 
usually associated with marginality (they dwell in a distant place with 
symbolic charge, on civilization’s periphery), anteriority (the monster 
originates in some invented or re-invented history, rather than in the 
narrative present), excessive appetite, anarchic violence, and perverse 
or misdirected sexuality. “Marginality” and “anteriority” are traits re-
sulting from the banishing of the monster from the oikumene, the fic -
tion-producing center; the triple linking of violence and appetite with 
the destructive expression of libido suggests why this removal is nec-
essary. The monstrous is thus intricately tied to that ambitious cate-
gory in modern critical praxis, the Other; monsters may, in fact, be 
described as the primary vehicle for the representation of Otherness in 
the Middle Ages.

Every reuse of a monster is a reinvention. The Grendel of Beowulf
exists in order to be unproblematically destroyed by the hero; the 
Grendel of John Gardner’s work isn’t sure why he exists, but the fact 
that the reader is privy to his existential musings makes him a charac-
ter of sympathy rather than one of simple repulsion. Geoffrey of 
Monmouth’s giant of Mount St. Michael was invented primarily to 
enlarge the impression of Arthur’s martial prowess in the Historia
Regum Britanniae; the same giant in the Alliterative Morte Arthure
is quietly conflated with the now overly bellicose British king, replacing 
textual celebration with subtle re-evaluation. Monsters, then, are not to 
be thought of as having an existence outside of their social and literary
contexts. Thus we can speak of the vampire of Bram Stoker’s
Dracula , where the monster’s transgressive sexuality is as subtly al-
luring to Jonathan Harker as Henry Irving, Stoker’s mentor, seems to 



51

have been to the author, or of Marnau’s homophobic reinvention of 
the same vampire in Nosferatu , where the undercurrent of desire is 
replaced with waves of disgust; or even Anne Rice’s modern rewrit-
ing of the myth, in which homosexuality and vampirism are conjoined 
and apotheosized; the historical influence of contemporary social
movements (la décadence, nascent fascism, liberal humanism) is the 
determinant of the vampire’s cultural charge in each case. Discourse 
extracting a transcultural, transtemporal phenomenon labelled as “the 
vampire” is of necessarily limited utility. Even if vampiric figures are 
found almost worldwide, starting in ancient Egypt and surviving today
in Hollywood film studios, each reappearance (and its analysis) is still 
bound in its re-creating moment.

The genre particularly associated in the Middle Ages with the use 
of monsters is, of course, romance, which has at various times been 
denigrated or even condemned for its overabundance of the fantastic. 
Romance then seems the logical point of embarkation for this journey 
of monstrous encounters, and no figure would be more appropriate as 
an introductory example than Chrétien de Troyes’ Giant Herdsman. 
Appearing in the opening segment of Yvain (Le Chevalier au lion), 
this Herdsman is the first important intrusion of the Other into the 
genre, a figure close to its very birth. The story of Yvain begins with 
the Arthurian knight Cologrenant’s account of his own humiliating
defeat beside a magic fountain, along the way to which he encounters 
a huge and hirsute vilain described in elegantly nonhuman terms:

… il ot grosse la teste

Plus que roncins ne autre beste

Chevos meschiez et front pelé

S’ot plus de deus espanz de le

Oroilles mossues et granz



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Autés come a uns olifanz

Les sorciz granz et le vis plat

Iauz de çuëte et nes de chat

Boche fandue come los

Danz de sangler, aguz et ros,

Barbe noire, grenons tortiz

Et le manton aers au piz,

Longue eschine, torte et boçue (II. 295-307).

He had a head larger than that of a pack-horse or any other beast. His hair 

was tufted and his forehead, which was more than two spans wide, was 

bald. He had great mossy ears like an elephant’s, heavy eyebrows and a 

flat face with owl’s eyes and a nose like a cat’s, a mouth split like a 

wolf’s, the sharp yellow teeth of a wild boar, a black beard and tangled 

moustache, and a long chin that ran into his chest…1

Calogrenant supposes that any creature which so much resembles 
a beast must be as senseless as one, but when he asks the churl what 
he is, the reply is simple and astounding: “Je suis uns hon” -“I am a 
man”. There is something marvelous, unapproachable, and unknow-
able about this “man”, however. To the knight’s further question of 
“What kind of man are you?”, the only reply is “Tes con tu voiz./Je 
ne sui autre nule foiz” (“I am what you see, nothing else”). Placed 
as it is after a catalogue of his extraordinary attributes and followed by 
a description of his uncanny power of control over his deadly herd, the 
Herdsman’s assertion that he is not, after all, extraordinary makes him 
all the more marvelous, and his denial of self-interpretation heightens 

1.- The Old French is excerpted from Foerster and Reid’s edition (Manchester, 1967): 
the translation is from D. D. R. Owen in Arthurian Romances (London: 1987), pp. 284-
285.



