Note: This post originally appeared on Tales after Tolkien: Travels in Genre and Medievalism, the blog of the Tales after Tolkien Society, on 21 May 2019.
What is it about monsters that have fascinated us for centuries? From The Odyssey and Beowulf to Dracula and It, stories featuring the monstrous have always captured our imaginations. We are drawn to them, and yet at the same time fear them. In our modern times, so-called ‘monster-of-the-week’ TV shows seem to air on every channel or streaming service. In similar fashion, the images in prodigy books attracted the general public five hundred years ago. By comparing the two, we can get a glimpse of what monsters embody for us.
NBC aired the last episode of Grimm in March of 2017, just as the exhibit I co-curated, Imperfecta, opened. Grimm was a monster-of-the-week TV program that aired on NBC from 2011 to 2017. The show’s main character, Nick Burkhardt, is a homicide detective in the Portland, Oregon, police department, and also a “Grimm.” Grimms are descended from the Brothers Grimm (of fairy-tale fame), and have the ability to see the dual natures of “Wesen” (Ger., noun, “nature”), human-like creatures who can “woge” (Ger., verb, “wave;” used in the show as “shift”) into animal-like beings with animal-like traits.[i] Nick does not discover he is a Grimm until his last-known living kin, Aunt Marie, is dying. She leaves him a trailer full of diaries dating back to the beginning of the Grimm line, which detail the appearances, traits, and methods of killing all sorts of Wesen. Traditionally, Grimms were hunters of Wesen, although Nick takes a different approach. Each week, armed (literally) with a plethora of specialized Wesen-killing weaponry and the diaries, Nick must balance his heritage as a Grimm with his job as a homicide detective and navigate the sometimes morally grey areas of modern society.
Imperfecta opened March 9, 2017. Since I work in a historical medical library, the exhibit is focused on shifting perceptions over the past 500 years about abnormal human development. It examines physical anomalies and their causes from early beliefs in divine influence and supernatural causes to later scientific and medical facts. Imperfecta encourages visitors to question what it means to be ‘monstrous’.[ii] The exhibit starts off by introducing the subject of “teratology” (scientific study of physiological abnormalities and abnormal formations) using some of the prodigy books in our collection, which illustrate the co-existence of supernatural and natural influences on physical anomalies, and ends with late 19th-century clinical studies on abnormal births. Supplementing our books are several fetal specimens showcasing fatal birth defects.
Curating the exhibit forced me to think about what makes one monstrous, and watching Grimm every week made me think about the ways the use of the word “monster” has (or has not) changed in the past 500 years or so. Of course, many of the stories and Wesen we encounter in Grimm are inspired by Grimm’s fairy tales, which were collected over a period of years and can cite medieval, classical, and earlier origins. This illustrates that there is something to be said about our long-standing fascination with monsters, and how even old stories still captivate us today.
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[i] For the purposes of this essay, I only look at your ‘run-of-the-mill,’ everyday sort of animalistic Wesen – not extremist groups like Black Claw or the more ‘supernatural’ Wesen like Hexenbiests and Zauberbiests.
[ii] Many medical terms used in the past are words that we find insensitive or cruel today. Up until the late 19th and early 20th centuries, the term ‘monster’ was used as a medical term to describe abnormal births (think conjoined twins, people with Roberts syndrome or hydrocephaly) and other physical anomalies. This is the manner in which we use the term ‘monster’ in the exhibit Imperfecta. In this essay, I use the term ‘monster’ in a more familiar sense: fantastic, often frightening beasts that aren’t human.