‘Legends of the slaughter of a destructive monster are to be found all over the world. The thought underlying them all is that the monster slain is preternatural and hostile to mankind.’
E. S. Hartland, The Legend of Perseus (1896)
In 1839 a young Englishman, Henry Austen Layard, set out to travel overland to Ceylon, the island now known as Sri Lanka. Halfway through his journey, when he was crossing the wild desert region then known as Mesopotamia, his curiosity was aroused by a series of mysterious mounds in the sand. He paused to investigate them, and thus began one of the most important investigations in the history of archaeology. For what Layard had stumbled on turned out to be the remains of one of the earliest cities ever built by humankind, biblical Niniveh.
Over the decades which followed, many fascinating discoveries were made at Niniveh, but none more so than a mass of clay tablets which came to light in 1853, covered in small wedge-shaped marks which were obviously some unknown form of writing. The task of deciphering this ‘cuneiform’ script was to take the best part of the next 20 years. But when in 1872 George Smith of the British Museum finally unveiled the results of his labours, the Victorian public was electrified. One sequence of the tablets contained fragments of a long epic poem, Dating back to the dawn of civilisation, it was by far the earliest written story in the world.
The first part of the Sumerian Epic of Gilgamesh, as we now know it, tells of how the kingdom of Uruk has fallen under the terrible shadow of a great and mysterious evil. The source of the threat is traced to a monstrous figure, Humbaba, who lives half across the world, at the heart of a remote forest. The hero, Gilgamesh, goes to the armourers who equip him with special weapons, a great bow and a mighty axe. He sets out on a long, hazardous journey to Humbaba’s distant lair, where he finally comes face to face with the monster. They enjoy a series of taunting exchanges, then embark on a titanic struggle. Against such supernatural powers, it seems Gilgamesh cannot possibly win. But finally, by a superhuman feat, he manages to kill his monstrous opponent. The shadowy threat has been lifted. Gilgamesh has saved his kingdom and can return home triumphant.
In the autumn of 1962, nearly 5000 years after the story of Gilgamesh was placed in the library at Niniveh, a period encompassing almost the whole of recorded human history, a fashionable crowd converged on Leicester Square in London for the premiere of a new film. Dr No was the first of what was to become, over the next 40 years, the most popular series of films ever made (even by 1980 it was estimated that one or more of the screen adventures of James Bond had been seen by some 2 billion people, then nearly half the earth’s population). With their quintessentially late-twentieth century mixture of space-age gadgetry, violence and sex, anything more remote from the primitive world of those inhabitants of the first cities who conceived the religious myth of Gilgamesh might seem hard to imagine.
Yet consider the story which launched the series of Bond films that night in 1962. The Western world falls under the shadow of a great and mysterious evil. The source of the threat is traced to a monstrous figure, the mad and deformed scientist Dr No, who lives half across the world in an underground cavern on a remote island. The hero James Bond goes to the armourer who equips him with special weapons. He sets out on a long, hazardous journey to Dr No’s distant lair, where he finally comes face to face with the monster. They enjoy a series of taunting exchanges, then embark on a titanic struggle. Against such near-supernatural powers, it seems Bond cannot possibly win. But finally, by a superhuman feat, he manages to kill his monstrous opponent. The shadowy threat has been lifted. The Western world has been saved. Bond can return home triumphant.
Any story which can make such a leap across the whole of recorded human history must have some profound symbolic significance in the inner life of mankind. Certainly this is true of our first type of story, the plot which may be called ‘Overcoming the Monster’.
The realm of storytelling contains nothing stranger or more spectacular than this terrifying, life-threatening, seemingly all-powerful monster whom the hero must confront in a fight to the death.
