Fatima Chishti
English 397
05-02-08
Evolution of Hybridity within the Postcolonial Monster
Human fear of the unknown and the displaced is a fear that has been evolving through
centuries. The inability to classify and categorize a being stupefies mankind and then forces
further misclassification and disunity. In the medieval context, one who could not produce pure
identity lost his strongest weapon, a weapon which would safeguard his acceptance into society.
Displacement of identity meant displacement within society, but further, the fear of difference
caused a heightened level of panic which inspired belief in and creation of the monstrous.
According to Jeffrey Jerome Cohen, a prominent scholar on monstrosity, “The monster is
difference made flesh, come to dwell among us. In its function as dialectical Other or third-term
supplement, the monster is an incorporation of the outside, the Beyond- all of those loci that are
rhetorically placed as distant and distinct but originate Within” (Cohen, Monster Culture, 7).
Cohen argues that monstrosity’s origins are from our own inability to accept differences. The
label of the monstrous comes from a desire to disenfranchise what is unlike us. Cohen continues,
“Any kind of alterity can be inscribed across (constructed through) the monstrous body, but for
the most part monstrous difference tends to be cultural, political, racial, economic, sexual”
(Cohen, Monster Culture, 7). The ideology that monsters are not necessarily inhuman, but
instead are a creation of human intolerance towards diversity, becomes a postcolonial matter.
Within postcolonialism, the concept of monsters then becomes one of hybridity. Rather
than being an “other” which is separate from the “self”, monsters become more of a reflection of
difference within a body of sameness. The evolution of monstrosity from one of the oldest
introductions to monsters, the epic poem, Beowulf, to present day adaptations of this tale shows a
time-lapse of what it meant and what it now means to be classified as a hybrid. In a sense,
hybridity makes postcolonial of the medieval. As the definition of hybridity evolves with the
evolution of the Beowulf tale, an increased parallel with postcolonialism occurs. By looking at
the ways hybridity is defined through a postcolonial lens, the goal of the paper is to trace the
ways hybridity functions socially and politically with the evolution of the monsters (Grendel and
his mother) from Beowulf through Gardner’s Grendel, McTiernan’s, The Thirteenth Warrior, and
Zemeckis’s, Beowulf . This paper questions happens when we are “outside” the medieval
audience and the creation of monsters occurs in the social setting of today, one which is fairly
disconnected from the medieval world. Who becomes monstrous and how hybridity functions
changes along with the evolution of this classic tale. With it remaking in a postcolonial society,
the monster evolves to fit our society’s fears.
Defining hybridity in the postcolonial sense becomes crucial to our understanding of how
monsters have evolved over time. This is because the “other” has come a long way since its 1000
year old release in Beowulf to how identity is classified, formed, and maintained today. Cohen
quotes Robert Young’s definition of hybridity in his essay, “Hybrids, Monsters, Borderlands:
The Bodies of Gerald of Wales” for a definition of the hybrid, “difference and sameness in
apparently impossible simultaneity” (Cohen, Hybrids, 85). He continues, “If the medieval
touches the postcolonial exactly at the point of hybridity, this conjunction reveals both a startling
consonance and a productive dissonance….medieval hybridity is, to paraphrase Bhabha, ‘the
same but not quite.’” (Cohen, Hybrids, 85). For Cohen, hybridity becomes a conflicting
convergence of identity. He quotes Young again in saying hybridity is, “contra fusion and
disjunction…as well as fusion and assimilation” (Cohen, Hybridity, 1). Hybridity in this sense is
not containable within boundaries of a single identity. It is neither combining with nor
completely going against a society- almost as if in limbo. Homogeneity is simply not happening
through hybridization, there is ‘a joining of differences that cannot simply harmonize’ (Cohen,
Hybridity, 2). This definition of hybridity becomes a surface definition. As we delve deeper into
the causes and effects of monstrosity, this definition will add on layers of complication, but for
now, it is the inability to be wholly one identity.
The conflict of becoming part of and removed from the Anglo-Saxon society function
simultaneously as an identity for our Grendel family in the original Beowulf. In the epic poem of
Beowulf, the monstrosity that immerges from Grendel is that of a beast derived from man:
Grendel was the name of this grim demon…
in misery among the banished monsters,
Cain’s clan, whom the Creator had outlawed ‘
and condemned as outcasts, For the killing of Abel…
and out of the curse of his exile there sprang
ogres and elves and evil phantoms and the giants too who strove with God.
