The Seven Basic Plots - Christopher Booker [16]
Another celebrated Overcoming the Monster story from the Dark Ages is that of Beowulf. Again we begin with the familiar image of a kingdom which has fallen under a terrible shadow: the little community of Heorot which is nightly menaced by the predatory assaults of the mysterious monster Grendel. The young hero Beowulf comes from across the sea and eventually, in a great nocturnal battle, deals the monster a mortal wound: only to discover, when he tracks the trail of Grendel's blood, that he must confront the monster's even more terrible mother, in the lair at the bottom of a deep lake where she is brooding over the body of her dead son. Although Beowulf's immediate reward for his victory over the two monsters is a rich hoard of `ancient treasures and twisted gold' from the grateful king whose kingdom he has saved, he then returns home to become king over his own kingdom (many years later, at the end of his life, he has to confront a third monster, in a profoundly symbolic episode which we shall look at much later in the book).
Of the many Overcoming the Monster stories thrown up by Christian Europe in the Middle Ages, probably the most familiar is that of St George and the Dragon, which appears to be a Christian adaptation of the Perseus myth.' The hero comes to a kingdom which is being ravaged by a dragon and, like Perseus, finds a beautiful Princess tethered by the edge of the sea, where she has been placed by her countrymen in a last desperate bid to buy off the monster's attacks. The monster approaches and George slays him; but, unlike Perseus, George is not then able to marry the Princess he has freed. Since this is rather self-consciously a `Christian' version of the tale, his reward is simply to insist that all the inhabitants of the country should be baptised: in other words, that they should all succeed to another `kingdom, the kingdom of Christ.2
During the centuries of diminishing faith in the supernatural which followed the Middle Ages and the Renaissance, the more obviously fantastic dragons and monsters of old slipped below the horizon of European storytelling (although they never faded away altogether). But then, in a way which to the rationalistic age of the Enlightenment or even through most of the literal, materialistic Victorian era would have seemed wholly improbable, fabulous and terrifying `monsters' came back into vogue in a quite remarkable fashion.
It all happened quite suddenly, in the closing years of the nineteenth century. Over the previous 100 years there had been a number of premonitory signs, notably in the taste for `Gothic horror' which had been such an important reflection of the rise of the Romantic movement, with stories such as The Castle of Otranto (1764) and Mary Shelley's Frankenstein (1817). But in the space of just a few years in the 1890s, there appeared in England a rash of stories of the kind which have played such a dominant part in popular entertainment ever since - ghost stories, tales of horror, science fiction - in which monsters of the most grotesque and improbable variety once again surged to the forefront of Western popular storytelling.
In 1894 a young Cambridge don, M. R. James, wrote a story called Canon Alberic's Scrap Book. Tales of ghosts and hauntings have been told since time immemorial, but with the first of his series of ghost stories James raised the form onto a new plane of horror. In a `decaying town' in the Pyrenees, an English scholar, Denniston, finds a folio of old mauscripts which belonged to a Canon of the local cathedral who had died in mysterious circumstances 200 years before. One