Chapter 5

The mighty and the monstrous

Order and chaos

In medieval societies, religious and secular literature built communities by encouraging and persuading individuals to behave in certain ways, to absorb particular sets of knowledge, and to emulate similar ideals. There is more to it than this, but prescriptive and proscriptive texts exist in all surviving records from the earliest centuries. Some texts are explicitly proscriptive; sermons and a good deal of religious material could be thought of as exhorting against impious and amoral thoughts, words, and deeds in no uncertain terms; and simply forbidding actions that were thought to encourage waywardness, witchcraft, and the abandonment of societally acceptable norms. Other texts, though, like the dynamic and engaging drama that emerged in the 14th and 15th centuries, could proscribe by demonstrating the consequence of evil personified, or by creating visually and aurally repellent enactments of dreadful deeds. Those who maintained control—the church, the elite, local government—persistently sought to maintain order and deter disruptive, immoral, or anti-social behaviour.

Order comes from the delineation of propriety, the regulation of society, the measuring and marking of territory, and the acknowledgement by the majority of what is acceptable. For early British and Irish people, this would be reflected in settlements being established and borders being respected and remembered. Christian processions at Rogationtide walked along the boundaries of the local parish (and ‘beating the bounds’ still happens in some townships like Laugharne in south Wales); legal charters written in Latin often included clauses describing in great detail the landmarks that denoted the perimeter of the land being granted.

Burghs, villages, towns, cities, and countries followed laws, whether familial, tribal, local, regional, or national. What lay on the other side of the boundary of these laws resulted in ‘outlaws’, those who lived beyond order, beyond the familiar, beyond the known. In places inhabited by outlaws, or areas that were unmapped and uninhabited, there lay the dangers of the unknown and people, or things, or spaces that were out of control. As the centuries have progressed, those unknown regions have become further and further removed as exploration reveals much of the world; but still, deep sea, darkest forest, and outer space itself remain marginal, unquantifiable, and potentially (in films, on television, in fiction) filled with monstrosities and imminent disaster.

For the medieval world, the unknown, and thus the potentially monstrous, was closer to home. Without streetlights, without clearly demarcated and deforested landscape, there was a genuine darkness at night that is often difficult to emulate now. It was so much easier to get lost on journeys when there were no compasses, no signs, and sometimes no clear roads to follow. So, the spaces that were safe were inside walls, fences, houses, societies, whereas wilder, uncultivated landscape threatened. In Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, when Gawain makes his way to meet the Green Knight, he leaves the warmth of Camelot and enters a forest only to be challenged by countless monsters and wild creatures.

The shadowy land in between places of civilized order presents wonderful opportunities for authors’ imaginations. In the Anglo-Saxon literary tradition, many texts can be singled out for attention, including the earliest English romance, Apollonius of Tyre (in Cambridge, Corpus Christi College, 201, datable to about 1050), which problematizes monstrosity by having as its primary antagonist someone who should be the epitome of order and rule: a king, Antiochus. He commits incest with his daughter and then kills successive noblemen to cover his tracks, and by so doing, he provides an excellent foil to the hero of the prose tale—Apollonius.

As with many romances, the plot is complex, driven by motifs of exile and return, loyalty and treachery, love and vengeance. This same classical narrative provided the source for Shakespeare’s Pericles, but was also treated by John Gower—Chaucer’s contemporary and friend—an exceptionally talented author, who wrote in Latin, French, and English. Gower included the story in his major English poem, the Confessio amantis (The Lover’s Confession), a consolatory work comprised of a sequence of verse tales, dated to 1390. In the Confessio, Antiochus in Apollonius of Tyre is used to exemplify the dangers of lechery. The audience is told that Antiochus’ wife has died and:

His doghter, which was piereles

His daughter, who was without comparison

Of beauté, duelte aboute him stille;

In beauty, dwelled with him still;

Bot whanne a man hath welthe at wille,

But when a man has wealth in abundance,

The fleissh is frele and falleth ofte.

The flesh is frail and fails often.

And that this maide, tendre and softe,

And so this maiden, tender and soft,

Which in hire fadres chambres duelte,

Who dwelled in her father’s chambers,

Withinne a time wiste and felte

Soon knew and experienced

For likinge and concupiscence,

Because of desire and physical lust,

Withoute insihte of conscience,

Without insight from conscience,

The fader so with lustes blente,

The father, so blinded with lust,

That he caste al his hole entente

That he set his entire intent

His oghne doghter for to spille.

Upon the rape of his own daughter.

