August 30, 2024
The synchronicity of seeing the film Alien: Romulus at the same time I was preparing to teach Beowulf led me to think about monsters. The first great long poem in English has not just one monster but three: Beowulf fights the monster Grendel, then Grendel’s mother, and finally a dragon. But apparently monsters are not only vestiges of a distant past. If the Alien films are to be believed, our future will still be swarming with them. So, the simple yet puzzling question poses itself: why monsters? After all, they aren’t real. They do not correspond to anything in empirical reality. There are no monsters. Are there?
Alien: Romulus is not, to my mind, a terribly good movie. I was surprised at how warmly it has been received, and, to be honest, can only chalk it up to nostalgia. It is all high-speed chase scenes, with little inventiveness, and there are no surprises about the aliens: they are the same face-sucking, chest-bursting creatures we have known for 45 years. Yet that is another way of asking the question. Why has this series continued to fascinate people for that long, even in some of its lesser moments? And the answer clearly is the aliens themselves. They are not an excuse for action and suspense. They are the films, which would be just more Hollywood action entertainment without them. Something about them is compelling. They have brushed against something that sleeps in the dark depths of the imagination and awakened it, as the dragon is awakened in Beowulf by a thief who steals from its hoard.
The most famous essay ever written about Beowulf was J.R.R. Tolkien’s “Beowulf: The Monsters and the Critics” in 1936. As its subtitle hints, it is a reply to critics who denied that Beowulf is a classic because, after all, it’s really just a triple-feature monster fight. Despite the dark tone and the tragic ending, it really isn’t serious literature, and can’t be compared with a true tragic epic like the Iliad—or like the Icelandic sagas from northern culture. The critical attitude that Tolkien takes issue with regards interest in heroic battles with monsters as a remnant of a barbaric, superstitious past. An updated version of the same attitude would call Beowulf an alliterative comic book. Beowulf is a superhero with the strength to swim home after a battle with 30 suits of armor that are his war prizes. There is indeed something primitive about him. Like Hercules and Samson, he relies on brute strength, wrestling with Grendel and ripping off his arm and shoulder. Before his battle with the dragon, he makes a speech apologizing for using armor and a metal shield. He admits it’s necessary protection from the dragon’s fire, but it still clearly feels like cheating to him.
The critical presupposition informing the negative judgment of Beowulf is that literature should be about “real life,” meaning what today is sometimes called “consensus reality,” a commonsense view of what the average person might accept as true. But the strange thing is that realism has only been dominant in literature for the last 300 years, and even then never entirely. The students in my Survey of British Literature are going to go on to read Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, in which Gawain lops off the Green Knight’s head and the Knight picks it up and walks off with it, still talking. They are going to read part of Book 1 of Spenser’s Faerie Queene, in which the Redcrosse Knight fights…another dragon. In Gold-Hall and Earth-Dragon, Alvin Lee argues that Beowulf is not really a “heroic epic.” It actually belongs to another genre, the romance, or tale of wonders, and in fact it exists on the upper registers of romance, just slightly displaced from actual myth, in which there is no “reality principle” and anything is possible. That is suggestive. The genre of heroic epic in fact has a counterpart, the “mythological epic,” of which the Greek example is Hesiod’s Theogony. It is the story of the rise and triumph of Zeus—and Zeus’s climactic feat is to defeat the monster Typhon (or Typhoeus). Typhon is the everything bagel of monsterdom, a dragon made up of dragons:
On his shoulders grew A hundred snaky heads, strange dragon heads With black tongues darting out…. Astounding voices came from those weird heads, All kinds of voices: sometimes speech which gods Would understand, and sometimes bellowings, As of a bull let loose, enraged, and proud, Sometimes that of a ruthless lion; then, Sometimes the yelp of puppies, marvellous To hear; and then sometimes he hissed, And the tall Mountains echoed underneath. (818-47)
Demonic puppies? The sublime and the ridiculous are strangely akin, and this description, like many dreams, sits right at their juncture. The description is more than an attempt to be over-the-top, however. Typhon is a bundle of contradictions because he is Chaos embodied. One type of Creation story is the “combat myth,” in which a god establishes order by overcoming a monster who represents Chaos, sometimes fashioning the world out of the monster’s body, as the god-hero Marduk does with the female monster Tiamat in the Babylonian Creation myth. Tiamat is the salt sea, the sea of death. There is a dim echo of this myth in the opening of the Book of Genesis, in which the spirit of God hovers in the darkness over the “deep,” the waste and void of waters, and causes the order of the cosmos to arise out of it. Elsewhere in the Bible, the monster who will be slain by God is Leviathan, the “dragon in the sea.” In short, the victory of the god or hero over the monster is the victory of order over Chaos, and that victory is Creation.
