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Session 13b: Monsters on the Edge
Chair: Jean-Philippe Imbert

Dreadful Burials: Corpses and Skulls Pierced by Nails in the Ancient World
Silvia Alfaye
Institute of Archaeology, Oxford University, Oxford, United Kingdom

No abstract is presently available

Inconceivable Beasts: The ‘Wonders of the East’ In the Beowulf Manuscript
Asa Mittman and Susan Kim
School of Art, Arizona State University and Department of English, Illinois State University, USA

Strange, indistinct creatures peer out at us from darkened, charred pages. They writhe on brittle vellum, leap off the page, and refuse to be contained by frames. The headless blemmye, the firebreathing, dog-headed cynocephalus, the man- (or woman-) eating donestre – these wonders fill London, British Library, Cotton Vitellius A.xv, commonly known as the Beowulf Manuscript, after that most famous Anglo-Saxon epic. The main poem in this tenth-century manuscript has received abundant scholarly attention, but the other works bound with Beowulf remain understudied. This paper examines the Wonders of the East, a collection of illustrated descriptions of monsters and other marvels inhabiting the other end of the world.
These images have been critically dismissed or elided for being everything fantastic monsters ought be—raw, uncontained, unrestrained. Yet, as J.R.R. Tolkien wrote in “Beowulf: The Monsters and the Critics” (The Proceedings of the British Academy, 1936)—the essay which shapes most modern readings of the poem—Beowulf’s monsters “a re not an inexplicable blunder of taste; they are essential, fundamentally allied to the underlying ideas of the poem, which give it its lofty tone and high seriousness.” We argue that like the monsters of Beowulf, the very resilient monstrosity of the unique pairings of images and texts in the Vitellius Wonders of the East is not a debasement of traditions executed with greater skill in other manuscripts, but rather“essential” to the “underlying ideas” of the collection as a whole.
The Wonders are very much about how we locate ourselves. Explicitly and literally, most entries begin by situating the creatures to be described: “At the beginning of the land,” “as you go towards the Red Sea,” “in the same place,” “between these two rivers,” and so on. These passages can disorient—they follow no geographic logic and map no possible journeys—yet nonetheless they shape for readers a progression though a loose ‘narrative’ in which we are led deeper and deeper into the unknown, almost mythical East and, thus, back again to the spaces of our own identities. In this paper, we will chart the location of these creatures both in their geographic context and in the modern scholarship which at once denies meaning to and reifies their monstrosity.

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