From dinosaurs to Godzilla: a 15,000-year history of monsters

Summary

History Extra Podcast: From Dinosaurs to Godzilla – A 15,000-Year History of Monsters

Introduction

In the episode titled "From Dinosaurs to Godzilla: a 15,000-year history of monsters," hosted by Rachel Dinning of History Extra Podcast and featuring author and historian Natalie Lawrence, listeners embark on a comprehensive journey through the evolution of monsters in human storytelling. Drawing from Lawrence's book, Enchanted Creatures, the discussion delves into how monsters have mirrored societal fears, cultural beliefs, and humanity's relationship with the natural world over millennia.

Origins and Inspiration Behind Enchanted Creatures

Natalie Lawrence introduces her book by tracing her academic journey, which began with a PhD focusing on the depiction of strange beasts in early modern Europe (16th-18th centuries). She discovered that the creation of monsters often stemmed from humanity's attempt to personify the unknown and natural world's ambiguous aspects. This realization underscored the significance of monsters in understanding how humans perceive their environment and their place within it.

“We turn unknown things into monsters, and also we imbue aspects of the natural world with monstrousness because we are putting parts of ourselves out into other creatures, into the landscape, even into plants sometimes.” ([03:23])

Defining Monsters: Transgression and Revelation

When addressing the elusive definition of monsters, Lawrence emphasizes two primary characteristics: transgression and revealing quality.

1. Transgression: Monsters often break boundaries—be it between species, or societal norms. This transgression makes them inherently shocking and fascinating.

2. Revealing Quality: Monsters symbolize deeper fears or societal issues that humans might prefer to ignore or suppress.

“Monsters tend to be things that transgress boundaries in some way. And that is the reason for why they are shocking and surprising, because they do something that is transgressive.” ([07:00])

Monsters in Mythology and Religion

Lawrence explores how monsters feature prominently in various creation myths, particularly in ancient cultures. These beings often embody the chaotic forces of nature essential in the world's formation.

“There's nothing better to represent the incomprehensible natural forces involved in creating the world than a monster.” ([13:48])

She contrasts animistic pantheistic religions, where monsters coexist within the natural landscape, with monotheistic religions like Judeo-Christianity, which tend to vilify monstrousness as purely evil. This shift has profound implications on how societies perceive inherent human qualities and the natural world.

The Female Snake Monster Trope

A significant portion of the discussion centers on the recurring motif of female snake monsters, such as Medusa in Greek mythology, Lamia, and Melusine. Lawrence argues that this trope reflects deep-seated fears surrounding female power and fecundity.

“If you make a monster, you can kill it and you can steal its power. So I think the snake women really represent a lot of the problems of gender relations in history in this kind of monster making of female potency.” ([16:37])

She highlights how these creatures often symbolize the duality of creation and destruction inherent in Mother Nature, portraying women as both life-givers and potential harbingers of death.

Reimagining Traditional Monsters

The episode also touches on contemporary efforts to retell and reinterpret classic monster stories. While Lawrence appreciates the intention to demystify and humanize these creatures, she cautions against diluting their symbolic significance.

“You need to face the monsters head on a bit, just turning them into characters who aren't really that bad.” ([20:43])

Real vs. Mythical Monsters: Dinosaurs

Lawrence draws parallels between mythical dragons and real creatures like dinosaurs, which have served as inspirations for modern monsters. She discusses how paleontological discoveries and cultural shifts have continually reshaped our perception of dinosaurs.

“Dinosaurs are kind of like our pet monsters that have come with us over the last 200 years and shifted with our own sense of our technologies.” ([25:37])

This evolution reflects advancements in scientific understanding and changing societal values, demonstrating how real-world discoveries influence mythical narratives.

Godzilla: From Nuclear Nightmare to Ecological Savior

A compelling case study is the transformation of Godzilla, originally a symbol of nuclear devastation post-World War II, into an ecological protector in recent films like King of the Monsters.