Monsters like those in Beowulf are exiles, dwelling beneath or at the boundaries of the known and ordered world. They may be imprisoned or asleep, but at any time they may escape or awaken to stalk the world again. They break into the world we thought safe, suddenly and unpredictably. Oh, we still believe in monsters, whatever the realists and rationalists say. King Hrothgar says to Beowulf,
I came to believe My enemies had faded from the face of the earth. Still, what happened was a hard reversal from bliss to grief. Grendel struck after lying in wait. (ll. 1772-75)
The sleep of reason produces monsters, the title of Goya’s famous print says. But reason can itself be a kind of sleep, and myth can be awake to what dwells in the darkness beyond the rational. The teenagers in slasher films are always blissfully ignorant of the monsters with masks and power drills that wait for them. It takes so little to shatter the ordinary peacefulness of our lives, and the demonic predator always seems to come out of nowhere. Chaos is not just disorganization or entropy: it is nihilism, an active malice that hates all Creation, all order, and reflexively wants to destroy it. Why? Well, who needs a reason? The monster is totally Other, lacking all human feeling, and that is part of what makes it not just terrifying but unnerving, demoralizing. Coleridge used the phrase “motiveless malignity” in relation to Shakespeare’s Iago and his strange, unwarranted hatred of Othello, and the psychology of Satan in Milton’s Paradise Lost may have been influenced by Iago. We don’t just hate and fear the inhuman Other: it is more than merely an enemy. It shakes us because it is a principle not just of destruction but of negation.
What monsters hate is life itself. In Beyond the Pleasure Principle, Freud said that the pleasure principle, the principle of life, conflicts yet intertwines with an opposite principle, the death drive. The pleasure principle, or Eros, consists of energy, or libido, and that energy is active and order-creating: all of civilization’s order, from engineering to the arts, is the product of the form-giving power of Eros. The death principle is, in contrast, passive and entropic. What it really seeks is lack of conflict and therefore peace, and such peace is attainable only in death. To paraphrase Schopenhauer, one of Freud’s influences, life is a thing that should never have been. The goal of the death drive, therefore, is Nothing. In the Babylonian Creation myth, the Enuma elish (“When on high”), the female monster Tiamat, the salt sea, is actively aggressive. But she has a consort, Apsu, the freshwater sea, who represents the passive, entropic principle. Apsu wants to drown their children, the first generation of the gods, because they are noisy at night and disturb his sleep. John Gardner’s Grendel (1971), a wonderful comic-yet-poetic novelization of Beowulf, captures this active-passive distinction in the contrast between Grendel and his mother. Grendel is a kind of angry, acting-out juvenile delinquent, whereas his mother is lumbering, almost mindless.
But evil, whether active or passive, is negation. Hrothgar builds Heorot, “a great mead-hall / meant to be a wonder of the world forever” (69-70), not as a monument to his own pride but as a symbol of civilized order: “there he would dispense / his God-given goods to young and old” (71-72). As soon as he builds it, within the next few lines Grendel appears, instantly hating it, hating the song of the scop or bard in the new hall singing the Creation story, “how the Almighty had made the earth / a gleaming plain girdled with waters” (92-93), the creation of order that is the model for all human creative acts. And the destructive evil keeps returning: the super-villains and serial killers are defeated and thought to be dead, but always show up again. Beowulf kills Grendel and everyone celebrates, but Grendel’s mother immediately appears. Beowulf kills her, and there is a period of peace, in which Beowulf rules for 50 years, but eventually there is the most formidable monster of them all, the dragon. The three monsters are not just repetitive but show something about the inevitable recurrence of evil.