(Beowulf, 102-113)
While it is clear that a descendent of Cain would ultimately place Grendel in the lineage of man,
it appears that an outcast breeds an outcast. However, it is not simply that Grendel is under a
grandfather clause of ostracism; Grendel’s exiled lineage has provoked society into viewing him
as one who is inseparable from beasts and creatures that are evil rather than as a part of man
whom he is genetically linked to. The jump from man to monster comes instantly. It appears that
one must eternally pay the price for his ancestors’ mistakes. This unavoidable classification leads
to isolation and demonization of the ‘other’. Though human, Grendel is pushed away from that
part of himself and instead he is pushed into something that the people can no longer pretend to
identify with:
Every nail, claw-scale and spur, every spike
and welt on the hand of that heathen brute
was like barbed steel. Everybody said
there was no honed iron hard enough
to pierce him through, no time proofed blade
that could cut his brutal blood caked claw. (Beowulf, 983-89)
Grendel is no longer identified as being in the same flesh as man; instead, he has become almost
machinelike in his impenetrability. Hybridity is then being formed into Grendel’s identity by
Anglo-Saxon. They are placing him as a rejected state of man, but closer to inhuman; further,
they have morphed him into a being more machine than man, one beyond human penetration.
According to Cohen’s Monster Culture:
The monster’s body quite literally incorporates fear, desire, anxiety, and fantasy… giving
them life and an uncanny independence. The monstrous body is pure culture. A construct
and a projection…the monster signifies something other than itself. (Cohen, Monster
Culture, 4)
With Cohen’s theory in place, we can assume that the Grendel character in Beowulf then
becomes a representation of the culture and time period he is in. The signification of religious
‘othering’ branches Grendel away from the goodness of man, but also, the industrialized strength
symbolizing the ideal man for war encapsulates the admiration of brute strength. Ruth
Waterhouse in her essay, Beowulf as Palimpsest, writes:
The mysterious dimension of Grendel is a crucial part of how he is presented in Beowulf.
There is no overt close description of him, though his eyes, his hands, and of course his
head are fore grounded in the discourse, and though he seems to be huge…his size is left
vague. From a twentieth-century stance, an awareness of this lack of specific description
is as much as indication of our current expectations as it is a comment on the
contemporary society. (Waterhouse, 33)
Waterhouse brings the original poem into a modern context, questioning the description of the
monster and suggesting that without a clear cut depiction, our imaginations do not believe in his
monstrosity. A depiction of Grendel’s crimes gives us the explanation of strength:
…Suddenly then
The God-cursed brute was creating havoc:
Greedy and grim, he grabbed thirty men
From their resting places and rushed to his lair,
Flushed up and inflamed from the raid,
Blundering back with the butchered corpses. (Beowulf, 120-125).
Grendel’s monstrosity is seen through his actions, though physical description is scarce. For a
medieval text, this depiction of strength, much like the machine-like depiction of his
impenetrability, would suffice in drawing attention to horror. However, as Waterhouse suggests,
it does not seem brutal enough for today’s readers or audiences. Cohen writes on this
phenomenon of being unmoved by monsters, “Aurally received narratives work no differently;
no matter how unsettling the description of the giant, no matter how many anabaptized children
and hapless knights he devours King Arthur will ultimately destroy him. The audience knows
how the genre works” (Cohen, Monster Culture, 17). Cohen and Waterhouse both describe the
phenomenon of today’s world where description must be more intricate, and even then, it is
unlikely that description of action alone will force us to view something as monstrous. However,
for the culture and time period, this idea of being a man-machine, grabbing men like a monster,
yet having the sense to bring back the corpses shows a hybrid of mentality. While 20th century
audiences may not fear Grendel because of the lack of physical description, the fact remains
clear; there is an understanding present within the monster to know how to pursue these people
time and again. Grendel’s 12 year reign is evidence to this power.
As the story of Beowulf moves to a more modern version, shifts in the ideology of the people
and likewise, the representation of monsters, vastly differs from the original text. John Gardner
takes the epic ballad and transforms it into a retelling of the story from the perspective of
Grendel. Published in 1971, the story is an existential view of monstrosity within society.
Grendel going from antagonist to more plausible protagonist shifts his physical representation
from his original début. In Gardner’s, Grendel, our monster is not described from an outside
perspective. This first-monster perspective leaves the reader at the mercy of Grendel to be self
reflective and he does not disappoint, “Pointless, ridiculous monster crouched in the shadows,
stinking of dead men, murdered children, martyred cows” (Gardner, 6). Though Grendel at times
speaks in the third person, all part of this existential crisis, we see his self-deprecation through
description. He is calling himself a monster and he doubts his own worth. Looking back at the
epic poem, the narrative has shifted tremendously to arrive at this version of the story. The social
aspects between the two are entirely different, but before one delves into the social aspect, the
description of monsters is what needs to be compared. Even though Grendel has called himself a
monster, he bares more similarities to the humans than could have been said for the Beowulf
monster.