“Godzilla wakes up and he takes his rightful place as the alpha of the pack and starts leading all the Kaiju to regenerate the ecosystem and undo everything that humans have done.” ([25:45])

This shift signifies a broader cultural reimagining of monsters from embodiments of fear to agents of environmental restoration.

Monsters in Literature: Grendel in Beowulf

Lawrence examines Grendel from the Anglo-Saxon epic Beowulf to illustrate how monsters can encapsulate societal anxieties. Grendel represents not only the external wildness threatening civilization but also the internal fears of societal collapse and moral decay.

“Grendel is really a representation of everything that society at that time was trying to defend themselves against and everything in the wild.” ([28:09])

She draws parallels between ancient fears and modern-day discourses on wildlife management and conservation, highlighting the persistent nature of monster symbolism.

The Modern Relationship with Monsters: Internal Fears

Lawrence posits that contemporary monsters often originate from within, reflecting internal psychological fears rather than external threats. This internalization aligns with the 20th-century recognition that evil can reside within humanity itself, as seen in the fascination with true crime and psychological thrillers.

“We became fully aware that we couldn't just push the evil outwards into other races, into distant places. The world became very well known.” ([32:05])

This introspective view of monstrosity underscores a shift in societal fears from external chaos to the potential for internal corruption.

Favorite Monster Story: The Minotaur

Concluding the episode, Lawrence shares her admiration for the Minotaur myth, not for its narrative but for its symbolic depth. The Minotaur represents the internal monsters individuals must confront and integrate within themselves.

“We try and defend against them by building all these conscious defenses and trying to hide them from ourselves and from others. And the idea that actually what we need to do is to go into our mental labyrinths and not slay the monsters, but actually befriend them.” ([34:06])

This perspective emphasizes personal growth and self-acceptance as crucial in overcoming one's inner fears and flaws.

Conclusion

The episode "From Dinosaurs to Godzilla: a 15,000-year history of monsters" offers a rich exploration of how monsters serve as mirrors reflecting humanity's evolving fears, beliefs, and societal changes. Through historical analysis and contemporary examples, Natalie Lawrence elucidates the enduring significance of monsters in understanding the human condition.

For more insightful discussions and historical narratives, subscribe to the History Extra Podcast, produced by Lewis Dobbs.

Transcript

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[Natalie Lawrence]

Welcome to the History Extra Podcast. Fascinating historical conversations from the makers of BBC History magazine. From the shadowy figures of ancient cave paintings to modern pop culture icons like Godzilla, monsters have been a powerful part of human storytelling for thousands of years. But why do we create them? And what do these mythical beings reveal about our fears, beliefs, and the way we see the natural world? Speaking here to Rachel Dinning, Natalie Lawrence, the author of the book Enchanted Creatures explores these questions and more, revealing how monsters have evolved alongside us, reflecting the hopes and anxieties of different cultures through time.

[Rachel Dinning]

Hi, Natalie. Today we're talking about your new book, Enchanted Creatures, which traces 15,000 years of history through the stories of different monsters and creatures. Why did you want to write this book? Perhaps you can tell our listeners a bit about the inspiration.

[Natalie Lawrence]

So it really started with my PhD work, which was on strange beasts that came to Europe for the first time in the early modern period. So sort of 16th, 17th, 18th century. And the ideas that I developed through that project I saw actually spanned a much broader human story in that we turn unknown things into monsters, and also we imbue aspects of the natural world with monstrousness because we are putting parts of ourselves out into other creatures, into the landscape, even into plants sometimes. And so I thought it was a very important story to tell because it tells us a lot about how we relate to the world and also how we see our place in nature.

[Rachel Dinning]

And we'll get a bit more into that later on in the podcast, as well as some of the particular stories of monsters that you cover in the book. So your book covers a really broad timeframe which really highlights how we've been fascinated by monsters and stories about them. We've got, you know, manticores and hydras of the ancient world all the way through to modern day, and films like Alien and Predator. So monster storytelling has really been a part of human nature for a very long time. So why are we fascinated by monsters?