We first usually encounter these extraordinary creations early in our lives, in the guises of the wolves, witches and giants of fairy tales. Little Red Riding Hood goes off into the great forest to visit her kindly grandmother, only to find that granny has been replaced by the wicked wolf, whose only desire is to eat Red Riding Hood. In the nick of time, a brave forester bursts in to kill the wolf with his axe, and the little heroine is saved. Hansel and Gretel are cruelly abandoned to die in the forest, where they meet the apparently kindly old woman who lives in a house made of gingerbread. But she turns out to be a wicked witch, whose only wish is to devour them. Just when all seems lost, they manage to push her into her own oven and burn her to death, finding, as their reward, a great treasure with which they can triumphantly return home. Jack climbs his magic beanstalk to discover at the top a new world, where he enters a mysterious castle belonging to a terrifying and bloodthirsty giant. After progressively enraging this monstrous figure by three successive visits, each time managing to steal a golden treasure, Jack finally arouses the giant to what seems like a fatal pursuit. Only in the nick of time does Jack manage to scramble down the beanstalk, and bring it crashing down with an axe. The giant falls dead to the ground, and Jack is left to enjoy the three priceless treasures he has won from its grasp.
The essence of the ‘Overcoming the Monster’ story is simple. Both we and the hero are made aware of the existence of some superhuman embodiment of evil power. This monster may take human form (e.g., a giant or a witch); the form of an animal (a wolf, a dragon, a shark); or a combination of both (the Minotaur, the Sphinx). It is always deadly, threatening destruction to those who cross its path or fall into its clutches. Often it is threatening an entire community or kingdom, even mankind and the world in general. But the monster often also has in its clutches some great prize, a priceless treasure or a beautiful ‘Princess’.
So powerful is the presence of this figure, so great the sense of threat which emanates from it, that the only thing which matters to us as we follow the story is that it should be killed and its dark power overthrown. Eventually the hero must confront the monster, often armed with some kind of ‘magic weapons’, and usually in or near its lair, which is likely to be in a cave, a forest, a castle, a lake, the sea, or some other deep and enclosed place. Battle is joined and it seems that, against such terrifying odds, the hero cannot possibly win. Indeed there is a moment when his destruction seems all but inevitable. But at the last moment, as the story reaches its climax, there is a dramatic reversal. The hero makes a ‘thrilling escape from death’ and the monster is slain. The hero’s reward is beyond price. He wins the treasure, or the hand of the ‘Princess’. He has liberated the world – community, kingdom, the human race – from the shadow of this threat to its survival. And in honour of his achievement, he may well go on to become some kind of ruler or king.
There have been few cultures in the world which have not produced some version of the Overcoming The Monster story. But a civilisation we particularly associate with such stories is that of the ancient Greeks, whose mythology was swarming with monsters of every kind, from the original Titans overcome by Zeus or the one-eyed giant Polyphemus blinded by Odysseus to the mighty Python strangled by Apollo or the riddle-posing Sphinx who threw herself over the cliff when Oedipus proved to be the first man who could correctly answer her riddle (for which he was chosen to be king over Thebes).
One of the most celebrated of the Greek monster-slaying heroes was Perseus, who had to overcome not one monster but two, one female, one male. When, as a young boy, he is cast adrift in the world with his beautiful mother, the Princess Danae, the two fall under the shadow of the cruel tyrant Acrisius, who demands that Danae should succumb to his advances. In a desperate bid to save his mother from this fate, young Perseus offers to perform any task the tyrant should set him. The cruel Acrisius therefore sends the boy off to the end of the world to obtain the head of the dreadful Gorgon Medusa, the mere sight of whose face is sufficient to turn a man to stone. Perseus is equipped by the gods with magic weapons, a pair of winged sandals, enabling him to fly, a ‘helmet of invisibility’ and a brilliantly polished shield, in which he will be able to see the Medusa’s reflection without having to look at her directly. ‘By remote and pathless ways’, as Ovid put it, Perseus reaches the Gorgons’ lair at the Western edge of the world, and severs the Medusa’s snake-covered head. It might seem that he has triumphantly concluded the task that has been set him; but we now learn that this was merely the essential preparation for a further immense task which awaits him on his journey home. As he flies back with his prize, he looks down to see a beautiful, weeping Princess, Andromeda, chained to a rock by the sea. She has been placed there as tribute to appease a fearsome sea-monster, which has been sent by Poseidon to ravage her father’s kingdom. Perseus sees the huge reptile rising out of the deeps to seize Andromeda and swoops down to engage it in battle. He is able to use the trophy of his first victory, the head of Medusa, to turn the monster to stone. He is rewarded with the hand of the Princess, for liberating her father’s kingdom from this awful threat. He returns home, where he uses the Medusa’s head to turn the tyrant Acrisius to stone, and eventually goes on to become king of Argos.