This Grendel gives up snippets of description which make us aware of how close to human
he really is. He makes reference to his humanlike body parts such as arms, legs, eyes, face. These
fragments of descriptions come as snippets where he will mention his condition as humanly as
possible, “My head aches. Morning nails my eyes” (Gardner, 13). Grendel’s complaints are
easily relatable to a reader’s everyday life. Therefore, these commonly heard asides make
Grendel connected with the reader. We are given these snippets so we can slowly piece together
Grendel as we delve deeper into his psyche. Though the Beowulf Grendel cannot be denied some
of his human features, what we get in Gardner’s version is weakness:
He shook his horns at me, as if scornfully. I trembled. On the ground, on two good feet, I
would have been more than a match for the bull, or if not, I could have outrun him. But I was
four or five feet up in the air, trapped and weak…he could gore me to death at his leisure in
the grass. (Gardner, 20).
Gardner’s Grendel becomes a monster who is self conscious and insecure about himself.
Opposing the original tale, this Grendel fits Cohen’s explanation of the identity crisis of
hybridity, “Hybridity tends to remain a tumultuous, conflicted state, easily roiled by changes in
social context” (Cohen, Hybridity, 145). Grendel in this modern novel becomes a physically
weaker link, essentially impossible to correlate with monstrosity.
Beyond the physical aspects of the differences between the two tales, the definition of
hybridity and how it relates to monstrosity must be brought up again in a social context. Cohen’s
cultural, political, racial, economic, and sexual differences between hybrids/monsters and the self
is an issue that is being tackled in Gardner’s book. Gardner’s monster does not dwell on the
physical aspects of his being; what separates him from the others is the way in which he thinks
and communicates. The cultural difference that Cohen writes on is what makes this Grendel
monstrous. The linguistic challenge Grendel faces added to a slight physical difference
exaggerates the physical difference more, hence, labeling him monstrous:
I staggered out into the open and up toward the hall with my burden, groaning out,
‘Mercy! Peace!’ The harper broke off, the people screamed…Drunken men rushed me with
battle-axes. I sank to my knees, crying ‘Friend! Friend!’ They hacked at me, yipping like
dogs (Gardner, 52).
The problem is not that Grendel is incapable of communication. He understands the language of
the humans, though he does not always understand their ways, however, both the language and
the ways of Grendel are misunderstood. There is only one way communication, in that Grendel
can understand the people. His adaptation to their language and culture puts him at a moral high
ground for understanding, yet he is ostracized for his differences:
The sounds were foreign at first, but when I calmed myself, concentrating, I found I
understood them: It was my own language, but spoken in a strange way, as if the sound
were made my brittle sticks, dried spindles, flaking bits of shale. (Gardner, 38)
The linguistic-cultural challenge that Grendel faces poses him as a monster to the community,
but the reader understands his plight and immediate sympathy is gained for the monster. Man
must then be wrong in that he is not listening carefully enough to the “other.” Monstrosity does
not exist until we call on it to exist. What makes Grendel’s hybridity even more transparent is his
inability to communicate with his mother, “She’d forgotten all language long ago, or maybe had
never known any. I’d never heard her speak to the “other” shapes. (How I myself learned to
speak I can’t remember; it was a long, long time ago.)” (Gardner, 28). Grendel is now caught in a
realm between man and between monster. He is in the third-space, failing to communicate
properly with anyone and therefore, isolating himself as an “other” among those who collectively
came to produce him. Grendel even questions this lack of communication, “‘Why can’t I have
someone to talk to?…‘The shaper has people to talk to’… ‘Hrothgar has people to talk to.’”
(Gardner, 53). Here Grendel is comparing himself to man assuming he deserves communication
and equating himself to their species. Grendel questions his inability to communicate and
assumes the language and culture of the people as one he should be a part of. He is not isolating
himself; he desires inclusion.
One of the biggest challenges Grendel faces becomes not only creating an implicit linguistic
association between himself and man, but he becomes confused in if he should relate himself to
them, “It was confusing and frightening, not in a way I could untangle…the men who fought
were nothing to me, except of course that they talked in something akin to my language, which
meant that we were, incredibly, related” (Gardner, 36). This becomes the moment of Grendel’s
intense hybridic struggle. He slowly integrates himself into their society, passively taking in all
of their culture, but eventually he is caught between two beings, “Thus I fled, ridiculous hairy
creature torn apart by poetry crawling, whimpering, seaming tears, across the world like a
two-headed beast, like mixed-up lamb and kid at the tail of a baffled, indifferent ewe…”
(Gardner, 44). Grendel’s very being is caught between the humane and animalistic. He is
emotionally suffering with his desire to be a part of the human society. However, his physical
appearance and inability to communicate make him a rejected hybrid.