There are multiple levels of horror and monstrosity in Gower’s depiction of Antiochus, which, line by line, seems to explain the premeditation of his depravity, building up rationalizing of the awful deed and his ghastly intention (‘I’m a king and I can have anything; my flesh is weak; she’s so beautiful; I really want her; I can have what I want’). ‘Conscience’, which should guide him, is absent; intellectual insight and spiritual sight are lacking, so that he is simply, but horribly, driven by bodily urges to rape his own daughter.

The repulsive actions of Antiochus and his inability to curb his overwhelming physical desires highlight one of the key aspects of monstrosity for medieval writers. In sermons throughout the centuries, preachers railed against permitting the seven (sometimes eight) deadly sins to take hold. Wrath, Lechery, Gluttony, Envy, Avarice, Sloth, and Pride feature in countless tracts, didactic poems, plays, and saints’ lives. In many depictions and lists, Pride heads the sins; in others, it is Gluttony. Indeed, a list put together by the early theologian Isidore of Seville outlines whole nations’ associations with particular sins: Ira brittorum, stultitia saxonum, libido scottorum, crudelitas pictorum (‘the anger of the Britons; the foolishness of the Saxons; the lust of the Scots [the Scotti are the Irish]; the inhumanity of the Picts’).

Asserting the monstrosity of whole races was (and is) one way in which colonizers, or proponents of particular dominant religious beliefs, seek to oppress or control others. William of Malmesbury, probably the finest 12th-century historiographer, in his explication of the Norman divine right to rule through conquest, reviles the English for their drunkenness with its attendant witlessness and loss of national status. In his great Latin Deeds of the Kings of the English, the Gesta regum Anglorum, which he finished in 1125, he writes in Book 1 that for the English: ‘Drinking communally was done by all, and in this habit they made no distinction between night and day … There followed the vices that accompany drunkenness … eating food that encouraged intoxication and drinking until they caused themselves to throw up.’ For Malmesbury, it was the Normans’ ability to control themselves that distinguished them from the conquered, sinful English, though he laments, too, the loss of the Anglo-Saxon realm to the Normans.

Size matters

Excess and lack of control, lack of order in one’s own demeanour, created a major form of monstrosity from within society, roundly condemned by authorities, particularly those in the church and particularly those who sought to regulate. In medieval romance, the monstrous outsider was often depicted as a ‘Saracen’, a universalized type of opponent, instigated by the Christian Crusades against the Muslims for control of the Holy Land in the eastern Mediterranean. These campaigns, beginning in 1096 and lasting all the way into the 15th century, became a major subject of European romance literature, many narratives featuring knightly battles against monstrous Saracens. Through these depictions of ideal knightly heroism, white European crusaders were given models for ostensible right behaviour, and spiritual encouragement for their religious wars.

The oldest surviving version of a chanson de geste (‘song of heroic deeds’) is the 12th-century French La Chanson de Roland, The Song of Roland (Oxford, Bodleian Library, Digby 23). In this poem, after Charlemagne’s army has been engaged in battle against the Saracen in Spain, Roland, the hero of the story, is ambushed by Saracens, and boldly fights to his death, but not before he has blown his ivory horn (the Olifant) to summon Charlemagne to take revenge. While many of the Saracen enemy are depicted as worthy opponents—noble and beautiful, though damned—others, like Falsaron in laisse 94, brother to the Muslim king, Marsilla, are gigantic, monstrous:

Suz cel nen at plus encrisme felun;

There is no more hardened felon on earth;

Entre les dous oilz mult out large le front,

Between his two eyes was a very large space,

Grant demi pied mesurer i pout hom.

It measures at least a half-foot.

While Falsaron’s heathenness is a focus for the poet, the evidence provided for his being a ‘hardened felon’ is his size, emphasized by the single lingering detail (synecdoche) of the enormous gap between his eyes. The implication is that if the gap between his eyes is six inches, then how big is the rest of him? He looms vast and monstrous into the text.

Later medieval romances in English, French, Welsh, and their multiple reflexes, continue the theme of the Saracen enemy who is overcome by the Christian hero. In texts such as the Romance of Horn, Guy of Warwick, Richard Coeur de Lion, Otuel, The Sultan of Babylon, and Beues of Hampton, the gigantic Saracen is a type, delineated by his monstrous appearance or his skin colour, manifesting, in these good versus evil formulae, inner debility and sinfulness. The Christian protagonist is usually able to demonstrate his overwhelming superiority in a display of combat and virtuous speech that is lauded by the poet. In this way, literary texts contributed to a systematic derogation of the exoticized enemy, bolstering the social and cultural ideals and efforts promoted by European kings, aristocracy, prelates, and popes for centuries. The formulaic nature of this scene though could also, effectively, be appropriated symbolically for the denigration and attempted conquest of any enemy.