[Natalie Lawrence]

So I think there's many elements to this. One of them is that I think we are inherently biophilic, so we are inherently fascinated with other organisms and fascinated with the other animate beings that inhabit the world with us. And children from. Right from a young age, they're fascinated with, you know, they see a worm or a beetle, they'll stare at it for ages. And a lot of adults, I think, lose that as they get older. But some people manage to hold onto it. But other creatures have basically been in our deep in our imaginations for as long as we've existed. I think accounts of, for example, deep psychedelic journeys, there are often creatures in those visions. So they. They exist right down in our. In our subconscious. So there's that fascination and that kind of inherent engagement with other beasts, but there's also the kind of dreamlike quality of putting them together in funny ways. And we are attracted to strange and weird things. We're curious beings. And so anything that shocks us or surprises us, which is what monsters tend to Do. We're inherently attracted to that, and we want to find out about it, but also just to kind of experience the wonder of it as well. And then if you add the layer on also of the symbolism of the monsters, too. Aspects of the natural world have always had symbolic meaning for us. And I think that's true even today. Even though we have a much more kind of materialistic, scientific society, we still place symbolic value on other creatures. I mean, if you look at the emphasis people put on attractive animals like pandas or tigers and things like that, so that that kind of inherent fascination, the zany quality of our imagination and also the symbolic value of other creatures altogether means that we have always created monsters, and we've always imagined strange and fantastical creatures. And even today, when we think they don't exist, we still love seeing them on the cinema screen or reading about them in books or seeing images of them sort of basically enjoying the unreality for a while.

[Rachel Dinning]

So how do we actually define what a monster is? Because it's meant such different things at different points in our history. Sometimes we describe real animals as monsters, Sometimes we describe specific groups of. Of people as monsters, and sometimes we perhaps fabricate completely mythical creatures out of nowhere. So what's your definition?

[Natalie Lawrence]

So in all my years studying monsters, it's still very difficult to actually define a monster. Because if you just collect together a bunch of different monsters, they encompass a massive array of different things. They tend to be things that transgress boundaries in some way. And that is the reason for why they are shocking and surprising, because they do something that is transgressive. They cross between the human and the animal. They cross between species or, you know, like something like a dragon is a reptilian mammalian bird. Like they cross between the organic and the inorganic. Or they might transgress social boundaries, which is where you get human monsters. So people who behave in ways we think are inhuman, we often call monsters because they have extreme, you know, they're extremely sadistic or greedy or violent. You know, we see them as monstrous. So that is possibly one of the most defining characteristics of monsters, is this quality of transgression. The second is probably that they have some kind of revealing quality in that they have some meaning that we are trying to run away from. So a really nice example, and this does speak to today as well, are the depictions of other races in the 16th and 17th century. So people were traveling around the globe for the first time, and they were discovering new lands, encountering other peoples that they'd never even heard of. And the assumptions about these other races were ancient, ancient images. So right back to the time of Pliny and before, in, you know, Roman Greek images, the idea was that these other races were savage peoples who were monsters. You know, they had their heads in their chests, they had one foot, they were cannibals, they had giant ears that they covered their whole bodies with. And when people went to distant places, Indonesia and other parts of Asia, for example, they saw these monstrous images in the people that they encountered. And there were all these stories of, for example, cannibalism that was occurring in these other cultures. And there isn't actually any evidence that there was any cannibalism, but people projected this kind of dark violence onto these other peoples.

[Rachel Dinning]

And was this sort of munstering of other humans a fear based thing, do you think?