From the epic poem, our version of Grendel became one of a hybrid between man and
machine. In Gardner’s version, impenetrability is later bestowed upon him by a dragon. Before
this curse was put upon him, Grendel was viewed as more fleshy and human like in his actual
physical appearance very much equated with nature. He would bleed and feel pain. The
mechanical descriptions, however, are not absent from this text. They are instead used to
describe the ‘hero’ of the original epic:
Staring at his grotesquely muscled shoulders-stooped, naked despite the cold, sleek as the
belly of a shark and as rippled with power as the shoulders of a horse…He was dangerous
…He talked on. I found myself not listening, merely looking at his mouth, which moved- or
so it seemed to me- independent of the words, as if the body of the stranger were a ruse, a
disguise for something infinitely more terrible. (Gardner, 155)
Grendel’s description of the hero, unnamed though assumed to be Beowulf, is one that is
mechanical and cold, much like the original description of Grendel in the epic poem. Beowulf is
described as though a hybrid of machine, man, and animal. A role reversal has occurred in
Gardner’s novel. Though Grendel equates himself to a hybrid, the people do not see the human
side of him. However, Grendel can see the animalistic and inanimate nature of man as more
fitting of the definition of hybrid. Cohen writes:
Medieval hybridity is an impudent relentlessly embodied phenomenon that brings together in
a conflictual, ‘unnatural’ union races (genera) in the medieval sense: not just different kinds
of human bodies, with their competing determinations, but geographic, animal, “inanimate”
bodies that incarnate heterogeneous histories of colonization inscription,
transformation…medieval hybridity is the admixture of categories, traumas, and
temporalities that reconfigure what it means to be human. (Cohen, Hybrids, 89)
From this definition, we see that Grendel’s depiction of the hero becomes one that
encompasses many of the characteristics of medieval hybridity. Though this definition fits with
context of medieval hybridity, the text itself is not in the social context of the medieval and
therefore, it is fitting for Grendel to be the one labeling the hero as a hybrid. From this text, we
get the sensation that hybridity is inherent within all of us, hero and monster, and we are not that
different from one another. Hybridity becomes less of a simply physical aspect of man and beast,
but a psychological and social state of mind as well. Readers relate more to this Grendel than the
mechanical hero, therefore, when this novel’s protagonist claims, “…no wolf was so vicious to
other wolves…Now and then some trivial argument would break out, and one of them would kill
another one” (Gardner, 32) it is implied that our brutality is beyond that of animals and one that
even this hybrid can pick out as revolting.
Now that the story of Beowulf is launched in the modern world, the aspects of hybridity and
monstrosity have changed as one can note from Gardner’s novel. Cohen’s argument on hybridity
passing up physicality and moving to an “othering” of difference related to culture still stands. It
becomes more prevalent as this story continues on the path of modernity. Moving to a more
modern Beowulf story, hybridity begins to focus even less on the monstrous claws and talons of
medieval monsters. As we bridge past with present in this tale, through adaptations of the story
in film, there is a necessity to make the film relatable to the people who will be watching it.
The oral tradition was adapted to fit society as it was passed down. The story of Beowulf has
not changed in that aspect. The retelling of it constantly changes to fit the audience. Hybridity,
and its different meanings, therefore, change as well. Cohen writes about hybridity in a
postcolonial medieval sense, “‘postcolonial’” stands for a diverse alliance of work that stresses
the uneven structure of power that comes into being when cultures meet. Conquest, domination,
and injustice are predictable outcomes of such clashes. Innovation, hybridity, and resistance are,
however, never far behind” (Cohen, Hybridity, 5). As we move into the film adaptations of the
Beowulf legend, these ideas of conquest and domination are worked into the previous definitions
of hybridity to make it more easily tied to the postcolonial. Cohen’s definition of postcolonial
stems from the concept of power coupled with the clash of cultures and ethnicities. While race
was a concept that was present in the medieval world and was linked to ethnic group (Bartlet,
2001), an issue that becomes morphed from the medieval to the modern is the social and political
concepts behind monstrosity. Race and ethnicity in postcolonialism ties into ideas of
colonizer/colonized. In the original Beowulf text, race becomes linked with, ‘monster-race’
rather than a bastardization of a whole people who are still seen as human. The modern concept
of race/culture becomes a driving factor in how we define postcolonialism and how the definition
of hybridity changes with the way society views an “other”. Greta Austin in her essay,
Marvelous Peoples or Marvelous Races?, writes on the place of race in Anglo-Saxon culture:
Race- although a number of alternative definitions could be proposed- has come to refer very
frequently to certain broad divisions among humans, divisions which are made on the basis of
physical appearance and place of national origin. But the word race seems to have been coined
only in the seventeenth century, when it was taken up as a way of classifying the natural world.
(Austin, 26-27).
While we see the concept of race as broad, it still dives into the idea of “among humans”.
Though Grendel is described as a descendent of Cain in the original text, his actions and physical
appearance prove other than human. In Gardner’s version, it is never stated what his origins are
at all. What then becomes increasing postcolonial is the depiction of the monsters as directly
from within us.