Mythically, monsters dwell in two locations, depending on whether the orientation is vertical or horizontal. Vertically, of course, they dwell in the depths. Dragons are coiled in their caves, and Leviathan lurks at the bottom of the sea. Both Typhon and the Titans who tried to overthrow the gods were thrust into Tartarus, the lowest part of the underworld. The latter fell 9 days and nights, which Milton echoes in the fall of Satan and the rebel angels after their attempt to storm the top of the axis mundi. But mythical thinking is not bound by the principle of non-contradiction. Satan is consigned to hell, yet at the same time he “roams through the world, seeking the ruin of souls,” as the Catholic prayer to St. Michael that I used to recite as a child put it. It is Michael who will fight Satan in the form of the Dragon at the end of the world, according to the Book of Revelation. The prayer asked Michael to “defend us in battle,” for our life is itself a dragon-slaying. In terms of the horizontal orientation of this world, monsters dwell in exile at the boundaries, outside the limits of the civilized order. Outside the boundaries lies the unknown, and the unknown is inhuman, is Other. We get the word “scapegoat” from the ritual in Leviticus 16 in which a goat with the sins of the community on its back was driven into the wilderness, to be devoured by the demons that live there. In American mythology, the boundary was the frontier, beyond which dwelt uncivilized “savages” who were all too easily imagined to be monsters. Star Trek called outer space the “new frontier,” and saw it as a realm of wonder, but in the history of science fiction there was an alternative perspective in which space was the boundary beyond which could dwell who knows what kind of monsters. H. G. Wells’ War of the Worlds actually tries to have it both ways: his monstrous Martians come from space but plow themselves into and emerge from the ground. Old maps are said to have marked the boundary where the known ended and the unknown began with the phrase “Here there be dragons,” which could be both warning and promise.
The difficulty in slaying monsters is that they are more than human. Sometimes, as with Beowulf, that means the heroes who slay them, while mortal, are still more than human. In book 24 of the Iliad, the disguised god Hermes opens a gate into the Greek camp for Priam to enter and beg for his son’s body. The narrator says that it takes three men to open the gate—but Achilles could do it by himself. Beowulf is clearly far stronger than that. But even he is willing to use a special weapon to even the odds against Grendel’s mother: a sword that conveniently happens to be hanging on the wall in her lair, a sword “so huge and heavy of itself / only Beowulf could wield it in a battle” (ll. 1561-62). The sword is not only big but has special powers, being forged in ancient times by giants—giants evidently prescient enough to engrave pictures of their own demise on the hilt: “It was engraved all over / and showed how war first came into the world / and the flood destroyed the tribe of giants” (ll. 1688-90). So, a sword designed to slay monsters, designed by monsters. But most of all, the hero is filled with a special energy, a charisma or mana, or, in Star Wars, the Force, that enables him to transcend the limits of the human. This means that he too becomes to some degree Other. To fight a monster, you may have to become one. On the level of undisplaced myth, this means that the representation of God becomes an example of what the 18th and 19th centuries called the sublime: the epiphany of sheer power usually manifested in natural phenomena such as volcanoes and storms. The Old Testament God was possibly a volcano-god; the Greek Zeus, and the Norse Thor were originally storm deities—and all three were monster killers. God’s “answer” to Job’s query about why he has been so unjustly tormented culminates in an entire chapter describing Leviathan (chapter 41), asking Job, “Canst thou draw out leviathan with an hook?” The chapter is one long sneer, in magnificent poetry, at least in the King James version:
Will he make many supplications unto thee? will he speak soft words unto thee? | Wilt thou play with him as with a bird? or wilt thou bind him for thy maidens? Shall the companions make a banquet of him? | Who can open the doors of his face? his teeth are terrible round about. | By his neesings a light doth shine, and his eyes are like the eyelids of the morning. | Out of his mouth go burning lamps, and sparks of fire leap out. | The sword of him that layeth at him cannot hold: the spear, the dart, nor the habergeon. | He maketh a path to shine after him; one would think the deep to be hoary. | Upon the earth there is not his like, who is made without fear. | He beholdeth all high things: he is a king over all the children of pride.
