Tag: monsters
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Medieval Monsters: Grendel
Few works of medieval literature are as central to the “monster canon” or as influential on modern fantasy as the Old English epic Beowulf. The poem offers not one but three monstrous antagonists for its hero to confront. Beowulf is an Anglo-Saxon poem, and while the manuscript dates to the tenth or eleventh century, the…
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Medieval Monsters: The Draugr
Vampires. Mummies. Zombies. The undead are everywhere in modern horror and fantasy, from Salem’s Lot to The Walking Dead. But they’re far from a recent obsession. Long before even the nineteenth-century Gothic novels of Bram Stoker and Mary Shelley, we find the undead represented in the folklore traditions of every culture—the Ro-Langs of Tibet, the…
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Medieval Monsters: The Green Knight
If you’ve ever taken a first-year English course at university, I’m willing to bet that you’ve encountered Sir Gawain and the Green Knight. This fourteenth-century romance is one of the most well-known works of medieval English literature and a classic entry in the Arthurian corpus.
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Medieval Monsters: Bisclavret the Werewolf
Of all the monsters of Western folklore, the werewolf is among the most iconic and enduring. From the ancient Greek lycanthrope, to the Roman versipellis, to the “man-wolf” of medieval Europe’s Germanic and Celtic peoples, to the Early Modern witch-hunts, to its widespread presence in modern popular culture, the werewolf has enjoyed near-constant popularity throughout…
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Medieval Monsters: The Giant of Mont St. Michel
If you consume even a small amount of modern fantasy, you’re probably used to seeing monsters in a vaguely medieval setting. It is common to see knights, princesses, and peasants living alongside and/or doing battle against a range of fantastical creatures: dragons, ogres, giants, trolls, orcs, elves, dwarves, and more. Medieval Europe has become, in…