In McTiernan’s adaptation of a modernized Beowulf, The Thirteenth Warrior, we see the
concepts of race and hybridity as it relates to ethnicity among people. Cohen writes, “An
indigenous people are represented as primitive, subhuman incomprehensible in order to render
the taking of their lands unproblematic” (Cohen, Hybridity, 87). These aspects of the indigenous
and primitive are very present in the depiction of the evil ‘Wendols’ that invade the village. One
man’s description is as follows:
‘Teeth like a lion, head like a bear, claws that could tear a plank to kindling. They come in
the night in the mist always in the darkest like they could see in the black’ - ‘did they walk on
two legs or four?’ ‘It seemed they did both- like a thing that was both man and bear. I saw
the glow worm though, saw it clear… Slithering this way and that… Spitting as it came’.
(The Thirteenth Warrior)
When we see the Wendols actually attack, what is shown on the screen is the exact description
the man has given us. What is being feared is a monster that is a hybrid of fierce animals.
Ruthlessly barbaric in their fighting, depicted as animalistic, however, they remain very capable
of human tasks. The fear lies in the possibility that this cross breed of animal and human could
have adapted the skills necessary to be in power. Cohen writes on, “connecting medieval
colonialist projects of representation to their mimicry and subversion…” (Cohen, Postcolonial,
89). He continues citing an example of fourteenth century history of France, the Grandes
Chroniques, where the Saracen army of Cordova employing tactical mimesis, or imitation, to
defeat Charlemagne’s cavalry. Cohen writes:
Each one had a horned mask, black and frightening, on his head, that made him look like
a devil…In his hands, each held two drums together making a terrible noise, so loud and
frightening that the horses of our soldiers were terrified. Without reference to the
surrounding text, a medieval observer of the minutely rendered scene might not guess
that the Saracens are wearing masks, for their caricatured corporeality is wholly
consonant with other textual and pictoral representations of Muslims as a monstrous
cultural other. (Cohen, Hybrids, 88-89).
This racial “othering” and linking together with ideas of monstrosity are explored with The
Thirteenth Warrior. As it turns out, mimicry is being utilized by the Wendols in order to give a
similar impression of power and monstrosity. Their heads, teeth, and claws come from animal
masks and parts, very similar to the ones the Saracens don. The “fire worm” or “glow worm”
that is burning down their village, is actually hundreds of men carrying torches. The idea of evil
is inherently tied to the monstrous, something beyond humanity, beyond humans. One of the
warriors replies upon hearing the “fire worm” is really men, “I would rather prefer a dragon”
(The Thirteenth Warrior). The Wendols were thought to be demons by the villagers and warriors
before adequate evidence became available to characterize them as humans. Cohen writes on this
phenomenon of relating cultural difference to monstrosity, “The monster can embody the abject,
such as when the Welsh or the Jews are transfigured into blood-thirsty foes, bereft of humanity.
Yet the monster can also offer a body through which can be dreamed the dangerous contours of
an identity that refuses assimilation and purity” (Cohen, Hybridity, 6).
In the case of the Wendols, the viewers are receiving this outlook of humanity. The monsters
are not an alien life form or something beyond humanity, they become indigenous cultures who
refuse to conform to “humanity”. As we get closer and closer to the Wendols through the battles
the tone and anxiety shifts as Ahmed realizes “It’s a man…It’s a man…It’s a man” (The
Thirteenth Warrior). Once the point of humanity is established, a new anxiety and power is
realized and established. Ahmed’s fighting gets more ferocious and shows his rage. This anger
and dominance seems to come from the realization that he can dominate these people, but also
through a new anxiety that it is people who are being barbaric. This leads to an unsettling
realization that it is someone from among them who has become monstrous.
Once the connection is made that these Wendols are not “monsters” in the physical sense, the
power dynamic shifts and a need to colonize and defeat the “other” develops. For the villagers,
there is no choice in the matter of whether to invade or not. Through an invasion of the Wendols’
lair, the new characterization comes that these people are a cannibal tribe. Ahmed’s reaction to
the cannibalism is, “I was wrong, these are not men” (The Thirteenth Warrior). The immediate
desire to disinherit the Wendols as part of a shared race shows the fear of the monstrosity of
people. Ahmed’s comment makes one assume that if the Wendols were actually monsters, their
actions would be excusable, but their desire to live in a culture that is different, forces a rejection.
His comment legitimizes the colonization, violation, and eventual annihilation of their people.
Going deep into their lair it is clear that these people have their own society and ruling
system. They are warriors and conquerors. They are the racial “other” that now need to be
colonized or destroyed because they put a threat on everything we know to be humane and right.
The invasion of the Wendol lair is a continuation of the original Beowulf story. The lair of
Grendel’s mother was also invaded with a desire to destroy the beast within. However, the
difference of invasion lies in the fact that in both the original epic and Gardner’s version the
mother came out of lair to defend her son. The attack from Beowulf in those aspects was more of
retaliation as well as an assurance that no more attacks would be underway. In The Thirteenth
Warrior, the Wendol warriors are invading the land, and nationalistic pride and civic duty come
into play, the invasion and penetration of the lair to kill the woman is due to a desire to stop
breeding more cannibals and letting this race continue. The warriors could defeat all the men and
exterminate the race, but they choose to go after the queen as a symbolic gesture of cutting their
leadership from the top and destroying a civilization. They are not eliminating the Wendols as a
whole, they could always get a new queen, they are instead colonizing them and forcing them
into their world. As long as the cannibal race is able to lose identity through the killing of their
queen, there is no point in exterminating a whole class of people. It is more profitable to assert
power as a noble and pure race to survivors than to simply destroy a culture. In this way, without
a leader, the Wendols are more likely to assimilate into surrounding cultures.