One of the classics of the history of religion is Rudolf Otto’s The Idea of the Holy (1917), which Otto expressly says was motivated by the desire to show that religion originates in something irrational. The “holy” does not refer to any kind of moral perfection, and is in fact not an idea at all but rather the experience of what he calls the numinous (a word he apparently coined), meaning “charged with energy.” That energy manifests itself as a mysterium tremendum et fascinans, a mystery that is awe-inspiring and fascinating, and the God who manifests it is “wholly other,” incomprehensible to merely human minds, which is basically what God tells Job. Job’s God is practically the centerpiece of Otto’s argument, because he displays “the downright stupendousness, the wellnigh daemonic and wholly incomprehensible character of the eternal creative power; how, incalculable and ‘wholly other,’ it mocks at all conceiving but can yet stir the mind to its depths, fascinate and overbrim the heart” (80). What is significant is that Otto’s description fits both Job’s God and Leviathan (and also his land counterpart, Behemoth). They are in a way interchangeable, signifying that the “holy” is beyond the opposites, including the moral opposites of good and evil. Such a view does not sit well with a modernized Christianity, but it would have been comprehensible to the Greeks and Northern peoples. Zeus and Thor, as storm gods, wielded the lightning that is a symbol of numinous power. Such deities may kill monsters, but they are notorious for their wrath, and occasionally somewhat monsters themselves.
The modern weapon for monster slaying is intellect, which rids the world of monsters by proving that they do not exist. They are delusions of an ignorant mind. Goya’s famous print shows a man asleep with monsters teeming all around him, clearly having escaped from his brain like geniis out of a bottle. The Enlightenment method of exterminating monsters is to declare that they are projections of the human mind. “All deities reside in the human breast,” said William Blake, and so do all the demons and dragons that are their antagonists. Blake, however, did not make the mistake of the rationalists and secular humanists of his time and ours. To say that gods and monsters are projections is not to say they are not real, merely that they are not real in the fashion of “consensus reality,” of subject-object perception. They are products of the mind, which is to say of the imagination, and to dismiss the mysterium tremendum of the deeper levels of the mind as silly, superstitious figments is a modern kind of hubris or complacent pride. Those who dismiss archetypal figures as Wizard of Oz projections to which the intellect should be superior are vulnerable to being possessed by such powers from within. And that means to go over to the dark side of the Force, which means to become a monster yourself. At this point in history, we have become all too familiar with the kind of megalomaniacs who are inflated, to use Jung’s term, by energy from the unconscious and think they are godlike, when they are really monstrous: Napoleon, Hitler, Trump, Putin. We have also become familiar with the demonic artist, possessed by a creative energy that turns him into a kind of sacred monster. The brooding, pose-striking “Byronic hero” of Romantic literature is the ancestor of any number of modern examples. Thomas Mann’s nihilistic composer in Dr. Faustus was modeled on Schoenberg, but surely the real model is Wagner. Even more benign creative figures such as Joyce’s Stephen Dedalus and some of Alice Munro’s clearly autobiographical future-artist characters are utterly ruthless in the pursuit of their vocation, rejecting calls to duty and the social virtues, beyond good and evil. Another type of demonically possessed creator is the mad scientist, drunk with godlike power. The real monster in Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein is named in its title.
Realists like Martin Scorsese scorn super-heroes, but super-heroes were born out of a need to believe that greater-than-human figures might arise and save us from demonic evil. It is no accident that the first super-hero, Superman, was created by two Jewish teenagers simultaneously with the advent of Nazism. Superheroes, especially those without superhuman powers, like Batman, may fight ordinary criminals, but most of them are, like Beowulf, saviors in the face of extraordinary threats. Batman, even the technologically jacked-up Batman of recent times, is not going to be of much use against Galactus or Thanos. People complain that superhero comics and movies are nothing but fight scenes, yet the fight scenes are not gratuitous but the real point, which is an agon or contest of primal forces with everything at stake.
The counterbalancing genre to superhero comics and movies is horror, which is antiheroic. No larger-than-life hero is going to show up to save us. The best that the protagonists of the Alien films can hope for is to be last woman standing by the end of the movie, if you are lucky and resourceful enough. In the original movie, the survivors are Ridley and a cat; in Alien: Romulus, it is the new female lead plus (spoiler alert) one other. We all know that everyone else is going to die in picturesque ways according to the ingenuity of the filmmaker. Horror films are the dark version of the kind of antiheroic romance that Northrop Frye examines in The Secular Scripture. This subgenre rejects the main virtues of the heroic, forza and froda, force and fraud, the virtues of Achilles and Odysseus. Its protagonists are non-heroic types who do not triumph through power and dominance. They are, rather, peaceable characters, often marginalized: women, children (as in Harry Potter), hobbits, talking animals in cartoons.