[Natalie Lawrence]

I think discrimination is often based in fear or partly based in fear in that. So fear of difference, fear of not being on the same page culturally, fear of violence. And it's also often the projection of one's own violent feelings onto the other group. And you fear that they're going to do you violence. And this is a really deeply inbuilt evolutionary mechanism and it's important for survival. If you know, if you're from different groups, there is a risk that you're going to have to defend yourself. So the monster making of other races or other people is actually something that is very difficult to get over because it's something that is deeply wired into our evolutionary history and that were very good evolutionary reasons for. So it's something that we have to work very hard to overcome.

[Rachel Dinning]

Now, on sort of the topic of evolutionary reasons for creating monsters, I was going to ask you a question about something you discuss at the start of your book where you tell the story of a series of cave paintings discovered in France in the first half of the 20th century. So cave paintings are one of our earliest records of human history and they can reveal a lot about ourselves and our relationship with nature in particular. Can you tell our listeners a bit more about this particular set of cave paintings that you discuss and what they reveal?

[Natalie Lawrence]

So there's an amazing array of different paintings in southern France and Spain. The Trois Faire caves specifically date to around 15,000 years ago. They were discovered just before World War II by three brothers. And they loved exploring all the cave complexes that existed around their home. And they discovered this particular one which just contained myriad wonderful paintings and they couldn't believe what they found. It had all these galleries covered in cave lions and aurochs and Woolly rhinos and all the kind of megafauna of the Pleistocene landscape, the Ice Age landscape. But it also contains this very interesting figure called, we now call the sorcerer, which was a sort of half antlered, animalistic human figure with a sort of a horse's tail, but it was definitely quite humanoid. And there are theories that, which I discuss in my book, that this might actually represent a shaman in a trance state, or it might be a shaman dressed in skins, wearing antlers. And we have found antlered headdresses elsewhere which we think were used for shamanistic ceremonies. But this is a token of one of the oldest and most widespread forms of spirituality or religious experience. Shamanistic societies, they're centered around a shaman and they use fasting, chanting, psychedelic drugs, all sorts of means to enter trance states and to access what they see as alternate realms or alternate worlds, but are essentially other levels of consciousness. And there's something about becoming half human, half animal and entering caves, which would have been a bit like, you know, going through a sort of rebirth almost, and shutting off the world and entering these dark cavernous spaces with quite a lot of effort. It would not have been easy to do this and representing the images, their trance images on the walls of the cave and just abandoning the images in the dark of the cave when they returned back to the light again. There's this deep human need to explore the depths of our conscious and to enter these alternate states, which might have been a way of dealing with the fear of living with, you know, you've got these massive big cats around with scimitar like teeth, and you've got woolly mammoths, you've got this big megafauna that can really kill you and you've got to fight with as well, because you need to eat. So it might have been a way of dealing with that, that fear, but it also might have been a way of bringing people together in these trance states. And there are theories that a chap called Robin Dunbar, a professor at Oxford, he suggested that actually, see, these transcendental states acted as social glue and they brought people together and healed the rifts between people and allowed them to live in groups that were much larger than they otherwise would like to live together in.

[Rachel Dinning]

Now, on the topic of spirituality, I wanted to ask you about monsters in mythology and even religion. So you write in the book that monsters frequently take center stage in a lot of creation myths, especially in the ancient world.

[Natalie Lawrence]