Jeffrey Cohen writes on the aspect of the frontier and borderlands in medieval society that is
coupled with hybridity:
A frontier is a temporal and geographic edge where an “advanced” culture is imagined to
meet a distant, primitive world in order to begin the process of making the “new” land and its
people learn both their backwardness (the frontier is by definition “undeveloped”) and their
marginality (the center of the world is elsewhere, and so new cartography of signification, a
new way “to divide the world,” must be disseminated). (Cohen, Hybrids, 95).
When the warriors enter the lair of the Wendols they are in fact crossing this borderland into the
world of the primitive. The depiction of the Wendols is one of classic savage. They are seen
through Gloria Anzaldua’s depiction of what lies beyond at the borderland:
Borderlands foster “shifting and multiple identity and integrity,” since they are home to
multiple and “bastard” languages; the borderland is a place of masticate of new and impure
hybrids, of los astravesados “the squint-eyes, the perverse, the queer, the troublesome the
mongrel, the mulato, the half-breed…those who cross over, pass over, or go through the
confines of the ‘normal’. (Cohen, Hybrids, 96).
As soon as their lair is penetrated, the Wendols are unmasked and viewed from a perspective that
contrasts their dominance on the battlefield. The Wendols are without their masks, without their
weapons, and without clothing; the classic image of an indigenous/native tribe. Their language
appears barbaric and animal like through chanting and their faces are blackened with paint.
The penetration and elaborate description of the lair as well as the people is very different
from the overpowering of Grendel and his mother from older representations of this story. The
depiction of both the Wendols and the place they inhabit is intricate. Immediately the connection
for modern audiences is that indigenous people inhabiting areas of the borderlands are a threat to
our safety as well as to humanity. Monstrosity comes from these hybrid people, biologically
human, but socially barbaric. The place which they inhabit becomes a symbol for Eastern lands
and thought separate from the civilized west. The lesson for today’s audiences becomes that
colonization of these hybrids is necessary. It is no longer a matter of killing off one or two
monsters that may be attacking; it is a matter of killing off a whole life style of the people
The final venue in which to look at hybridity is through the modern lens of Zemeckis's
Beowulf. Cohen writes, “Mixed ethnic identity is figured as ontologically different because it
arises at that border where cultures meet in a violent, “unnatural” coupling” (Cohen, Hybrids,
92). We have reached a new age of the legend of Beowulf, one which recognizes that
monstrosity becomes a problem not from the physical or even from the indigenous. Rather, the
fear of mixing becomes the greater shame and horror of breeding a mixed race. Cohen continues
in Monster Culture:
As a vehicle of prohibition, the monster most often arises to enforce the laws exogamy, both
the incest taboo and the decrees against interracial sexual mingling…The monster are here,
as elsewhere, expedient representations of other cultures, generalized and demonized to
enforce a strict notion of group sameness. The fears of contamination, impurity, and loss of
identity…are strong, and they reappear incessantly. (Cohen, Monster Theory, 15).
The phenomenon of the mixed race is seen in Zemeckis's adaptation; this phenomenon was not a
part of the original epic. This movie brings out the concepts of true origin and creates reasoning
for monstrosity that originates literally from within us through desires of power and ethnic
curiosity and sexuality. The movie, Beowulf, reveals the combination of the multiple levels of
hybridity in order to establish a monster that comes from within our very selves.
The first depiction of Grendel in Zemeckis's movie is that of a giant monster. He is
enormous, but lacking the more appealing qualities of a human. His deformity lies in his lack of
skin, hair, and the overgrowth and deformation of facial attributes. He is an “other”, but he can
still be seen as having the physical “body” that is a man, even if it is overgrown. This physical
hybridity between man and monster is clear. His actions resemble his physique. Ruthlessly
killing and eating people, he stays true to his outer appearance which causes him to be regarded
as a “demon.” Beyond the physical attributes, the linguistic differences that were present in
Gardner’s adaptation are present in Zemeckis’s production as well. Through the point of view of
the monster, it is clear that the language barrier is a factor in his frustration towards the people.
Human language and noise is hurting his ear. The ear drum itself protrudes outside of the ear and
causes him pain in hearing sounds, but specifically language. The mixing of languages and the
pain it causes him parallels Grendel’s outward mixing of man and monster. His language is in a
constant state of code-switching between an Old English and modern English dialect. When
Grendel speaks with his mother the hybridity of languages is clear, he also catches Beowulf and
Hrothgar off guard when he addresses them. It requires more attention and concentration to
understand Grendel, though it is clear his hearing is hyper sensitive and in tune with the humans
as well as his mother.