53

the effect by leaving his signification ambiguous; announcing that he is 
a giant born of the devil and proceeding to smash Calogrenant with his 
mace would ruin the atmosphere which Chrétien creates by sus-
pending discernment. Faced with the mystery of the Herdsman, Calo-
grenant is forced to assert and therefore define his own identity as a 
knight. When the churl commands, “Et tu me redevroies dire, /Ques 
hon tu ies etque tu quiers”, Calogrenant answers with what John 
Stevens has called “a classic definition of chivalric romance”:1

“I am, as you see, a knight who searches for what I cannot find; I

have searched long and have found nothing.”

“And what would you want to find?”

“Avantures [adventure] to prove my prowess and my courage.”

(ll. 358-63)

Calogrenant’s meeting with the churl becomes an exposition of the 
essential attributes of knighthood; the Herdsman’s inexplicability
evinces a self-examination and definition which indicates less an in-
terest in personal psychology than the self-reflexive impulse of a 
writer in an as yet undefined genre. The marvelous and hence the 
monstrous enter romance just as the Giant Herdsman does: sitting at 
the margins of the knowable, ready to test the characterizing essence 
of a hero by not partaking of that composition themselves, and finally 
forcing the heroic to assert itself against their Otherness and thereby 
define its own assumptions. Yvain will reinitiate the process later in 
the work when he fights Harpin of the Mountain, a marauding giant 
who is a negative representation of the state induced by a lack of 

1.- Medieval Romance: Themes and Approaches (London: Hutchinson University 
Library, 1973), p. 107.



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chivalry; the Herdsman was likewise outside of the chivalric system, 
albeit ignorant of the function of knights rather than antagonistic to it. 
Yvain defines himself by encountering and conquering Harpin, so 
that the polarity between enemies is mutually identifying. In both
cases, a revelatory instant of self-reflective examination is created.1

The encounter with the Other, the encounter with the monster
necessitates an assertion and evaluation of the textual (generic,
chivalric, social) ideology. Monsters are in this way like textual
fissures, revealing momentarily the underworks, the machinery.

Employing monsters as an instrument of analysis seems a very
modern endeavor, the work of anthropologists and literary critics. 
Medieval usage is generally less self-conscious, but vast traditions of 
exegesis on the subject of the monstrous exist, engaged early in the 
classical period by Aristotle (The Generation of Animals) and Cicero 
(De Divinatione), refined in the days of the great naturalists like Pliny 
(Natural History), Christianized by Augustine and the other patristic 
writers, and continued into the Renaissance and far beyond by innu-
merable teratologists (Ambroise Paré, Pierre Boaistau, Conrad
Wolffhart, Polydor Vergil). Teratology has always exerted a strange 
fascination, perhaps contingent upon the attraction of monsters them-
selves. The best way to account for the uses of monsters may in fact 
be to first examine some reasons for their widespread popularity,
especially as figures of entertainment. On a very basic level, we as 
humans like to be frightened, provided the creation of fear can be 
bounded, as in the safe spaces of narrative. A recent psychological 
survey concluded that couples attending a horror movie are more 

1.- This moment is perhaps related to Tzvetan Todorov’s notion of “fantastic
hesitation,” although the horizons of expectation for medieval fantastic literature and 
the modern works that Todorov theorizes from are perhaps different enough to cast 
doubt on the utility of his findings; see The Fantastic, A Structural Approach to a 
Literary Genre (New York: Cornell University Press, 1975).



55

likely to have had what they describe as “a good date” than those at-
tending a romantic movie, apparently because of this enjoyment of the 
former genres’ greater ability to activate the release of adrenalin; the 
production of excitement becomes attributed to the partner on the out-
ing, rather than the monster, but the monster in fact deserves the 
credit. We watch horror films knowing that the cinema is a temporary 
place, that the denouement will be followed by re-entry into the world 
of comfort and light. As engrossed as we might become in a chilling 
book, we are always on some level aware that the number of pages in 
our right hand is dwindling, and that no matter how much terror a story 
can elicit, we are safe in the knowledge of its nearing end, and our 
liberation from it. The same is true of narratives received aurally; no 
matter how disturbing the description of the giant, Arthur will ul-
timately destroy him because the audience knows how romance
works.