In terms of creation myths. Yes, I think there's nothing better to represent the incomprehensible natural forces involved in creating the world than a monster. So often you get dragons like Leviathan. I talk about Tiamat, the Mesopotamian dragon goddess. In the book you've got all these chaos gods, the Titans in Greek mythology and your mangada, the world serpent in Norse mythology. So a lot of creation or origin myths for the world involve vast dragon like beasts because they kind of represent everything about the power of nature. The earth, the air, the fire and the water. And I think we've always had a tendency to animate the world as well. So if you think about something like Greek mythology, it's a, it's a pantheistic, it's quite an animistic pantheistic religion. There are spirits, naiads, dryads, oreads. Everything has a spirit and a God, some kind of deity attached to it. So there's this kind of animation of the landscape which monotheistic religion really squashed. So whereas before monsters were part of the landscape, they were part of this constellation of supernatural beings that inhabited the world and weren't necessarily good or bad all the time. I mean, if you look at the Bible, there's a. The angels are very monstrous and there are monsters all over the place. Or even if you look in Eastern religions tend to have a lot more monstrousness woven into their deities. But then when you get Judeo Christianity, that becomes much more binary. So you have a good sort of all good transcendent God and his followers. And then you've got the devil who is like a horned God. He's like sort of old pagan horned God. So monstrousness becomes all bad. And to be pure and divine and holy is entirely on the opposite side. So in a way, that's not very good for us because it means that anything inside us that is seen as monstrous or bad is totally vilified. And rather than accepting that we are a mixture of good and bad, we're always. Well, in terms of Judeo Christian canon, we sort of trying to always reach this holy purity when actually there's quite a lot of monstrousness in us.

[Rachel Dinning]

That's really interesting. And I think we as humans have struggled to accept these monstrous qualities through history. As you say, it's not always black and white. Now, I wanted to ask you about some specific examples of monster stories. One that I found really interesting in your book was the trope of the female snake monster, which crops up repeatedly through history. So we've got Medusa from Greek mythology and there are lesser known ones like the Lamia and Melusine. So why are snakes and women so connected. And why do these stories of snake women pop up again and again?

[Natalie Lawrence]

So snakes and women, they pop up quite a lot as this kind of hybrid monster. And there's some really interesting themes across their stories. So if you take something like a monster like Medusa, who's very well known, she was this beautiful maiden who gets raped by the sea God Poseidon in the temple of Athena in one of the versions. So Athena was Poseidon's niece, and rather than punish her uncle, Athena decides to turn the beautiful maiden Medusa into this horrendous monster with brazen hands and wings, claws, snake hair and the ability to petrify men with her gaze. And she also turns her sisters into these monsters too, and then banishes them to the desert. And they spend a bit of time just turning men into stone and creating a little sculpture park around their home. Until the hero Perseus comes to cut off Medusa's head, which he does with a lot of help from the gods, because he's not really up to the job himself. And then Medusa's head gets taken and put on Athena's shield. So it becomes a weapon for the Olympian gods. So the ability, her petrifying ability becomes a weapon for the Olympian gods. And this is a theme that crops up in quite a lot of the other stories. So Lahmia was a queen who gets turned into, who catches the fancy of Zeus, gets turned into this horrible monster by Hera, becomes a child eating monster. There's another great story from Turkic and Iranian mythology called Shamaran. She's this kind of medicinal wisdom keeper who gets discovered by a young man and eventually ends up getting eaten and passing her medicinal wisdom to the young man. So there's this kind of theme of the inversion of the female from being the life giving, nurturing force, the kind of Mother Nature force into the female as this deadly, monstrous, often baby murdering creature. And what I argue in the book is that this is about the fear of the female power to give life and also to take life away. In that Mother Nature is terrible and wonderful. She can generate endlessly, but also can destroy and death is inevitable. So if you don't have control of this power, it's absolutely terrifying. And there are plenty of Mother Nature goddesses who were associated with snakes. And the snake represents the deadly because they were our first predators, so they were really primates, first monsters. So the snake is deadly, it's also regeneration. And then the female is fecundity generation life giving. And so there are plenty of Mother Nature goddesses in across different traditions who represent this cycle of life, this, this life giving and deadly force. And they were revered. But I think the snake monsters are more recent inversions of these snake mother goddesses in that they are turning this female power into a monstrous and vilified horror, just purely deadly power like Medusa. Rather than being life giving, she returns things back to stone, she renders things inert. And also in a lot of these stories, you have the co option of that power, the monstrous power. So if you make a monster, you can kill it and you can steal its power. So I think the snake women really represent a lot of the problems of gender relations in history in this kind of this monster making of female potency, which allows you to kill it, subjugate it, take control of it. And that is what has happened to women through history and is still happening in many parts of the world right now in astounding ways.

