Who is Grendel in Beowulf? Ambiguity, Allegory, and Meaning

Chapters in this book

1. Frontmatter I
2. Contents VII
3. List of illustrations XI
4. Imagination, Fantasy, Otherness, and Monstrosity in the Middle Ages and the Early Modern World 1
5. When Dreams Got Real: The Ontology of Dreaming in the Arabic Aristotelian Tradition 231
6. Imaginary Creatures Causing Real Diseases: Projective Etiology in Medieval and Early Modern Medicine 253
7. Political Ideals, Monstrous Counsel, and the Literary Imagination in Beowulf 275
8. Who is Grendel in Beowulf? Ambiguity, Allegory, and Meaning 303
9. Otherworldly Pilgrims: The Hell Tour and the Establishment of (Continental) Christian Territoriality on the Anglo-Saxon and Irish Peripheries 321
10. On Monstrosity in the Shāhnāmah: Philosophizing with Żaḥḥāk 355
11. The Negative Imagination: William IX’s Song Exactly About Nothing: “Farai un vers de dreit nien” 377
12. Ladies, Warriors and Genies: Imagining Gender and Power in The Book of the Tales of Ziyad Ibn Amir al-Kinani 417
13. The World of Hybrid Women in Medieval and Early Modern German Literature: Fantasy Images, Fascination, and Terror 437
14. The Myth of the Amazons in Medieval Spain 469
15. Wonders and Monsters in The Travels of John Mandeville and in Abu Hamid al-Gharnāti’s Tuhfat al-Albāb 487
16. Are Dreams Gender-Related? The Function of Dreams in Middle High German Narrative Literature 511
17. Monstra nobiscum: Medieval and Early Modern Teratology and the Confluence of Imaginatio and Scientia 543
18. Jews and Anti-Jewish Fantasies in Christian Imagination in the Middle Ages 573
19. The Life of Christ in Medieval Bestiaries: Imagining the Griffin, Lion, Unicorn, Pelican, and Phoenix 607
20. Monsters, Grotesques, and Other Marvels in the Later Medieval Imagination 637
21. Fantastic Places, Objects, and Creatures in Fourteenth-Century Czech-Language Literature: Imagination During the Reign of the Luxembourg Dynasty 661
22. The Mermaid of Edam and the Emergence of Dutch National Identity 683
23. Dream and Prophetic Projection in Andreas Gryphius’s Historical Tragedies: Traces of the Symbol 711
24. The Shadow of the Knight: Phantom Fears and their Distortions of Reality in Baroque Spanish Theater 737
25. Fantasy, Imagination, and Vision in Thomas Vaughan’s Lumen de Lumine 759
26. Biographies of the Contributors 789
27. Index 797