It is interesting how consistently superhuman evil is counterpointed with human evil in heroic literature. Critics have criticized what they see as “digressions” in Beowulf, disruptions of its artistic unity. However, the unity of the poem is not narrative but thematic, and the “digressions” are necessary to establish the poem’s theme, which is the tragic limitation of the heroic. Beowulf’s limitation is not that he dies in the fight with the dragon, for what matters is not death but victory, a victory that saves his people. But a glum prophecy at the end of the narrative predicts that the Geats will not survive their leader’s death for long, not because of any monster but because of the endless feuding that all the “digressions” are about. The warrior ideology of the various tribes mandated battle as a way of life, in order to achieve fame and fortune. Tribes or individuals were constantly going to battle over slights and injustices that are clearly pretexts. The absolute demand for revenge was a way of making sure that the chain of violence would be endless, as revenge provoked counter-revenge, which provoked counter-counter-revenge, and so on. The dying Beowulf is proud of the fact that he has ruled in such a way as not to provoke quarrels, and to defuse those that did arise. He has kept the peace rather than instigating battles as other kings did, battles that they usually died from, dooming their leaderless people. But after his death, the Frisians and Swedes and who knows who else will see their chance to renew hostilities, and the Geats will most likely be wiped out—not by terrifying monsters, but by the selfishness and greed of human nature. In the same way, Arthur’s Camelot will fall, not because of external foes but because of the neurotic soap opera generated by his queen’s adultery—which will lead to war between friends and endless reprisals. In the Alien films, the evil of the aliens is counterpointed with the evil of the exploitative capitalist system that endangers its workers for the sake of profit. Capitalist greed is also the real monster in James Cameron’s Avatar films, and, in a modified way, in the Dune saga. Realists would prefer that storytellers concentrate on such real and systemic evil rather than on superhuman invaders that are, in their view, mere bogies.
The problem with such a view is that it has not thought the matter completely through. When realists like Martin Scorsese and Francis Ford Coppola do examine human, all-too-human evil, they find that it is not a matter of the occasional villain. Evil is a system, symbolized by the mob and the Mafia, by a crime syndicate that has incorporated the police, the political system, and the judiciary into one network of corruption. The monster is not “out there” somewhere: the monster is the network, and we are inside it. Mythology is full of images of people swallowed alive inside of monsters, in the belly of the beast, from Jonah in his “big fish” to the children swallowed by their father Kronos in Greek mythology to Little Red Riding Hood’s grandmother swallowed by the Big Bad Wolf. In medieval pictures of the Harrowing of Hell, Christ is leading redeemable people out of the gates of hell portrayed as the mouth of a fire-breathing monster. Cannibalism is a kind of ultimate evil, not because it is violent but because there is a horror of being “incorporated.” The archetype of the Terrible Mother catalyzes a primal fear of being swallowed back into a womb that is also a tomb—a womb that is often a vagina dentata, with teeth.
Rational skeptics reject the idea, held by Jung among others, that all reality is psychic, a product of the mind, which seems to them escapist “power of positive thinking” sentimentality. The toughminded view is that there is a reality “out there,” independent of us and our wishes, and strong people are those that accept it. However, it is the idea of a reality “out there” that is wish fulfilment. All reality is psychic, constructed by the mind from the data of the senses (which may themselves be constructed). All that we can know is the experience of the psyche. A reality “out there,” whether it is Kant’s “thing-in-itself” or religion’s God, is what Jung politely called “metaphysical,” by which he meant an arbitrary assertion rather than empirical science. This kind of view used to be called Idealism, and Samuel Johnson claimed to have refuted it by kicking a stone and saying “ouch.” But people are perfectly capable of feeling things that are not “there,” as in phantom limb syndrome, or having visions that others do not see. We think that the psyche, meaning the ego, is a dot of consciousness surrounded by vistas of external otherness. But the logical inference is that both the ego and reality are inside a larger psychic system. No one wants to hear this, because it calls into question our very sense of reality, and thus raises the terror of madness. What if external reality is not only an appearance but a malevolent illusion? The Matrix brought this paranoid conspiracy view into popular culture, but it has a long history, all the way back to Gnosticism, which believed that the Creation and the Fall were the same event, a fall that was in part the fall of God himself, so that the world we are living in is an evil illusion, ruled over by powers called Archons.