Earlier texts explored the nature of monstrosity with startling effect, too, and none more so than the epic Anglo-Saxon poem Beowulf. In this poem, the eponymous hero, and greatest of all warriors, Beowulf, arrives at Heorot, the hall of the Danish king, Hroðgar. He comes to help Hroðgar defeat the monster, Grendel, who has attacked and killed Danish warriors for the previous twelve years. Grendel is a complex monster, not least because he is eternally damned through a direct relationship with Cain, the first murderer in the Bible. We are told that Grendel ‘carried God’s wrath’ (‘Godes yrre bær’) suggesting, ambiguously, that Grendel is the carrier of God’s wrath against the very people he attacks, and/or that God is angry with Grendel. He is also depicted as an outsider, haunting the moors, excluded from the joys of the warriors’ hall. This may not have elicited a great deal of sympathy from Anglo-Saxon audiences sitting in a hall listening to the poem being recited, conscious of the absolute darkness just beyond the door. It does, though, problematize the nature of evil, the depiction of the monstrous. From a modern perspective, especially, some contemporary readers wonder whether, if monstrosity is innate and inherited, the monster is to blame for its actions? If the monster is permanently outcast, why would it not seek some kind of revenge?

The Beowulf-poet creates in Grendel one of the all-time most spectacular monsters. He is a monster about whom we know very specific details, released gradually in the course of the long poem. We learn that he has the name Grendel (who named him?); that he is a fiend from hell (‘feond on helle’); that he is man-shaped; that he attacks at night; we know he is an ‘āglǽca’ (‘a monster’, or, confusingly ‘a hero’). We learn from Beowulf’s first speech at Heorot that Grendel is a ‘fierce monster’ who eschews weapons and that:

byreð blodig wæl, byrgean þenceð,

[Grendel] will carry off the bloody corpse, intending to taste it,

eteð angenga unmurnlice

the one who goes alone will eat without remorse

Grendel is solitary, it seems, and cannibalistic and huge, carrying off thirty warriors in the first attack, years ago. In Grendel’s attack on Heorot, where Beowulf now lies waiting, additional details are offered that heighten the terror: Grendel breaks off the door of the hall at the lightest touch; he feels immense rage intending to kill all the warriors in Beowulf’s troop who are asleep; and from his eyes emanates ‘ligge gelicost leoht unfæger’ (‘an ugly light, most like a flame’).

Descriptive detail also continues after the fight in Heorot, when Beowulf (himself somewhat monstrous as the strongest of men on earth) recounts his victory not once, but twice—to Hroðgar in the morning, and again to his uncle, King Hygelac, on his return to Geatland. This drip-feeding of detail is surely more frightening than receiving the full picture all at once. We are never quite sure what Grendel really looks like, which provides wonderful opportunities for the imagination—terror’s most useful tool—to take over. And just in case we were minded to construct and dismiss him as an outright bedevilled demon, we are introduced to Grendel’s mother the night after Beowulf’s victory. She is nameless, but comes to seek vengeance for the death of her son, as she should according to the ethos of the Germanic Heroic code.

Elements of humanness and the supernatural, of demonic lineage and familial love combine to create these two troubling and unknowable monsters in Beowulf. A third monster—a fifty-foot fire-breathing treasure-hoarding dragon—that finally defeats Beowulf seems less problematic somehow. It might be, then, the proximity of the monstrous to the human that creates the most disruption to the status quo. This would be true geographically, as much as in terms of physical relatedness. The most successful aliens in modern science fiction, whether in books or films, are depicted as human-like with, perhaps, two legs, a body, and a head, and it is their encounters with humans that bring conflict and terror.

Encountering and transforming

In taking the gamble of travelling into unmapped and potentially untamable spaces, the medieval explorer could not have known what he or she would encounter. From the classical period, at least, when Pliny discussed the strange and wonderful human races in India and Africa, numerous literary works survive that appear to provide orientation for the interested traveller, sharing some of the creatures they describe in common.