Another celebrated monster-slayer was Theseus, who also grows up alone in the world with his mother. On coming of age he goes to rejoin his father, King Aegeus in Athens, having to kill a series of monsters and villains on the way. But when he arrives he finds his father’s kingdom under a terrible shadow, cast by a rival kingdom across the sea in Crete, ruled over by the grim tyrant King Minos. Every ninth year the Athenians must pay a tribute to the tyrant, by sending the flower of their city’s youth to feed the frightful monster the Minotaur, half-bull, half-man (another creation of Poseidon), which lives at the heart of the mighty Labyrinth, a dark, enclosed stone maze from which no one has ever found a way out. Theseus volunteers to lead the party of young men and maidens who are to be sacrificed to this creature; and on arriving in Crete he wins the love and support of the tyrant’s daughter Ariadne, who secretly supplies him with the ‘magic aids’, a sword and a skein of thread, he needs to win victory. Finding his way to the centre of the Labyrinth, unravelling the thread, he confronts the Minotaur and kills it. Ariadne’s thread enables him to retrace his way back through the maze of tunnels to the open air. It is true that, when they then flee together back to Athens, Theseus abandons his Princess on the island of Naxos. And as he comes within sight of the mainland, and forgets to hoist a white rather than a black sail to show his father that he has returned victorious, King Aegeus throws himself in grief into the sea which ever afterwards bore his name. But this also means that, like many another monster-slaying hero, Theseus succeeds to the kingdom, becoming the greatest ruler Athens ever had. He also eventually marries the Princess, by making Ariadne’s sister Phaedra his queen.
Compared with the array of loathsome and supernatural monsters in Greek mythology (not forgetting the succession of horrors, like the many-headed Hydra, overcome by Heracles in the course of his twelve labours), the villain of the most familiar Overcoming the Monster story in Jewish legend might seem almost domesticated. But when the Philistine army invaded the kingdom of Saul, nothing could have seemed more terrifying to the children of Israel than the Philistines’ towering, seemingly invincible champion, the boastful giant Goliath. When an obscure little shepherd-boy David stepped forward to challenge the giant, first his own brothers, then the Israelite army as a whole could not have been more scornful – until they saw the deadly aim with which he cast his ‘magic’ slingstones into the giant’s forehead, sending the great figure toppling lifeless to the ground. And a detail of the story which might be overlooked is what happens to David after his victory. For being the saviour of his country, he is given the hand in marriage of King Saul’s daughter, the Princess Michal; and eventually the young giant-slayer succeeds Saul to become his country’s greatest king.
The hero’s immediate reward for slaying the monster may not always be the winning of a ‘Princess’ and succession to a kingdom: but in some form or another these are rarely very far away.
Another notable constellation of monster-tales, for instance, were those which loomed up in the imaginations of the inhabitants of northern Europe, amid the mists and darkness of the first millennium of the Christian era. The world has rarely seen such a parade of giants, dragons, trolls, treacherous dwarves, foul fiends and ‘loathly worms’ as infested the Norse sagas and Germanic and Celtic epics of these times. And here the hero’s immediate reward for slaying the monster was likely to be a fabulous treasure. One such tale, later to achieve wider currency from its adaptation by Wagner, was the episode in the Volsunga Saga which tells of how the young hero Sigurd, with the aid of his ‘magic weapon’, the great sword Gram, slays the horrible monster Fafnir, who sits in the middle of a wilderness brooding over a great treasure, which includes access to all sorts of runic knowledge, such as an understanding of the song of the birds. But he then goes on to discover ‘the beauteous battle-maiden’ Brynhild, lying asleep on a mountain top, guarded by a ring of magic flames which only ‘the true hero’ can enter; and it is the treasures and the secret knowledge he has won from his victory over Fafnir which enable him to waken her and win her love.