The genius of H.P. Lovecraft was to distinguish a special kind of horror that he called “cosmic horror,” an apt term because its premise is that the cosmos, the established order on which our sanity is based, is actually just a veil over unspeakable evil, over the monstrous. A monster like Cthulhu is just another ambassador of an evil cosmos. To doubt the very fabric of reality is psychosis, and many of Lovecraft’s narrators are in the process of going mad. The cosmos is the psyche, and, if it breaks up, the end of the universe is here. Thor’s final antagonist is the Midgard serpent, but the Midgard serpent is coiled around the base of the world tree with its tail in its mouth, the Ouroboros. So long as it is in place, it is the foundation of the cosmos, and for it to leave its place would be tantamount to the laws of physics ceasing to function. It is no wonder that so many people vulnerable to this kind of paranoid schizophrenic anxiety end up “getting religion,” not just QAnon cultist cranks but some important writers like C.S. Lewis, who insisted upon the reality of evil in works like The Screwtape Letters and That Hideous Strength. The ultimate dragon-slaying hero is Christ.
The problem with traditional religion, though, is that it throws us back into a passive, helpless, position of being terrified victims. Indeed, Christianity insists that we cannot save ourselves but must have faith in a supernatural hero—anything else is just human pride. But we are learning that such an attitude leads all too easily to cultism and authoritarianism, to manipulation by some charismatic con artist. And the ultimate charismatic con artist may be the traditional God himself, who is, as Samuel Becket said in Waiting for Godot, an eternal no-show. If all reality is psychic, on the other hand, we may be looking for a monster-slaying power in the wrong direction. Far below the level of the conscious ego, there is a deep level of the mind that is a reservoir of power, the creative power of the imagination. At this very moment, not just the Democratic Party but the entire United States is learning—it is remembering—that if that power can be unleashed, it will take the form of a resurrection, a fountaining up of the energy that Blake called “eternal delight.” That uprush of energy changes everything, not just through making social and political activism possible but through changing the very nature of reality. Once again, as we did with Barack Obama but as we did much more dramatically in the 60’s, we are remembering that we have been depressed and fearful victims of monsters and monstrous systems because we felt we lacked all power. But the power is there, waiting to be tapped: not for nothing did Northrop Frye title his last big book Words with Power. Beowulf says this to the monster at the end of John Gardner’s Grendel: “Though you murder the world, turn plains to stone, transmogrify life into I and it, strong searching roots will crack your cave and rain will cleanse it: The world will burn green, sperm build again. My promise. Time is the mind, the hand that makes (fingers on harpstrings, hero-swords, the acts the eyes of queens). By that I kill you” (170).
To be filled with exuberant energy is to become as little children again. Yes, he is very badly behaved, but Calvin in the comic strip Calvin & Hobbes is constantly filled with the energy of his imagination. He joyfully imagines being a monster—a Tyrannosaurus who leaves carnage in his wake, for instance—not maliciously but out of a constant protest that the reality principle should be our miserable limit. Why is Maurice Sendak’s Where the Wild Things Are (1963) one of the children’s classics of all time? After all, it is liable to the same criticism as Beowulf: nothing here to see but a bunch of cavorting monsters. In the book, the significantly named Max is sent to bed without his supper because of his unrestrained rampaging in a wolf suit. In his imagination, however, he is transported to an Otherworld of wild things, whom he masters by staring into their eyes without blinking once. He becomes their king and cavorts with them in a scene that any devotee of Dionysus would understand. He does not, however, “go native” but returns from the wild to have his supper. Calvin and Max do not transform reality: they return to accepting and obeying (for a while) the rules of their parents.
But they have not renounced their energy, their inner monster. They do not repent and become good little boys. The hope, the hope for all our children, is not that they will “mature” and “adjust” and eventually fit into the system. The system is the monster that, like Hesiod’s Typhon, is made up of monsters. We hope that they will learn how to control, to use, to employ their wild imaginings and joyous exuberance and someday blow the roof off this house of cards, which is not so strong and impregnable as it is said to be. Blow the roof off, and then build a new Heorot, a new Camelot, a Star Trek Federation of civilized equals not only accepting but delighting in all differences, building back better, making a new world out of the bones of the monster that ate its young. And once that world is built, to dance, dance to the song of the poet who sings of a Creation that in fact has no beginning or end, because it is destroyed and recreated anew in every moment.
References
Gardner, John, Grendel. Vintage, 1971, 1989.
Hesiod, Theogony. In Hesiod and Theognis. Translated by Dorothea Wender. Penguin, 1973.
Otto, Rudolf. The Idea of the Holy. Oxford, 1923. Originally published 1917.