We retain to some degree as adults a childish delight in being
frightened, and monsters engender that feeling well. A little later in 
this paper the sources of their terror will be probed, but it would per-
haps be more helpful to explore first the use of monstrous figures as a 
source of delight. Late in the Renaissance the monster began to be 
pushed out of mainstream discourse and to take up its still familiar 
habitation in allegory and juvenile literature. The very young are at-
tracted to monsters (dinosaurs, Skeletor, Freddy Kreuger) because 
they allow them to express in a safe, clearly delimited space fantasies 
of aggression, domination, and inversion. The monster can function as 
an alter-ego, an attractive and temporary projection of (another) self. 
Such escapist fantasy is no doubt behind much lavishly bizarre
manuscript marginalia, as well as cathedral gargoyles and other
grotesques, all of which seem to record the fancies of a bored or re-
pressed hand suddenly freed. Jacques Le Goff, writing of the marvels 
in medieval maps and travel accounts of the lands surrounding the 



56

Indian Ocean (a place he calls “a mental horizon, the exotic fantasy of 
the medieval West, the place where its dreams freed themselves from 
oppression”), says that these monsters inhabit a world:

where taboos were eliminated or exchanged for others. The weird -

ness of this world produced an impression of liberation and free-

dom. The strict morality imposed by the Church was contrasted 

with the discomfiting attractiveness of a world of bizarre tastes, 

which practiced coprophagy and cannibalism; of bodily innocence, 

where man, freed of the modesty of clothing, rediscovered nudism 

and sexual freedom; and where, once rid of restrictive monogamy 

and family barriers, he could give himself over to polygamy, incest, 

and eroticism. 1

The habitations of the monsters -Ethiopia or the Antipodes or 
whatever land was sufficiently distant to be exoticized- became more 
than dark regions of uncertain danger; according to Le Goff, they
were also realms of happy fantasy, horizons of liberation.

Even the quintessential wicked giant, Goliath (or Golias, as he is 
called in the Vulgate), became something of a fantasy figure of
escape. The group of poets known as the goliards traced their name 
from a mythical “bishop” or “mentor” named Golias, who of course 
derives from the biblical giant. Many of the goliards were bored uni-
versity students applying some of their inculcated Latin compositional 
skills to the invention of verses praising love, food, and drink; some of 
them went further and extolled lust, gluttony, and drunkenness. In true 
schoolboy fashion, they wrote elaborate parodies of the ecclesiastical

1.- “The Medieval West and the Indian Ocean” in Time, Work & Culture in the Middle 
Ages,  tr. Arthur Goldhammer (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1980), p. 197.



57

hymns and ceremonies; Deus sit propitius huic peccatori (“God 
have mercy on this sinner”) became Deus sit propitius huic potatori
(“God have mercy on this drunkard"). Rules requiring indulgence of all 
kinds were invented for this “goliardic order”, but its existence
continued to be more wistful fiction than actual brotherhood. In time 
such works as the Apocalypse of Golias appeared, in which the 
persona of Golias was co-opted yet again, this time to condemn the 
sins of the goliards by illustrating them; “Golias” was quickly restored
as a word soaked in reprobation.

This ability of the monsters to encode desirable traits while re-
maining ostensibly negative representations of Otherness is ultimately 
responsible for the shift in their cultural valence. Recognizing the 
escapist possibilities of the monster, Rabelais, Rousseau, and Mon-
taigne all envisioned narrative worlds in which the Other could sus-
tainedly be thought of as better than the human rather than worse. As 
Richard Bernheimer has pointed out, the Wild Man metamorphosized 
from aphasiac, violent cannibal to eloquent pacifistic vegetarian.1 The 
giant was likewise transformed from an embodiment of subversion,
anarchy, exaggerated appetite, and perverse sexuality to a spokesman 
for the “Good Earth”, and ultimately into a corporate emblem assuring
the freshness of a certain well-known brand of frozen vegetables.2

These co-optations of monsters into symbols of the desirable, often 
by neutralizing potentially threatening aspects with a liberal dose of 

1.- Wild Men in the Middle Ages: A Study in Art, Sentiment, and Demonology
(Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1952), pp. 4-5.
2.- The same process adapted giants from impediments to expansionism into town 
mascots; an effigy of the giant Ascopart (from the romance Sir Beves of Hampton)
appears on Southampton’s city gate. Gogmagog, the primeval giant who opposed the 
Trojan settlement of England, was depicted as two giants (Gog and Magog) and placed in 
Guildhall by the reign of Henry V; as stated earlier, these statues were destroyed in the 
Great Fire, rebuilt in 1708, and destroyed again during bombing in World War II.