[Rachel Dinning]

So there's been such a tendency recently, I've noticed, to rewrite stories of certain monsters. And you've just spoke about Medusa. Now, she's been retold in a few different ways in recent times. So an example might be Natalie Haynes novel Stone Blind. But there have been many film adaptations that turn traditional villains on their heads. What do you make of this shift into retelling stories of perhaps historically unpleasant or bad monsters in a more sympathetic light?

[Natalie Lawrence]

I applaud the sentiment. I think the recognition that these represent the monstering of women and the desire to undo that monstering is important in terms of we really don't want those instincts controlling how we act in a societal level. I think, though, they're trying in some ways to make characters out of beings that aren't characters. So Medusa is not a. She's not really a person, she's an image. So it's kind of cathartic to turn her into a full rounded character in a book. But it also in some ways unmakes what the monster means. And it. It doesn't really get rid of it, it kind of just dissolves it. So you need to face the monsters head on a bit, just turning them into characters who aren't really that bad. I think it's like, well, yes, of course, women are not that bad. They might be scary, they're not that bad. But it also removes the importance of really facing head on what drove the creation of this monster and what this monster really means. I mean, I've read Medusa as a symbol of the vilification of female power. You can also take Medusa as a rejection of the male gaze and an inversion of the power hierarchy, for example. So you can take lots of different feminist reworkings of this from very different perspectives. And that is one of the great things about monsters, is they can mean almost anything that you want them to mean. They're incredibly flexible.

[Rachel Dinning]

Now, not all the monsters that you discuss in your book are these fictional creations. So you have a chapter looking at dinosaurs, and, I mean, we're fascinated with dinosaurs, aren't we? And you argue that our presentation of dinosaurs has varied quite significantly over history, and this tells us something about ourselves. So tell me a bit more about this. Why has our representation of dinosaurs changed so much?

[Natalie Lawrence]

So, I think dinosaurs are a bit like the dragons that we discovered actually existed. They do a lot of the things that dragons do in that they are these vast, sometimes scaly creatures that are just bigger than we can possibly imagine and more powerful than we can possibly imagine. And so they push all of those buttons that classic monsters do. And the fact that they actually exist is even more exciting, the fact that they were right under our feet. So when. When people started first becoming aware of dinosaurs in the 19th century, or really sort of properly studying them, I think the idea that these beasts had existed just under our feet this whole time and then they were being unearthed and this image of this alternate world ruled by reptiles was just. I think it just fired everyone's imaginations to an incredible degree. Now, the reason why they've changed over time so dramatically is partly a paleontological one, in that when you're piecing things together from, you know, skeleton or fossil evidence, and you've got partial fossils and you have nothing really to compare it to, it's really hard to work out quite how things put together and what the fossil means. And so we're getting better and better at interpreting fossils all the time. So something like an iguanodon, it turned out it started off looking a bit like an iguana. If you look at the Crystal palace dinosaurs, it's got its horn on its nose. Then it became this really upright, kind of quite effete creature with the thumb horns. And it's kept changing basically over the decades, as basically as paleontological methods have got better, but also as people's ideas of dinosaurs have changed, so people, as much as you can look at things scientifically, there's always fantasy involved. When you've got blank spaces, when, you know, when you don't have all the evidence, you've got to fill those blank spaces with imagination. And so if you look at the early Victorian dinosaurs, they're kind of like these big hefty, trucky dinos. You know, it's an industrial world building up at this time. The imagination is all filled with these heavy industrial machinery. And that's what the dinosaurs look like. They look like these big industrial dinosaurs, you know, like trains chugging along a track. When the dinosaurs fell out of fashion in the early 20th century, they became sort of sluggish, hefty, maybe they couldn't even walk. And the images of the dinosaurs shifted to these kind of mopey looking giant reptiles that couldn't really move about properly. And now the more recent dinosaurs, or images of dinosaurs are these almost these much more bird like sparky. They do child care, they run around. They're kind of high tech dinosaurs, which obviously are the result of paleontological developments, but they also do fit with our kind of high tech society as well. So dinosaurs are kind of like our pet monsters that have come with us over the last 200 years and shifted with our own sense of our technologies.