Another celebrated Overcoming the Monster story from the Dark Ages is that of Beowulf. Again we begin with the familiar image of a kingdom which has fallen under a terrible shadow: the little community of Heorot which is nightly menaced by the predatory assaults of the mysterious monster Grendel. The young hero Beowulf comes from across the sea and eventually, in a great nocturnal battle, deals the monster a mortal wound: only to discover, when he tracks the trail of Grendel’s blood, that he must confront the monster’s even more terrible mother, in the lair at the bottom of a deep lake where she is brooding over the body of her dead son. Although Beowulf’s immediate reward for his victory over the two monsters is a rich hoard of ‘ancient treasures and twisted gold’ from the grateful king whose kingdom he has saved, he then returns home to become king over his own kingdom (many years later, at the end of his life, he has to confront a third monster, in a profoundly symbolic episode which we shall look at much later in the book).
Of the many Overcoming the Monster stories thrown up by Christian Europe in the Middle Ages, probably the most familiar is that of St George and the Dragon, which appears to be a Christian adaptation of the Perseus myth.1 The hero comes to a kingdom which is being ravaged by a dragon and, like Perseus, finds a beautiful Princess tethered by the edge of the sea, where she has been placed by her countrymen in a last desperate bid to buy off the monster’s attacks. The monster approaches and George slays him; but, unlike Perseus, George is not then able to marry the Princess he has freed. Since this is rather self-consciously a ‘Christian’ version of the tale, his reward is simply to insist that all the inhabitants of the country should be baptised: in other words, that they should all succeed to another ‘kingdom’, the kingdom of Christ.2
During the centuries of diminishing faith in the supernatural which followed the Middle Ages and the Renaissance, the more obviously fantastic dragons and monsters of old slipped below the horizon of European storytelling (although they never faded away altogether). But then, in a way which to the rationalistic age of the Enlightenment or even through most of the literal, materialistic Victorian era would have seemed wholly improbable, fabulous and terrifying ‘monsters’ came back into vogue in a quite remarkable fashion.
It all happened quite suddenly, in the closing years of the nineteenth century. Over the previous 100 years there had been a number of premonitory signs, notably in the taste for ‘Gothic horror’ which had been such an important reflection of the rise of the Romantic movement, with stories such as The Castle of Otranto (1764) and Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein (1817). But in the space of just a few years in the 1890s, there appeared in England a rash of stories of the kind which have played such a dominant part in popular entertainment ever since – ghost stories, tales of horror, science fiction – in which monsters of the most grotesque and improbable variety once again surged to the forefront of Western popular storytelling.
In 1894 a young Cambridge don, M. R. James, wrote a story called Canon Alberic’s Scrap Book. Tales of ghosts and hauntings have been told since time immemorial, but with the first of his series of ghost stories James raised the form onto a new plane of horror. In a ‘decaying town’ in the Pyrenees, an English scholar, Denniston, finds a folio of old manuscripts which belonged to a Canon of the local cathedral who had died in mysterious circumstances 200 years before. One drawing in particular catches his attention – a group of horrified soldiers at the court of King Solomon, surrounding a strange, shapeless creature. Late that evening, while he is examining the drawing in his lodgings, Denniston suddenly becomes aware of a terrible presence in the room:
‘He flew out of his chair with deadly, inconceivable terror clutching at his heart. The shape ... was rising to a standing posture behind his seat ... coarse hair covered it, as in the drawing. The lower jaw was thin – what can I call it? – shallow, like a beast’s; teeth showed behind the black lips; there was no nose; the eyes, of a fiery yellow, against which the pupils showed, black and intense, and the exulting hate and thirst to destroy life which shone there, were the two most horrifying features in the whole vision.’
Denniston grabs at a crucifix, as at a ‘magic weapon’: two servants rush in, and feel ‘something’ passing them out of the room. Denniston destroys the drawing; the ‘monster’ is overcome and appears no more.
Three years later, in 1897, an Anglo-Irish former civil servant, Bram Stoker, published Dracula. Again, stories of blood-drinking vampires had been told at various times before in history but Stoker’s version was conceived on a new plane of horror. The story divided into two parts. In the first, the hero, a young English lawyer named Harker, makes a visit to a mysterious, ruined castle deep in the wolf-infested forests of Transylvania. There is an air of indescribable evil, both about the place and about his client, Count Dracula, a man with sharp, protruding teeth and unnaturally red lips. What follows makes any ‘Gothic horrors’ of a century before seem trivial. Harker discovers that he is trapped by a man who can crawl face downwards on the castle wall by moonlight; whom he finds one day lying as if dead, ‘bloated’ with blood, ‘like a filthy leech, exhausted with his repletion’; who seems to be in command of a whole army of equally horrible supernatural spirits.