These works extend to maps like the glorious and enormous Hereford map of the world, the Mappa mundi, the margins of which are filled with the unusual bodies of the peoples that one could hope (or fear) to meet. Audiences can see or hear about people-like races such as the headless Brixontes, whose eyes and mouth are in their chests; the Homodubii, who are humanlike from head to navel and like a donkey from the waist down. The traveller need not fear the Homodubii, because they run away if they see or hear anyone nearby. The Donestre are also part-human, part-animal, and can speak every language known to humankind (see Figure 5); with this linguistic aptitude, they lure the unwary traveller into their trap, and proceed to devour their prey, except for the head, over which the Donestre then weep. Monstrous women—Amazonians (like the race of women defeated by Theseus in Chaucer’s Knight’s Tale)—have distorted bodies, and clearly threaten men with whom they come into contact.

Writers and artists lingered over the depiction of these curiosities. Whole, cogent tales were concocted to provide contexts that appeared truthful. The illustrated text called the Marvels of the East in the Beowulf-manuscript (Figure 5) lists the monsters that one might meet in the region of the Red Sea. An immensely popular narrative, the Letter of Prester John, circulated widely in Europe; and in the second half of the 14th century, the French Book of John Mandeville appeared, translated into Middle English within decades, as well as Irish, Welsh, Latin, and many other languages. Cast as personal histories with a first-person, eyewitness narrator, these texts are predominantly fictional, but supply numerous geographic and factual elements. Rather like Alexander to Aristotle in the Beowulf manuscript, and the whole buoyant tradition of Alexander-romances, real places, from Europe to India to Egypt, are juxtaposed with fantastical inhabitants to entertain, inform, and simultaneously misinform. They remind medieval audiences of the benefits of being in familiar places as well, contrarily, as whetting the appetite of the adventurous.

5. Marvels of the East, London, British Library, Cotton Vitellius A. xv, folio 103 verso (the Beowulf-manuscript Donestre monster).

Journeys in medieval literature almost always involved discovery. In the real journeys of Gerald of Wales through Wales and through Ireland, he encountered a wide range of people, stories, and curiosities that he was not able to explain. In the questing exploits of great heroes, such as the Arthurian knights, or heroes in nations’ originary myths, inexplicable creatures and grotesque characters populate the landscape. In the early Irish Ulster Cycle’s Togail Bruidne Da Derga (The Destruction of the Hostel of Da Derga), Cichuil is a monstrous woman, with enlarged genitals, whose one-eyed, one-footed, and one-handed husband is a swineherd, called Fer Caille. This couple is paralleled by Cymydei Cymeinfoll and Llasar Llaes Gyfnewid, who flee from Ireland to the Welsh court of King Bendigeidfran, carrying the Pair Dadeni (magic cauldron of rebirth), which they present as a gift. This narrative is part of the second branch Mabinogi of Branwen, and the numbers of parallel motifs and characters show the close relationship between Irish and Welsh literature—the Celtic tradition.

There is no doubt that the magical or supernatural was thought of as potentially monstrous; elements of the otherworldly with its refusal to comply with the order and familiarity of the real world could also be regarded as threatening and portentous. Indeed, the Latin root of ‘monster’ is monstrum, ‘portent, warning, prodigy’, and at its simplest and least threatening, the monstrous is someone or something different from the norm. In the case of the 14th-century English poem Sir Orfeo, the supernatural is very present in the shape of the Otherworld, which breaks into the natural order of the world of Orfeo and his wife, Heroudis. This poem is a Breton lay, a short form of romance, which typically contains elements of the magical and supernatural. It exists in three manuscripts, the earliest of which is Edinburgh, National Library of Scotland, Advocates 19. 2. 1, the Auchinleck Manuscript, dated to c.1330 (see Box 8).

This genre of Breton lay derives from the form developed by Marie de France in her late 12th-century French Lais, and it may be that a lost French Lay of Orfeo influenced the Middle English text. Sir Orfeo brilliantly reveals the nature of medieval textual composition through adaptation and transformation. Its inspiration is the story of Orpheus and Eurydice from Ovid’s Metamorphoses, a myth that also appears in Boethius’ Consolation of Philosophy (translated in the 9th century by King Alfred and his scholars, and in the 14th by Geoffrey Chaucer), and in Walter Map’s De nugis curialium. The Liber monstrorum contains a reference to Orfeus; and, much later, in the 15th century, Robert Henryson (1460–1500), a Scottish makar (a court poet, like the Welsh bards), also writes a verse poem, Orpheus and Euridice.