[Rachel Dinning]

And are there any other types of monsters like that that have undergone a shift across time and how we've portrayed them?

[Natalie Lawrence]

I mean, one of the most recent ones which, talking about the dinosaurs, is Godzilla. So Godzilla initially appeared just after the Second World War in Ishiro Honda's film Godzilla. And he was a representation of the horrors of the nuclear bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki and also other horrors like Operation Meeting House and the nuclear tests on Bikini Atoll and the US occupation of Japan. So he was the vast bulk of Godzilla, represented the irresistible horror of these events and these weapons, as much as you can't really do much with a monster like that, he's just a giant dinosaur monster. He's actually become. He's quite nimble. And he's become a very different thing in recent films. So one of the recent Godzilla films, King of the Monsters, he actually becomes our savior. So there are all these bad monsters, the Kaiju, led by the three headed one King Ghidorah, and they sort of try and they're woken up by eco terrorists and they try and take over the world and kill all of humanity. So Godzilla wakes up and he takes his rightful place as the alpha of the pack and starts leading all the Kaiju to regenerate the ecosystem and undo everything that humans have done. So they become our kind of ecological saviors. They're almost like these ancient creation gods who have come back to take over the world again and be the kind of titans leading a new ecological age. And they all run on nuclear energy as well, clean nuclear energy. So they're munching on nuclear warheads and to keep their energy up. And as much as I had had a lot of issue with the reading of how ecology works and other things in that film, I thought this concept of shifting Godzilla from this implacable horror into this titan like savior, or the kind of this, like this ancient being that was coming back to set things right was an amazing shift for something that doesn't look like a very malleable monster.

[Rachel Dinning]

Now, if we go a bit further back into the past, although not quite so far as the dinosaur age, I wanted to ask you about Beowulf, the Anglo Saxon epic poem. So you included this story in your book because you say that it can tell us a lot about Anglo Saxon society and how it differs to ours. Can you tell our listeners a bit about what you meant by this?

[Natalie Lawrence]

So this was a really interesting case because I thought it was very important to look or to have a. Have a stopping off point at a time when our relationship with nature and wildness was very different to how it is now. Because I think from our perspective, it's very hard for us to imagine being really scared of wildness. It's become something that is so hard to get hold of, it's almost a privilege to access it. And everything feels so sanitized and so civilized now. But not that long ago. So just matter of hundreds of years ago, there was this sense that the human and the animal were still not that separate, and that society was actually quite tenuous in that things could fall apart very fast and the environment was much more threatening. And there were still big animals around that could hurt. You know, there were still wolves around that could hurt you and other big animals. And there was this sense of having to defend oneself. So the sense of boundary, the boundaries of civilization were much more porous and felt much more tenuous. And in that kind of situation, you get monsters like Grendel being created, because Grendel is really a. Well, one of the things he is, is a representation of everything that society at that time was trying to defend themselves against and everything in the wild. The fear of the wild, but also the fear of the wild inside and the fear of the aspects of humanity that could bring everything down. So should violence take over, should the desire for revenge take over, should loyalties fall apart, everything crumbles. And given that everyone's relying so heavily on each other, that is an impossible option. Beowulf was also written at a time when it was written just before the Norman invasion as well. So it was actually written at a time when there was about to be a seismic shift in the state of things. And it was written by a Christian author about sort of bad old days, the bad old pagan days. So it was a Christian author's view of what this kind of heroic Germanic warrior age had been like. So there's a really interesting interaction between the Christian elements of it and the kind of pagan side Grendel represents, the way that the wild could break in more easily in that kind of situation as well. And so I also, I used Grendel as a jumping off point to think about the ways in which, even more recently, we have been trying to keep the wild out and we, and we have still vilified, for example, other big predators. So I talk about the case of the thylacine in Australasia. Thylacines were, you know, can you imagine, a bit like urban foxes, they're called Tasmanian tigers as well. They're these marsupial predators that probably went after small mammals. But in the 19th century they started to think that they hunted sheep. And the sheep farmers in Tasmania were not happy about this. So they put out a bounty on the thylacine's head and they killed many, many thylacines until there were almost no thylacines left. And they realized this too late. And so the last thylacines died in the zoo. Although people keep thinking, they keep searching for them. People love a cryptid. They love looking for things they think may be there. And actually the thylacine wasn't a sheep killer. Its jaw was too weak to kill sheep. So they made this up because they were scared of the wild environment and its effects on their well being. And they had depicted the thylacines as kind of sneaking, vicious creatures that were going after their sheep. And actually it was just complete rubbish. So that's a really clear example of how we can make a monster out of an animal, even a real animal that we are quite familiar with. And even in a time when scientific rationality was meant to be on top of things.