Grendel’s portrayal in the movie coincides with his hybridity of races. The audience quickly
learns the origins of Grendel. His features are the result of the mixing of a water demon and a
human. Grendel the monster is half of the race of man. He goes through a physical change from
his alive state to his death- a reversal and degeneration of form. Grendel appears as a giant
underdeveloped human, but once he is nearing death he shrinks to the size of a man, and then
finally his physical size matches his characteristics; he appears in his final position as a fetus-
large head with an underdeveloped body. This degeneration links to his abortion by the society
as a whole. Grendel’s half breed leave him a bastard to the society, unable to produce,
communicate, or integrate.
Grendel’s swift end leads the audience away from focusing on the hybrid creature that was
lost, but the focus on the cause of the monstrous hybridity to begin with. Grendel’s mother is
revealed to the audience within her lair. Beowulf once again must penetrate the lair in order to
defeat the lineage of monsters. Though the motive is to stop the monster from attacking, much
like it was in the original poem, our hero runs into the problem that what he is dealing with is a
more human-like eroticized “other”. Cohen writes on women as monsters using aspects of
postcolonial discourse:
Women, like monsters, are a point of ambivalence…where “ambivalence” is that which (in
Homi Bhabha’s formulation) conjoins colonialist attraction to repulsion;… As Gayatri
Chakravorty Spivak has observed, the subaltern woman tends to exist in the colonialist
imaginary as a muted subject, as a body that produces only through an act of violation.
(Cohen, Hybrids, 93).
Up until this movie, Grendel’s mother was, in Spivak’s words “a muted subject”. Only she
possesses the key to lineage through her powers as a woman. Without going too much into
postcolonial feminism, it is still important to study the role of female monsters as they play a
larger role in Zemeckis’s adaptation than they have before. In the epic poem, Grendel’s mother
was a violent fighter, equivalent to any man, yet silent. In Gardner’s novel, the mother is
disenfranchised from her son and society. Her language is completely absent and she holds no
knowledge of it. In The Thirteenth Warrior, the Wendol queen fights Buliwyf, however, her
language (if one could call it that) was more equated with wild screams. Women are equated
with monsters, and in this sense, looking at a monster who transforms herself into an almost
precise human is worthwhile.
Spivak’s explanation of the postcolonial muted woman fits in that she becomes an object of
both desire and disgust for our hero. Beowulf penetrates her lair in hopes to find another
physically deformed creature, however, he is intrigued by her sexuality as well as what she offers
him; political power. Grendel’s mother is equated with more power and language that does not
come as a challenge as it was for her son, or the monsters in the other versions of the story.
There is an important distinction between female and male monsters that should be made in
that their female powers of maternity should not be denied or overlooked. In this case, the female
moves from an absent character, to being a lead player in the cause of hybridity and monstrous
creation. She is at the forefront of political and social upheaval. Through convincing the hero,
Beowulf, to produce a son with her in exchange for a glorious and powerful kingship, she is
bargaining Beowulf’s purebred lineage for political power. This exchange is highly costly in that
desire for political power nearly sacrifices the survival of a kingdom. Grendel’s mother,
however, cannot be left undefeated; her death becomes necessary to the destruction of the hybrid
lineage that has been created. While in early texts, the need to kill the mother could have been
seen as a destruction of just another monstrous attacker upon society, or a way to destroy an
empire, we are now convinced through the movie that the reasoning behind her destruction is to
prevent the lineage from continuing. Though one could look at the mother’s role from the point
of view of the seducing female, it can also be seen more importantly, as a postcolonial fear of
hybridity and the intermixing of races. If the female is gone, the fear of producing hybrid
offspring has vanished. The idea of invasion and penetration into the female lair becomes a
reverse penetration from the colonized/colonizer perspective and is moved to that of a trap to
ensure the mixing and interbreeding can continue. Though it can be read as female maternity
seeping through monstrous veins with a simultaneous urge to procreate and destroy (a
mommy-monster syndrome), in the case of postcolonial hybridity, it can be read as a racial
“other” attempting to infiltrate the society through mimicry, thus, reestablishing ideas of the evil
and invasive “other” intruding into the civilized domain.
The end result of this exchange of races and intermixing was first Grendel, then a
dragon-man, both wreaking havoc and destruction within the society. Though both are half
“other”, they still bear the marks of the dominant society, yet they are a burden upon society,
living in the borderlands and unaccepted- both seen as a hybrid of shame and mistake that
betrays the purity of a kingdom. The message of this new movie becomes clear, intermixing of
races is what will produce the monstrous; we, through a failure to remain true to our origins
produce the monstrous from greed for power and the deceit of our people. For today’s society,
one that is seen as nearly done exploring and colonizing the world, the new fear of the “other”
comes not from a need to overpower, but a need to sexually exploit or explore it. A different
dominance arises from the colonizer’s standpoint; the land has been conquered, but what to do
with the colonized is still in question. With the scope of the world becoming smaller as lands are
nearly finished being inhabited and occupied, the fear that arises from the occupation is the need
to populate and assimilate cultures through the process of reproduction.