58

comedy, are ultimately less interesting than the retention of the mon-
sters’ original, fearful significations. Monsters may still work as fan-
tasies even without their valence reversed. What Le Goff has called 
“oppressive institutions” can encode all that is necessarily viewed as 
bad in them in order to perform a wish-fulfillment fantasy of their own, 
by destroying the monster in the course of a narrative. The monster’s 
eradication then becomes a kind of exorcism, and perhaps a
catechism. The demons disguised as “ladies of high descent and rank” 
who tempt Sir Bors to sexual indulgence function in this way in the 
monastically manufactured Queste del Saint Graal; when he refuses 
to sleep with one of them, described as “so lovely and so gracious that
it seemed all earthly beauty was embodied in her,” his assertion of 
control banishes them all shrieking back to hell.1 Monsters are, how-
ever, seldom so uncomplicated in their use and manufacture, no matter
how thin allegory might flatten them.

Monstrous figures have often been promulgated in the service of 
political or nationalistic ends. The primary model for the Middle Ages 
of this kind of usage is to be found in the Bible, where the aboriginal 
inhabitants of Canaan are transformed into menacing giants. When 
Moses sends spies into the Promised Land in the Book of Numbers, 
they return to the Israelites with this report (in the Vulgate):

“We came into the land to which you sent us, which indeed flows 

with milk and honey as may be known from this fruit, but it has 

very strong inhabitants, and the cities are great and walled. We 

saw the Enakim there… The land which we have seen devours its 

inhabitants. The people whom we beheld are tall of stature. There 

1.- The Quest for the Holy Grail, tr. Pauline Matarasso (London: Penguin Books, 1969), 
p. 194.



59

we saw certain monsters of the sons of Enak, of the giant kind, in 

comparison to whom we seemed like locusts.” (Num.13:28-29, 33-4).

The indigenous inhabitants of Canaan are here imagined as gigantic
in order to convey the difficulty of the ensuing Jewish settlement. Just 
as the bounty of the land is great (fluit lacte et melle), so its resis-
tance to colonization (sed cultores fortissimos habet); the abundance 
of the land is conveyed by the surfeit of valuable commodities and the 
exaggerated proportions of its warding occupants. Envisioning the
anterior culture as monsters (ibi vidimus monstra) justifies their ex-
termination by making the act heroic.

The groups of giants known in Hebrew as the Anakim, the Emim, 
and the Zamzummim all embody a similar set of textual ambitions in 
their various appearances in the Pentateuch. Walter Stephens summa-
rizes their raison d’être when he writes that “[s]uch Giants embody 
the forces that resist expansion, conquest, cultivation, and domestica-
tion. Because they oppose the origin of a culture, they are envisioned 
as archaic, even autochthonic; they are an explanation of origins made 
by cultures that see themselves as invaders or latecomers”.1 This 
method of rationalizing displacement is a process very old and,
throughout history, very useful. In the Historia Regum Britanniae,
Geoffrey of Monmouth rewrote the passage previously quoted from 
the Book of Numbers, replacing the Israelites with exiled Trojans and 
Canaan with Great Britain, retaining giants as the distorted remnant of 
an anterior culture ready to be replaced. The chansons de geste
transformed the Moslems into demonic caricatures whose menacing 

1.- Giants in Those Days: Folklore, Ancient History, and Nationalism  (Lincoln, NE: 
University of Nebraska Press, 1989), pp. 72-73.



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lack of full humanity was readable from their bestial attributes.1 The 
Scottish, Irish, Cornish and Welsh were at various times monsterized 
as an expedient to expansionism. More recently, in American history, 
Native Americans were depicted as feral savages so that the
powerful political machine known as Manifest Destiny could push
westward with disregard.

