Of Men and Monsters

aristocracy. The reality, however, is that the medieval monsters bring into and out of the courts a hybrid of primal and chivalric values that ironically expose the civil ideals of Anglo-Saxon nobility as purely fantastic and hollow.

In this sense, the illusion of upper-class life is contingent on the creation of monsters who authenticate the fantastical ideals of nobility by the perceived undermining of such ideals, much in the same way that darkness exists because there is light.

The monsters in Beowulf and Sir Gawain and the Green Knight are in fact the courts’ noble counterparts, embracing both courtly and primal values. Yet, before making such a leap, a psychological analysis on the repression of monster and human relatedness is necessary. In Beowulf, the monstrous Grendel is a mysterious, shadowy creature. Grendel, a being of literary fantasy, is necessarily subject to interpretation for both the audience and the characters within the poem because his physical appearance, thoughts, and feelings are never given to us in full detail. Grendel, “a bold demon who waited in darkness,” killed at night, and then retreated back to the mere, is simultaneously known and unknown (86). He is known to be a danger to Heorot, but the actual creature is an enigma and thus creates what Freud calls the “uncanny” experience—an encounter with something both familiar and unfamiliar (Sandner 164). David Sandner argues that Grendel attacks Hrothgar’s thanes, not as a monster, but “as a feuding lord might attack, knowing where the seat of power lies, in Heorot, the mead-hall itself ” (171). Here, Sandner asserts that Grendel’s primal form of attack, in the form of cannibalism, is inextricably linked with Anglo-Saxon culture because it is an act of war, which necessarily begot Hrothgar’s kingdom. Nevertheless, Grendel embodies the uncanny because Hrothgar and his kinsman are experiencing “a return of something once thought safely repressed” (165).

While Sandner’s argument offers a foundational understanding of how the aristocratic imagination imposes monstrosity on Grendel as a way to 134 Of Men & Monsters