If one overlooks the consequences of commingling with a racial “other”, the result becomes
dishonor in society. The true victim becomes the hybrid of the cultures; a racial, linguistic, and
ethnic mix who no one desires to identify with or claim. Following the evolution of the tale, it is
clear that the monster is altered and grossly exaggerated by society in order to represent a
disapproval of accepting the “other” in any form. Beowulf’s enchantment towards the
attractiveness and power of this indigenous woman results in a failure to understand dthe
necessity of racial purity. While the hybrid produced is a dysfunctional and monstrous adversary
of society, the message to take away is that he is not the only one suffering. Nor is it simply that
the procreators of this hybrid are not the only ones who must deal with the consequences of
parenting such a beast. As Waterhouse states, “the damage that a self-created monster wreaks [is
not] confined to its creator, but…shows how individuals and society constantly interact”
(Waterhouse, 29). In this aspect we see that hybridity in today’s age is one that humans are
responsible for bringing onto the whole human race, not just on themselves. The hybridity is one
that springs from within us, a physical representation of ourselves once we cross into the realm
of the ethnic/cultural/racial “other” and this is what we should fear.
As the legend of Beowulf is traced through its multiple interpretations starting from the
original epic to the most recent remake into film, one can note that the desire to have an enemy
be labeled as monstrous is a constant feature within each retelling. Our fascination with the
“other” is not created through a complete contrast from ourselves. As the stories have shown, we
desire hybridity as a means for enforcing the morals of domination and colonization. The “other”
is labeled as a way to show difference from ideal society. As the story of Beowulf has evolved
over the centuries, the meaning of hybridity has evolved along with it. Though physical
difference is always seen as means of discrimination, the fetish of taking possession over other
cultures and societies that do not compare to ours proves a more modern reason to make monster
out of a people. The change in fear that has occurred over time comes more and more from
within us rather than from an alien or subhuman life form.
As the story of Beowulf is retold, each adaptation leaves the monster as less of an
otherworldly creature and more of a product of ourselves. The fears of today’s age become that
of commingling with those we attempt to colonize and overpower. The desires of humanity to
conquer and dominate a people do not only stop at land and culture, they run deeper to a point
where we are sexually assimilating and losing our identity to our colonized. This heavily
stereotyped mixing of races results in a fear that the identities we worked centuries to create will
be dissolved into an eerie creation of an unrecognizable and undistinguishable race. Thus, we
portray all intermingling among people so separated culturally, linguistically, socially, and
politically as monstrous in order to remind ourselves that hybridity, in all forms, will always be
inherently evil.
Works Cited
Austin, Greta. "Marvelous Peoples or Marvelous Races." Marvels, Monsters, and Miracles.
Kalamazoo: Medieval Institute Publication, 2002. 27-55.
Bartlett, Robert. "Medieval and Modern Concepts of Race and Ethnicity." Journal of Medieval
and Early Modern Studies. 2001. University of St. Andrews. 30 Apr. 2008
<http://muse.jhu.edu/journals/journal_of_medieval_and_early_modern_studies/v031/31.1
bartlett.html>.
Beowulf. Dir. Robert Zemeckis. Perf. Ray Winstone, Anthony Hopkins, Angelina Jolie, Crispin
Glover, Robin Wright Penn,John Malkovich, Brendan Gleeson, Alison Lohman. DVD.
Paramount Pictures, 2007.
Cohen, Jeffrey J. Hybridity, Identity, and Monstrosity in Medieval Britain on Difficult Middles.
New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2006.
Cohen, Jeffrey J. "Hybrids, Monsters, Borderlands: the Bodies of Gerald of Wales." The
Postcolonial Middle Ages. New York: St. Martin
Cohen, Jeffrey J. "Monster Culture (Seven Theses)." Monster Theory. Minneapolis: University
of Minnesota P, 1996. 3-25.
Gardner, John. Grendel. New York: Vintage Books, 1971.
Heaney, Seamus, trans. Beowulf a Verse Translation. Ed. Daniel Donoghue. New York: W.W.
Norton & Company, 2002.
The Thirtheeth Warrior. Dir. John McTiernan. Perf. Antonio Banderas, Vladimir Kulich, Dennis
StorhøI, Clive Russell, Richard Bremmer. DVD. Touchstone Pictures, 1999.
Waterhouse, Ruth. "Beowulf as Palimpsest." Monster Theory. Minneapolis: University of
Minnesota P, 1996. 26-40.