Especially prone in the Middle Ages to the use of this process of 
monsterization are historical writings such as chronicles and the popu-
lar “History and Topography” genre promulgated by Giraldus Cam-
brensis and others; the mapping of the geography or the history of a 
region is an act of colonization, of expansionism, and usually a reflex 
of incipient nationalism. Implicit in the creation of such textual “maps” 
is the superiority of the “cartographer” to that which becomes the 
cartographer’s geography. In racial or cultural terms, an opposition is 
set up between the dominant culture which becomes encapsulated into 
story. Encoded in this set of assumptions and the works it produces is 
not only a xenophobic fear of the Other, but also the horrible suspicion 
that its Otherness originates within “Us”, the race which fabricates 
the myth. Clearly, then, such stories also encode a fear of
miscenegation -about which more will be said shortly.

These examples connecting monsters with political contrivance and 
the promulgation of nationalism function as invitations to action, usually 
military. Monsters were frequently used, however, as vehicles of
prohibition, as admonitions against the engagement in certain en-
deavors. It has been suggested, for example, that merchants inten-
tionally disseminated maps depicting monsters at the edges of their 
trade routes in order to discourage further exploration and to establish 
their own monopolies. More typical (and perhaps prototypical in

1.- This tradition is transplanted to England with a curious result in the romance Sir Guy 
of Warwick, which features a monsterized Dane, the giant Colbrond.



61

Western culture) is the function of the Homeric cyclops Polyphemos, 
a figure familiar throughout the Middle Ages from various Latin and 
vernacular reworkings of the Odyssey.1 Essentially a xenophobic 
rendition of the foreign, the Cyclopes are depicted as savages who 
haven’t “a law to bless them” and who lack the techne to produce 
through cultivation. Their primitivism is conveyed by a lack of hierar-
chy and of a politics of precedent, a dissociation from community
leading to a rugged individualism which in Homeric terms can only be 
destructive. Because they do not partake a system of custom, the 
Cyclopes are a danger to the arriving Greeks, men who are defined by 
their compartmentalized function in a system of subordination and 
control.

Extended travel was dependent in both the ancient and medieval 
world on the promulgation of an ideal of hospitality in which the re-
sponsibility of the host to guest was sanctified. A violation of that as-
sumed code was responsible for the destruction of the biblical Sodom 
and Gomorrah, and for the first punitive transformation in the Meta-
morphoses (Lycaon becomes a wolf, Met. I.199ff.), as well as for the 
devolution from man to giant in Sir Gawain and the Carl of Carlisle .
Because Popyphemos is ignorant of his “sacred duty”, he, like Lycaon 
and the monstrous Carl, becomes part of a fable constructed to vali-
date this obligation by a violation of it. Thus when Odysseus finds 
himself trapped in the Cyclops’ cave, he declares to Polyphemus that 
he and his men are:

beholden for your help, or any gifts

you give -as custom is to honor strangers.

We would entreat you, great Sir, have a care

1.- See Donald K. Fry, “Polyphemus in Iceland,” The Fourteenth Century, Acta, vol. IV 
(1977), pp. 65-86.



62

for the gods’ courtesy; Zeus will avenge

the unoffending guest. (IX.232-6)1

To this formulaic language of courtesy, Polyphemos replies in re-
vealing action:

in one stride he clutched at my companions

and caught two in his hands like squirming puppies

to beat their brains out, spattering the floor.

Then he dismembered them and made his meal,

gaping and crunching like a mountain lion-

everything: innards, flesh, and marrow bones. (254-9)

Cannibalism is the ultimate violation of the divinely ordained host-
guest relationship. The graphic and lengthy depiciton, down to a cata-
logue of devoured bodily fragments, increases the deviance of the ac-
tions by creating an extended visualization of the scene; this technique
was later used extensively in encounters with giants in the medieval
romances, with much the same repulsive effect. The creation of re-
vulsion asserts the natural value of the societal constructs whose op-
posite or rejection the monster represents.

In the course of my research into the uses of monsters, I have 
come to the somewhat startling conclusion that when they are used as 
vehicles of prohibition, monsters most often embody a strong fear of 
interracial sexual relations, or even directly interdict miscegenation. 
Desire which crosses the imagined boundaries of race is envisioned as 
an illicit mingling with an Other who is a monster or by whom mon-

1.- The Odyssey, tr. Robert Fitzgerald (New York: Anchor Books, 1963).



