In the Company of Predators
beowulf and the monstrous descendants of cain

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Notes

notes

1. Ruth Mellinkoff, however, following on from R.E. Kaske and Stephen C. Bandy, treats the cannibalistic giants in Enoch I as a possible source. See Ruth Mellinkoff, “Cain's Monstrous Progeny in Beowulf: Part I, Noachic Tradition,” Anglo-Saxon England 8 (1979): 143–62. Cf. Margaret E. Goldsmith, The Mode and Meaning of Beowulf (London: Athlone, 1970) 107–08. Goldsmith cites the fourth-century Ecclesiastical History of Eusebius (1. 2. 19) and maintains that by the time Beowulf was composed anthropophagy was a stock feature of Christian discourse surrounding the races that inhabited the earth prior to the Flood.

2. Genesis 1.26.

3. On the conditional tenure of this dominion, see Leviticus 25.23: “The land shall not be sold for ever: for the land is mine; for ye are strangers and sojourners with me.”

4. Cf. Peter Singer, Animal Liberation (London: Pimlico, 1995) 186–88. Beginning his review of canonical texts in the Western tradition, Singer holds the opening of Genesis responsible for arrogant contemporary attitudes towards non-human animals. This is one-sided, if what Singer wants to restrain is the perniciousness that follows from this arrogance. Also contributing to the perniciousness of many human interactions with animals is the belief, shared by Singer, that humans are not fundamentally different from animals: it may seem, because we are no more mysterious than any other zoological specimen, that we do not have to ask of ethical practice who we are and can act with the arrogant self-interest of what we murkily take to be “animal instinct.”

5. John Gardner, Grendel (New York: Knopf, 1971) 43–55 passim, 75–77.

6. Bruce Chatwin, The Songlines (London: Cape, 1987) 249. Chatwin is also concerned with how specialist predators may have had a role in the constitution of Homo sapiens.

7. See the twelfth-century manuscript held in Cambridge University Library and reproduced in The Old English Version of the Heptateuch, Ælfric's Treatise on the Old and New Testament and His Preface to Genesis, ed. S.J. Crawford (London: Oxford UP, 1922) 92.

8. Mark Turner, “The Origin of Selkies,” Journal of Consciousness Studies 11.5–6 (2004): 90–115 (90).

9. Fabienne L. Michelet, Creation, Migration, and Conquest: Imaginary Geography and Sense of Space in Old English Literature (Oxford: Oxford UP, 2006) 27–28.

10. G.W.F. Hegel, System of Ethical Life and First Philosophy of Spirit (Part III of the System of Speculative Philosophy 1803/4), eds. and trans. H.S. Harris and T.M. Knox (Albany: State U of New York P, 1979) 221–22.

11. See Maurice Blanchot, “Literature and the Right to Death,” trans. Lydia Davis in The Work of Fire, trans. Charlotte Mandell (Stanford: Stanford UP, 1995) 322–27.

12. Hegel§292 of Encyclopedia of the Philosophical Sciences in Outline, trans. Steven A. Taubeneck in Encyclopedia of the Philosophical Sciences in Outline and Critical Writings, ed. Ernst Behler (New York: Continuum, 1990) 196: “And the environment of external contingency in which the animal must live exercises a perpetual violence against the individual. Hence the life of the animal seems in general to be sick, and the animal's feeling seems to be insecure, anxious, and unhappy.” In this later text from 1817 the animal appears even to wait for the mercy killing of idealisation.

13. Jacques Derrida, “The Animal That Therefore I Am (More to Follow)”, trans. David Wills, Critical Inquiry 28.2 (2002): 369–418 (400; emphasis in original).

14. Ibid.

15. H. Peter Steeves, “The Familiar Other and Feral Selves: Life at the Human/Animal Boundary” in The Animal/Human Boundary: Historical Perspectives, eds. Angela N.H. Creager and William Chester Jordan (Rochester, NY: U of Rochester P, 2002) 264 n. 56.

16. Sigmund Freud, Totem and Taboo, trans. James Strachey in idem, Totem and Taboo and Other Works in The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, ed. James Strachey (London: Hogarth, 1953–74) 13: 58–66.

17. Freud, “The ‘Uncanny,’” trans. Alix and James Strachey in idem, An Infantile Neurosis and Other Works in The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, ed. James Strachey (London: Hogarth, 1953–74) 17: 234–37.

18. Mark Jancovich, Rational Fears: American Horror in the 1950s (Manchester: Manchester UP, 1996) 78.

19. John D. Niles, “Pagan Survivals and Popular Belief” in The Cambridge Companion to Old English Literature, eds. Malcolm Godden and Michael Lapidge (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1991) 134–35.

20. Genesis 4.15.

21. See Giorgio Agamben, Homo Sacer, trans. Daniel Heller-Roazen (Stanford: Stanford UP, 1998) 71–74.

22. See Matthew 7.1: “Judge not, that ye be not judged.”

23. See the reflections on the colour white in chapter 42, “The Whiteness of the Whale” in Herman Melville, Moby-Dick, or The Whale, eds. Harrison Hayford, Hershel Parker and G. Thomas Tanselle (Evanston: Northwestern UP, 1988) 189: “this pre-eminence in it applies to the human race itself, giving the white man ideal mastership over every dusky tribe.”

24. Robert Milder, Exiled Royalties: Melville and the Life we Imagine (Oxford: Oxford UP, 2006) 50–96.