Just how the hero escapes from seemingly certain doom is never made clear, but the second part of the story tells of how Dracula ‘invades’ England, and in particular the battle by Harker and a group of friends to prevent the monster taking over two young girls, one of them Harker’s intended wife Mina, to recruit them into his shadowy army of the living dead. The first of them, Mina’s friend Lucy, falls fatally into Dracula’s power:
‘Far down the avenue of yews we saw a white figure advance ... Lucy Westenra, but yet how changed. The sweetness was changed to adamantine, heartless cruelty, and the purity to voluptuous wantonness ... (her) lips were crimson with fresh blood ... (her) eyes unclean and full of hell-fire.’
Having destroyed one ‘Princess’, Dracula then turns his nocturnal attacks on the other, the hero’s fiancée Mina. Gradually we see her sinking away into the monster’s deadly power. Harker and his friends eventually hunt Dracula down and pursue him back to his Transylvanian lair where, just in the nick of time before Mina finally expires, they manage to operate their ‘magic weapon’ by plunging a stake into the monster’s heart (the only way a vampire can be killed):
‘Before our very eyes, and almost in the drawing of a breath, the whole body crumbled into dust and passed from our sight.’
Mina – and mankind – are saved!
In 1898, the year after Dracula, H. G. Wells published The War of the Worlds. Again, it was by no means the first science fiction story, but the comparatively cosy fantasies of Jules Verne had contained nothing like this. Puffs of fire are seen on Mars, huge meteorites flash across the sky, and some come to earth in southern England. The initial mood of excited curiosity changes to alarm, when it appears that these mysterious, half-buried cylinders contain life:
‘As it bulged up and caught the light, it glistened like wet leather. The large, dark-coloured eyes were regarding us steadfastly. It was rounded, and had, one might say, a face. There was a mouth under the eyes, the brim of which quivered and panted and dropped saliva, The body heaved and pulsated convulsively. A lank, tentacular appendage gripped the edge of the cylinder, another waved in the air.’
The nightmarish realisation dawns that these huge ‘fungoid’ monsters climbing out of the cylinders are implacably hostile. They assemble great ‘tripod machines’ which stride across the countryside, armed with ‘Heat Rays’ and the deadly ‘Black Smoke’, against which mankind has seemingly no defence. Southern England is laid waste, as towns and cities burn, corpses pile up and the countryside is gradually submerged beneath the horrible ‘Red Weed’. Can the world survive?
Then, as the hero cowers in a cellar in south London, all alone and imagining his wife to be dead, he hears floating across the deserted, half-ruined city a ghastly, wailing cry, ‘Ulla, ulla, ulla’. He cautiously picks his way up to Primrose Hill, where he sees the great machines standing silent, the dead Martians hanging out of them as strips of decaying meat. The invading monsters have fallen prey to humble earthly bacteria, the one thing against which they had no defence. Mankind is saved; and the story ends on the image of the hero being joyfully reunited with his wife who turns out, like him, to have miraculously survived.
I have highlighted this little group of stories dating from the closing years of the nineteenth century in some detail because they represent one of the most remarkable developments in the entire history of stories: the sudden onset of that fascination with monsters of a near-supernatural power which was to become such a conspicuous feature of twentieth-century popular storytelling. In the latter-day Draculas, bug-eyed ‘extra-terrestrials’, triffids and other shapeless creature of the night which have swarmed in such numbers across the cinema screens and through the fantasy life of our time, we may see almost everything which characterised the most lurid monster-tales of the distant past. Since Perseus and Andromeda, for instance, has there been any more vivid image of the ‘Princess’ struggling in the clutches of the monster than the famous shot in the film King Kong showing the pretty young heroine being waved above the skyline of New York in the grip of the gigantic ape?
What is certain is that it is by no means necessary to believe in the physical reality of such monsters for them to loom up, as it were unbidden, in the mysterious processes of the imagination which lie behind the creation of stories. Indeed, so fundamental is this phenomenon to an understanding of how stories work, that we must now look at it more closely.