63

sters are engendered; this negative depiction is the essence of the 
prohibition. The group most prone to transgression of this sort, and the 
group therefore most in need of protection against it and against 
themselves, turns out not surprisingly to be women.

The Bible was the primary source for the Middle Ages of divine 
decrees against miscegenation. One of these pronouncements is a 
straightforward command from God, coming through the mouth of the 
prophet Joshua (Josh. 23:12ff); another is a cryptic parable much
elaborated during the medieval period, the story of how the “sons of 
God” impregnated the “daughters of men”, engendering the wicked 
race of giants:

Moreover giants were upon the earth in those days: for afterwards 

the sons of God went in to the daughters of men, and they bore 

children, who are the mighty men of old, men of renown. (Gen.6:4)

This biblical verse is highly problematic, and its ambiguity resulted
in an extended period of erudite scrutiny and discourse, which in its 
turn influenced profoundly popular notions of the genesis of monsters. 
The importance of the cryptic references lies in their linking of the 
birth of the giants with a mysterious kind of interracial (or better
“intergenus”) relations, and in the narrative proximity connecting the 
advent of the giants, the multiplication of worldly evil, and the divine 
retribution of the Flood. All these events were read in the Middle 
Ages as linear history; what might strike the modern reader as an 
episodic collection, evidence perhaps of the Bible’s composite author-
ship, was treated by successive exegetes as a progressive narrative of 
causal connections.

According to the reworking of the history in the Middle English 
Genesis, the first miscegenation of the world occurred as follows:



64

Two hundred ger after Ío wunes,

Miswiven hem gunnen SeÍes sunes

Agenes Íat Adam forbead,

And leten Godes frigtihed;

He chosen hem wives of Caym,

And mengten wiÍ varied kin;

Of hem woren de getenes boren,

Migti men, and figti forloren.1

The passage goes on to state that the Flood was sent as a direct 
result of the increase in evil attendant upon the generation of the 
giants, who are true monsters in that they organically encode a divine 
judgement on the sexual act which produced them. The Old English 
Genesis and the Vernon manuscript’s Life of Adam and Eve contain 
similar versions of the biblical story in which the “sons of God” (filii
dei) are likewise men descended from Seth, and the women (filiae
hominum) are of the race of Cain; these three works repeat the 
interpretation of the episode established by Augustine in his De
Civitate Dei.

The verses of the Pearl Poet’s Cleanness retell an older version of 
this same story in which the sons of God are immortals, fallen angels:

So ferly fowled her flesch pat pe fende loked

How pe de¥ter of pe doupe wen derelych fayre,

And fallen in fel¥schyp with hem on folken wyse

And engendered on hem jeauntez with her japez ille.

? ose wern men me peles and ma¥ty on urpe.1

1.- The Middle English Genesis and Exodus (ed. Olof Arngart), Lund, Gleerup: 1968, ll. 
539-546.



65

This notion that giants originated from the union of devils (or in-
cubi) with earthly women, opposed as it is to the Augustinian ortho-
doxy, nonetheless flourished as a popular explanation for the origin of
the giants in the romance tradition. In both its versions, the story re-
volves around miscegenation; the origin of the Other is thus always 
“an illicit mingling of heterogeneous ontological categories” (Stephens, 
p.79).

The complete Biblical episode was rewritten in the early fourteenth
century as a prehistory of England. The Anglo-Norman poem De
Grantz Geanz and its Middle English counterparts (The Anonymous
Riming Chronicle  of the Auchinleck MS and the preface to the 
Prose Brut of the MS Douce 323) invent an explanatory myth for the 
genesis of the giants which Geoffrey of Monmouth had asserted to 
dwell in Britain long before the arrival of Brutus and the Trojans. An 
extended swipe at feminine integrity, the myth links womanly desire 
with miscegenation and the birth of monsters. The production of
monstrous progeny simultaneously condemns women in general for 
their unbridled appetite, and interracial mingling in particular as inher-
ently degenerative. The women in consequence become hardly distin-
guishable from the monsters they bear, which in turn are the result of 
a “maternal impression” both physical and moral.

Re-encodings of the fear of miscegenation through the monsteriza-
tion of other races and teratogenesis did not stop in the Middle Ages. 
Shakespeare’s Caliban is such a product, the “freckled whelp” of the 
Algerian witch Sycorax and the devil. In modern America, Blacks 
have been variously demonized in a presentation of their imagined
danger to white women, especially after the Civil War eroded some of 

1.- The Poems of the Pearl Manuscript (ed. Malcolm Andrew and Ronald Waldron), 
Berkely: 1979, ll. 269-273.