[Rachel Dinning]

That's really interesting. And it kind of brings me on to my next question for you, which is, what would you say our relationship is with monsters now?

[Natalie Lawrence]

I think the most interesting shift with monsters is that over the 20th century and all the horrors that occurred there, I think we became fully aware that we couldn't just push the evil outwards into other races, into distant places. The world became very well known. We've explored most of It. Except the deep sea. And then there's a lot of monsters in the deep sea in our modern imaginary. But the monsters essentially moved inside us, and so we became the monsters. And that was far more terrifying than any other monsters that had ever existed. So you've got psycho killers, you've got serial killers. People are obsessed with true crime documentaries because they're fascinated by the way that humanity can become truly terrible, or there's even ideas of infection. The cordyceps fungus. In the Last of Us, for example, there's this fear that monstrousness can erupt in us at any moment and we could be infected by something that we have no control over. And I think this concept also, you know, this originated with Freud and similar thinkers in the. During the World Wars. Seeing what humanity was capable of and the way that apparently good people could go along with the most atrocious things possible really showed that the monstrousness was inside. And I think people are. People are terrified of that idea now and they like to defend against it by trying to pretend that others, you know, what other opposite political faction are the monsters. But I think it's something that is much more in conscious awareness now. And so those tend to be the monsters that we are fascinated with now. You get savior behemoths like Godzilla on screen, but you also get much more psychological monsters in modern media.

[Rachel Dinning]

So it seems like we've gone a bit more internal, whereas our fears used to be external.

[Natalie Lawrence]

Exactly. Which is much more terrifying because monster making used to be a way of getting rid of those things. And now we're kind of having to take some of it back in and it doesn't feel very good.

[Rachel Dinning]

We're getting to the end now. So a bit of a lighter question to end on, but what's your favourite monster story from history?

[Natalie Lawrence]

The Minotaur is definitely one of my favourite monster stories, I think, because it represents so much about what every human has to go through as they develop and grow up in that they. We've all got these monsters inside us that we need to face and we need to battle with and we try and defend against them by building all these. All these conscious defenses and trying to hide them from ourselves and from others. And the idea that actually what we need to do is to go into our mental labyrinths and not slay the monsters, but actually befriend them and realize that they're not that bad. So in terms of what happens to the Minotaur, he gets slain by the hero Theseus, that's not necessarily my favorite part, but it's the symbol. Is it that what the Minotaur represents and the way that you can actually imagine making friends with your monstrous parts and realizing that we all have monsters inside us and none of us are that terrible, especially if we acknowledge our monsters. So that is probably one of my favorites and one of the most resonant for me personally. That was Natalie Lawrence, author and historian of science. Natalie's book Enchanted Creatures is out now. Thanks for listening. This podcast was produced by Lewis Dobbs.