Big, Mean, and Ugly: How To Be A Monster

Large and in charge. Mean machine. Gross to the most.

Imagine you’re playing a new Middle Earth RPG developed by Bethesda Softworks (a thinly veiled Oblivion remaster), and in this game Todd Howard is only allowing you to make really horrifying player characters. Naturally you want to be the worst monster you can possibly be. However, you only have ten points to spend between bigness, meanness, and ugliness. Which is the most important?

Monster Traits are on the next page of Character Creation

Seemingly all three attributes are part of what makes monsters “monsters.” But it’s actually really tricky to determine how they relate to the concept of monstrousness, and why they come together as a cluster. Maybe you have a firmer concept of what monsters are than I do, but the category is pretty ephemeral to me. There are definitely some very big things that aren’t monsters, and some very ugly things that aren’t monsters. Vice versa, not all monsters are ugly, although most are, and not all monsters are big, although many are. Are all very mean things monsters? That might be the strongest case for defining monstrosity, but I’m not confident that that makes something a monster by itself. In some meaning of the word you could use “monster” to refer to evil humans, but in its common (and fantasy) sense it refers to something distinctly inhuman. So maybe there are two essential conditions to monstrosity: meanness and non-humanness, with bigness and ugliness both being a type of inhumanity.

Part of the ephemerality of the concept is that monsters are interpreted differently by different authors and in different cultural contexts. In some pop culture mythologies, monsters don’t need to be mean, like Roald Dahl’s BFG, Pixar’s Mike Wazowski, or PBS’s Elmo (I wanted to list Shrek, but he actually is emphatically mean). These are generally modern twists subverting the known meanness of monsters, although I think they’ve become common enough to help confuse the concept of monsters overall. For Tolkien, and for traditional mythologies, there is something essentially mean about monsters, although that meanness manifests in different ways, as does “inhumanity.” This hearkens to Tolkien’s distinction in his essay “Beowulf: the Monsters and the Critics” between draconitas and draco (his preference) as two competing dimensions of the dragon in Beowulf:

“There are in the poem some vivid touches of the right kind… in which the dragon is real worm, with a bestial life and thought of his own, but the conception, none the less, approaches draconitas rather than draco: a personification of malice, greed, and destruction (the evil side of heroic life), and of the undiscriminating cruelty of fortune that distinguishes not good or bad (the evil aspect of all life).” (Beowulf Reader, Norton Critical Edition, 114).

I want to unpack what Tolkien means by this, what it says about the valences of monsters, and why he prefers the aspects he does. Draco, “dragon,” is seemingly the more material interpretation of dragons, as “real” beings that are driven by savage animalistic urges. They stand outside of human society and are a physical threat to the well-being of humans. Draconitas, “dragonlike,” is the form of dragons as a manifestation of spiritual evil. In addition to Beowulf’s dragon, the “Devil as a serpent” that features in Christian hagiography and the Book of Revelations certainly conforms to draconitas rather than draco. Paradoxically, this spiritual evil actually draws the monster into the domain of humanity. It represents the dark side of armed heroism, and the dark side of Fortuna.

That nuances the definition we established for monsters. While they can’t be fully human, apparently some monsters actually do have something innately human about them. Monsters are frightening just by being mean (and therefore dangerous), but the scariest monsters evoke the uncanny by walking an inscrutable line between these aspects of human and non-human, draconitas and draco. That might also be the reason hybridity is a common feature of monsters, mixing the traits of humans with different animals. Tolkien sees these two elements varying across monsters, with the ogre-ish Grendel embodying more human-adjacency (he is a descendant of Cain, after all) and the dragon being further towards pure alien hostility: “[Beowulf’s] triumph over the lesser and more nearly human [Grendel] is cancelled by defeat before the older and more elemental [the dragon]” (Beowulf Reader, 128). However, it seems that each monster encapsulates elements of both draco and draconitas in differing degrees, as Tolkien also varyingly understands the dragon as sometimes representing human evil and Grendel as something distinctly inhuman: “a foe more evil than any human enemy of house and realm” (Beowulf Reader, 114).

As mentioned, Tolkien prefers the aspect of draco, non-human savagery, to draconitas, human evil incarnate. Even his framing of the terms—which he only used once, but I’m running with—privileges draco as the “real thing” of monstrousness, while draconitas is just a derivative. In his notes on Auden’s review of Return of the King, Tolkien explains his admiration of Grendel’s narrative function in Beowulf: “Grendel is an enemy who has attacked the centre of the realm, and brought into the royal hall the outer darkness… The overthrow of Grendel makes a good wonder-tale, because he is too strong and dangerous for any ordinary man to defeat, but it is a victory in which all men can rejoice because he was a monster, hostile to all men and to all humane fellowship and joy.” (Letters n.183, pp. 242). Grendel, as an embodiment of the savage monster, transcends petty human conflicts and brings to the fore the battle between humanity and its negation, light and dark.

This aesthetic preference is directly connected to the criticism often levied against Tolkien that his separation between good and evil, human and monstrous, can be naively Manichaean. Especially for the tastes of anyone born after the end of the Victorian age. Tolkien is aware of that criticism though, and in the same letter he acknowledges that in real life “causes are less clear cut.” He claims that in his stories he doesn’t use Absolute Evil because he doesn’t believe it exists on a theological level. I am skeptical about whether Tolkien really gives redeemable dimensions to some of his monsters like orcs and giant spiders, but he certainly does imbue them with a mix of humanity and alienness. He does favor the savage, inhuman side of monsters though, valuing its literary effect and the way it highlights the virtues he admires in mankind. The faults of humanity manifest in lost humans instead, like Denethor and Ar-Pharazon.

Wikipedia's image for Manichaeanism

So, to return to the original, extremely important (and not at all wandered away from) question: what stats do I give to an ideal RPG monster? I’m definitely pouring 5 out of 10, into meanness, and then I’ll throw 3 into bigness and 2 into ugliness. Malice does a monster make, while the way they relate to humans in appearance (physically in this case, but also symbolically) is important but more subtle.

-Daniel S