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the restraints against interracial relations (the word “miscegenation”, 
in fact, was not coined until 1863, in America). Charlotte Brontë re-
versed the usual paradigm in her Jane Eyre, but horror movies as 
seemingly innocent as King Kong demonstrate it in its essence. Even 
a film as recent as 1979’s immensely successful Alien may have a 
cognizance of the fear in its underworkings: the grotesque alien crea-
ture which stalks the heroine (dressed in the final scene only in her 
underwear) drips K-Y Jelly from its teeth; the jaw tendons are con-
structed of shredded condoms; and the man inside the rubber suit is 
Bolaji Badejo, a Masai tribesman standing 2.2 meters tall who hap-
pened to be studying in England at the time.1

A societal anxiety surrounding interracial mingling is a powerful 
catalyst to the generation of monsters, but I would like to turn from it 
now to consider more fully the most useful of the monster’s functions,
at least from the viewpoint of the modern critic. I will return here to a 
notion introduced early in this discussion, that the appearance of the 
Other in the text is a revelatory moment of assertion during which the 
underlying ideology may be glimpsed. I suggest that this is especially 
so when the monster is being used as what could conveniently be 
called an illustrative antithesis, that is, as an embodiment of the textual
suppositions’ opposites. This unconscious but revealing dialectic is 
beautifully employed in the greatest of Old English poems and a work 
once devalued for its use of the monstrous, Beowulf .

Grendel is perhaps the most truly unforgettable monster in English 
literature, perhaps because he is born of the commingling of so many 
different traditions while transcending them all in his wonderful
loathsomeness. He intrudes into the narrative just as the scop is sing-
ing, Caedmon-like, of the creation of the world -a bright song which 

1.- See John Eastman, Retakes: Behind the Scenes of 500 Classic Movies (New York,
Ballantine Books, 1989), pp. 9-10.



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begins with the shaping of the earth and closes at its populating. 
Hrothgar’s warriors are by conjunction immediately brought into this 
antediluvian Golden Age (“Swa Ía drihtguman dreamum lifdon” -“so
the warriors lived in joy”1), until the music -hating Grendel intervenes;
the parallel to the biblical advent of the giants and their spreading of 
evil among humanity in the days before the flood is subtle but unmis-
takable. Grendel is immediately linked with Cain, the first male Other 
and the progenitor of the very giants of the Books of Enoch and Gen-
esis whose deeds Grendel is repeating (“swylce gigantas, pa wiÍ Gode 
wunnon / lange rage” [“such giants, that fought against God for a long 
time,” ll.113-4]). Grendel as a result exists in a narrative temporality 
which is simultaneously before the Deluge (in its biblical time frame) 
and after it (in its historical setting). The attachment of monsters of 
Germanic provenance to this genealogy as Grendel’s brethren further 
conflates the two frames, merging them into some uncertain, vanished 
past which they all suddenly share. This manifold past is quietly de-
fined against the Christian present of the poet throughout the work; its 
point of vanishing is the interlocked deaths of Beowulf and the dragon 
at the close of the poem.

Grendel’s relation to the comitatus or Männerbund is one of illus-
trative antithesis. He disperses the unity of the war band with an erup-
tion of misdirected violence; he supplants Hrothgar as ruler of the hall 
through senseless, jealous slaughter. Clearly the maintenance of order 
in a warrior society is achieved only by the repression of what Grendel
represents. Wergild, for example, the institution which allows a
payment of gold to disallow blood vengeance in the case of a murder,
works well at defusing destructive impulses only so long as a people 
can be made to abide by its strictures. Grendel represents the cultural 

1.- Old English quoted from ASPR vol. 4, Beowulf and Judith, ed. Elliott Van Kirk 
Dobbie (New York: Columbia University Press, 1953), l. 99; translation mine.



68

Other to whom conformity to societal dictates is an impossibility be-
cause those dictates are not comprehensible to him; he is at the same 
time a monsterized version of what a member of that very society can 
become when those same dictates are rejected, when the authority of 
leaders or custom disintegrates and the subordination of individual to 
hierarchy is lost.1 Grendel is therefore an uncontained version of the 
wroecca, who in his exile turns not to elegiac poetry but to subversive 
violence.

