Critical Essay | Critical Essay by Ward Parks

Critical Essay by Ward Parks

SOURCE: "Prey Tell: How Heroes Perceive Monsters in Beowulf," in Journal of English and Germanic Philology, Vol. 92, No. 1, January, 1993, pp. 1-16.

In the essay that follows, Parks focuses on the ambivalent nature of all three monsters in Beowulf but particularly on that of Grendel, whose shifting status as both animalistic predator and human-like opponent adds to the terror associated with him.

Since ancient times, the bestiality of man has been a topic of such resonance in the discourse of high culture as to suggest that it strikes upon deep tensions in the human psyche. While certain features of this problematic relationship between the human and infrahuman are fairly stable, in different eras it has been conceived through radically differing paradigms. The Christian ascetic, for example, while acknowledging the bestial within the human soul, castigated it as the source of fleshly temptations that distract the pilgrim in his...
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