In the traditional Ovidian versions of the myth, which includes Henryson’s retelling, Orpheus loses his wife Eurydice to the king of the Underworld, but he wins her back through his superlative harp-playing. However, on exiting the Underworld, he does what the king forbade him to—he looks back at his wife coming behind him—and he loses her forever. In Sir Orfeo, Orfeo (now a king with his capital at Winchester) loses his wife to the malevolent Faery King with his Otherworld, which dystopically parallels Orfeo’s own kingdom and castle. Orfeo abandons everything and lives as a penitent in the forest with only his harp to remind him of happier days. He sees his wife with the Faeries and follows them back to the Otherworld, where he wins her back by playing his harp. In this story, Eurydice and Orfeo both make it back to Winchester and they resume their life happily after the ten-year hiatus.

Box 8 Scottish literature

Scotland has long been a nexus for significant cross-cultural exchange. Originally inhabited by the Picts in the north, in the 5th century, the Scotti (or Gaels), an eastern Irish tribe, settled in the west of Scotland. From the later 8th century, Scandinavian immigration was important; and the influence of the Anglo-Saxons and, subsequently, the French, all played major roles in Scottish culture and literature. Apart from place-names and some Pictish inscriptions, early literature includes the Latin Life of St Columba, the Irish saint who founded Iona in 563, whose Life was written by Adomnán in the 7th century. Scottish poets also travelled to Ireland to work for royal and ecclesiastical patrons; and early Welsh poetry is also intertwined in the long history of Celtic literature across the British Isles.

This complex network of languages and influences is seen in the 16th-century Book of the Dean of Lismore, a manuscript containing works written in Scots Gaelic, as well as Middle Scots, and Latin. This reflects the vibrant literary culture of Scotland from the 14th century onwards, when English, French, and Latin literature was written and performed in Scotland, beginning, most notably with John Barbour’s Middle Scots Brus. The 15th century witnessed the emergence of the makars, a significant group of court poets writing in English, such as Dunbar and Henryson, whose corpora of work are highly renowned.

This sophisticated, evocative, and engaging poem of just 604 lines intertwines classical myth with contemporary courtly references, a 14th-century setting, and Celtic traditions and superstitions involving Faeries. Influencing the composition of Sir Orfeo, as with the medieval Tristan stories, are the Irish narratives of the aithed, the ‘abducted, the taken’, where humans were stolen by the Faeries to be left in a sort of limbo state. The depiction of these bodies, lying around the walls of the castle, is monstrous indeed. In Sir Orfeo, Orfeo gazes on all manner of people who had been brought to the Otherworld, and who ‘seemed dead and yet were not’: the headless body; some bodies without arms; some horribly wounded; some bound up in madness; some still armed and sitting on their horses; some strangled while feasting; some drowned; some burnt; some insane; women in the midst of childbirth; and then his own wife, in a still-life, taken as she slept under a magically grafted tree. This is a scene akin to the depictions of the Temples in Chaucer’s Knight’s Tale, where violent images dominate; but here in Sir Orfeo, it suggests that behind the most glittering environment, and the most courteous etiquette, lies the monstrous in a continuous backdrop to life’s fragile joys.

The rapid transformation of the happy human to this seemingly permanent state of neither one thing nor the other is also, perhaps, its own kind of monstrous event. And within this definition of the monstrous or supernatural we might consider the werewolf, Bisclavret, who, in his human form, is a noble Breton baron in Marie de France’s late 12th-century lai of that name; and Merlin, the wizard, who is able to transform himself into a variety of guises in the contemporary Estoire de Merlin; and other shape-shifters, like the devil who disguises himself as a duke in order to impregnate the mother of Sir Gowther in the 15th-century tail-rhyme poem Sir Gowther; as well as Bertilak, the nobleman who hosts Sir Gawain, and then transforms into the Green Knight; and, finally, there is the old hag in Chaucer’s Wife of Bath’s Tale (another Breton lay), who magically becomes a beautiful young woman to please her new husband, forced into marriage with her.

The monstrous takes many forms, including forms with no defined shape, or a mysteriously changeable shape, or a shape that is strange and extraordinary, like the arguing birds in the lively 13th-century avian debate, The Owl and the Nightingale. The monstrous—like St Christopher or Bisclavret—need not be demonic. There is a more common tendency, though, especially within a Christian context, for that which is not beautiful to be considered inwardly corrupt and thus outwardly monstrous. In effect, the monstrous becomes, in the hands of Christian ideologues, a tool for suppression; and in the hands of the literature of entertainment, a mechanism for exciting curiosity, but also, conversely, instructing audiences that it’s sometimes preferable to want to stay among the people one knows.