The Boundary Between Monster and Human Anonymous College

In Tolkien’s view, voiced in his seminal lecture of 1936, the world of monsters is “essential” to the configuration of Beowulf; one half of a series of apparently antithetical binaries youth and age, good and evil, and not least, the human and monstrous that formulate the poem. Monsters are, according to Tolkien, instated in the poem as “the enemies of mankind, enemies of the one God” and thus form a further binary between good (God and mankind) and evil (the monstrous). The boundaries between the monstrous and human, then, if we are to consider the implications of Tolkien’s argument, appear firmly delineated not least because this binary is seemingly aligned with alternative antithetical pairs; that is, the monstrous corresponds with the ungodly and evil, and the human with the godly and good. This view is perhaps a simplistic interpretation of the poem, however, as Michael Alexander argues, who notes that though “opposition and dualism” certainly frame the poem, binaries are “not always [as] simply” differentiated as we might assume. Indeed, the monstrous is often sympathetically anthropomorphised; the human, specifically Beowulf, at times seeming to step outside of its own domain and into a nonhuman one, obscuring and...