ABSTRACT
Medievalists, according to Caroline Bynum, must write about “what is other—radically terrifyingly, fascinatingly other.” 1 The fascination we feel in dealing with fundamentally different cultures, and the attendant trepidation such encounters inspire, would not have been unfamiliar to the Anglo-Saxons. They, too, chose to dwell upon that which is Other, often terrifyingly so. I am separated from my Anglo-Saxon Others by a chronological gap which cannot be crossed. They were separated from a number of theirs by equally insurmountable geographical stretches. For them, many of their Others were monstrous, not only in the metaphorical way in which we now use the term, but in the most literal sense. They were not merely monstrous; they were actual monsters, such as we find catalogued in an eleventh-century English manuscript of the Liber Monstrorum (Book of Monsters). 2 The preface to this work explains that it was written in response to a request for knowledge:
You have asked about the hidden parts of the orb of the earth, and if so many races of monsters ought to be believed in which are shown in the hidden parts of the world, throughout the deserts and the islands of the ocean, and are sustained in the most distant mountains … and that I ought to describe the monstrous parts of humans and the most horrible wild animals and innumerable forms of beasts and the most dreadful types of dragons and serpents and vipers. 3