Beowulf’s triumph over Grendel becomes a fantasy of the triumph 
of comitatus (a homosocial society held together by metaphorically 
fraternal bonds and a hierarchical system of allegiance) over individ-
uality (associated here with atavism and anarchy). Grendel’s ingestion
of the sleeping man in Heorot and the numerous references too the 
power of his grasp are the signifiers of his uncontrolled, destructive 
appetite; Beowulf’s balancing grip and remedial rending of this very 
arm are its antidote: subordinated service which results in ataractic 
unity for society and, to make the action attractive, a celebrated per-
sonal glory for its enactor. By the end of the long episode this arm has 
been replaced with a more powerful emblem, the retrieved head of the 
giant:

? a waes be feaxe on flet boren

Grendles heafod, paer guman druncon,

egeslic for eorlum ond paere idese mid,

wliteseon wraetlic; weras on sawon. (1646-9).

1.- Cf. Hayden White’s notion of “ostensive self-definition by negation” in his essay 
“The Forms of Wildness: Archeology of an Idea,” Tropics of Discourse: Essays in 
Cultural Criticism  (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1978), pp. 151-152.



69

Then the head of Grendel, held up by its hair, was carried into where the 

men were drinking; it was a thing of horror for the warriors and their 

queen, a stunning spectacle; they looked upon it well.

The men at first gape at the severed head, but their attention
quickly moves from the fragment of the giant whole to the warrior 
who fragmented the giant and remained whole. The displayed remnant
of the adversary becomes almost totemic, a Medusa-like organic 
symbol which causes the watchers to stare in the realization that the 
monster’s powers have been transferred to the conqueror. Grendel is 
reduced to a trophy, a dumbshow of the punishment for deviation; his 
destruction is a public validation of the control and acceptance of 
structured society whose antithesis he represents. This validation is 
not complete until the emblem has been changed from a hand to a 
head; after his dismemberment, Grendel crawls back to his mother 
and unleashes another tide of condemnable violence, this time
spawned of retribution. Grendel’s unnamed mother suggests a spec-
trum of negative attributes not very different from her son’s, but cen-
tered around violent revenge rather than individualism and destructive 
nonconformity; even though her vengeance seems outwardly fair (one 
of Hrothgar’s men for the one child she has lost), her act threatens a 
spiralling cycle of death-for-death which it is in the best interest of the 
warband to defuse. Her appearance establishes, then, another
dialectic to be resolved by a demise -which, like the death of her son, 
is a validation maneuver.

A monster’s primary function as illustrative antithesis might best be 
described as an inducement to conformity. Giants, for example, are 
monsters connected to aberrant and voracious sexual appetite in the 
romances, where, following Geoffrey of Monmouth’s giant of Mount 
Saint Michael, they ordinarily are encountered with at le ast one ab-
ducted noblewoman who is being overtly or implicitly threatened with 



70

rape: in Lybeaus Desconus, two giants have kidnapped Violette in 
order to share her; in Yvain, Harpin of the Mountain wants to prosti-
tute a maiden to his “rabble of knaves”; in Malory’s Launcelot du
Lake, sixty ladies have been enslaved. Because courtly love and the 
control inherent to it were linked inseparably in the romances, the 
giants became symbols of the anarchic power of both unsubordinated 
violence and of unchecked libido. This linking of force and sexuality is 
programatically shattered by the romance compulsion to restraint, but 
replaced with the interdiction of all sexual expression and the ide-
alization of abstinence.

The repressed, however, like Freud himself, always seems to re-
turn. Monsters are continually linked to sexuality, the expression of 
which is depicted as perverse in its excess, or perhaps in its nature ta-
boo. Monsters were earlier described as part escapist fantasy in their 
creation, and the linking of monstrosity with sexuality makes monsters
all the more appealing as a temporary egress from repression. This 
simultaneous repulsion and attraction at the core of the monster’s 
essential composition accounts greatly for their continued cultural
popularity. We fear and loathe monsters at the same time as we might 
envy them.

Every monster is a measure of its age, a core sample of prevalent 
attitude and unspoken ideologies. So, too, is the process of interpreting
them. The monster is a window into worlds perhaps now estranged;
the value in their study is, in the end, to be found as much in the 
images visible through this glass as well as in the reflection of the 
observer cast suddenly upon it.

Jeffrey J. Cohen

Harvard University



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