Five of the best medieval monster stories, Volume I: The Giant of Mont St. Michel
A hypermasculine, man-eating giant with a coat of kingly beards
Andrew LiVecchi is a humanities professor and author of epic fantasy inspired by a lifelong obsession with ancient and medieval history, mythology, and classic literature. His novella, Son of the Thunder Goddess, is available for purchase at Amazon.
If you consume even a small amount of modern fantasy, you’re probably used to seeing monsters in a vaguely medieval setting. It is common to see knights, princesses, and peasants living alongside and/or doing battle against a range of fantastical creatures: dragons, ogres, giants, trolls, orcs, elves, dwarves, and more. Medieval Europe has become, in many ways and for many reasons, the default setting for epic fantasy.
But what about medieval people themselves? Did they share our same fascination with monsters? And are the creatures common in medieval fantasy also to be found in actual medieval literature?
To answer these questions, we will look at five examples from the Middle Ages that best demonstrate the range and depth of medieval monster stories. Initially, I had envisioned doing only a single post containing a list of five books. But, to do justice to each individual story, I’ve decided to divide it up over a series of posts, each of which will shed light on a unique monster story from the rich and varied corpus of medieval literature.
We will look at a cannibalistic giant with a coat of beards, a chivalrous werewolf, an undead Viking, a headless knight, and a night-prowling troll and his vengeful mother.
1. The Giant of Mont St. Michel in Le Morte Darthur.
The story:
Our first story comes from one of my favourite pieces of medieval literature: Le Morte Darthur. In one of the less well-known parts of this sprawling fifteenth century book of Arthurian romance, Sir Thomas Malory tells the story of King Arthur’s great war against the Roman Empire. Within this larger narrative of war, is a smaller episode in which we see the legendary king do battle with a truly revolting monster, the Giant of Mont St. Michel. It is also one of the few times that Arthur plays the role of knight errant, a part usually reserved for characters such as Lancelot, Tristan, or Gawain.
Along the way to battle the Romans, Arthur crosses the English Channel, making land in Normandy. There he encounters a peasant who informs the king of “a great giant which had slain, murdered and devoured much people of the country, and had been sustained seven year with the children of the commons of that land.” This peasant begs Arthur to “revenge us all as thou art a noble conqueror” and to save the Giant’s latest victim, the Duchess of Brittany:
“For now he hath taken the Duchess of Brittany as she rode with her meyne, and hath led her to his lodging which is in a mountain, for to ravish and lie by her to her life’s end, and all they might not rescue her, but they left her shrieking and crying lamentably, wherefore I suppose that he hath slain her in fulfilling his foul lust of lechery.”
Arthur is greatly moved by the peasant’s story and resolves to save the Duchess from this murderous, cannibalistic, and rapist Giant. He rides to Mont St. Michel, accompanied only by loyal knights, Kay and Bedivere, each armed to the gills (or, as Malory would say, “armed at all points”).
Once they reach the base of the mountain, Arthur commands his knights to remain, while he ascends to face the Giant alone. Along the way, he runs into a second source of information on the Giant, a “careful widow wringing her hands and making great sorrow, sitting by a grave new made.”
When Arthur asks her why she is lamenting, she tells him to keep his voice down, “for yonder is a devil, if he hear thee speak he will come and destroy thee.” If this warning were not terrifying enough, the widow adds that even fifty Arthurs would not be sufficient to beat him. And she explains that the grave belongs to the very Duchess of Brittany whom Arthur came to save. The Giant has already satisfied his base urges, raping the unfortunate Duchess to death: “he hath murdered her in forcing her, and hath slit her unto the navel.”
Keeping his own identity secret, Arthur tells the widow that he comes from the court of King Arthur, to which the widow says, “if thou have brought Arthur’s wife, dame Guenever, he [the giant] shall be gladder than thou hadst given to him half France.” As a final warning of the Giant’s power, the widow informs him that the Giant has already defeated fifteen kings and “hath made him a coat full of precious stones embroidered with their beards.”
After all this, Arthur is still undaunted. He climbs on, cresting the mountaintop, and there comes face-to-face with an appalling sight:
“[Arthur] saw where he [the giant] sat at supper gnawing on a limb of a man, baking his broad limbs by the fire, and breechless, and three fair damosels turning three broaches whereon were broached twelve young children late born, like young birds.
Upon seeing the naked Giant “gnawing on a limb of a man” and roasting newborn babies, Arthur’s “heart bled for sorrow.” Even though he has been warned that no one has been able to overcome this Giant, Arthur does not attempt to kill his enemy by stealth. Approaching the Giant with knightly courage, he steps out and addresses him directly:
He that all the world wieldeth give thee short life and shameful death; and the devil have thy soul; why hast thou murdered these young innocent children, and murdered this duchess? Therefore, arise and dress thee, thou glutton, for this day shalt thou die of my hand.
The Giant comes at Arthur with his iron club, and the two engage in deadly hand-to-hand combat. The Giant strikes first, knocking the crown from Arthur’s head. Absent the crown, Arthur is stripped of his royal regalia and its attending symbolism, forced to face this mortal threat as just a man, a knight and not a king. And Arthur strikes back with deadly precision:
And the king hit him again that he carved his belly and cut off his genitours, that his guts and his entrails fell down to the ground.
A blow like this would be fatal to any ordinary opponent. But the Giant is not finished yet. Casting away his club, he “caught the king in his arms that he crushed his ribs.”
In the wrestling that follows, Arthur is at a great disadvantage, since grappling favours the larger, stronger opponent. But Arthur holds on, as they roll around and around, eventually working his dagger free:
And then Arthur weltered and wrung, that he was other while under and another time above. And so weltering and wallowing they rolled down the hill till they came to the sea mark, and ever as they so weltered Arthur smote him with his dagger.
Arthur emerges from this deadly contest unharmed and victorious. He meets up with Kay and Bedivere again and orders the Giant’s head to be cut off and put on display. Arthur keeps the Giant’s coat of beards and iron club for himself but generously allows the treasure to be shared among the people.
As his last act before rejoining the war against Rome, Arthur redeems the site of these terrible crimes by ordering a church to be built upon the mountain “in the worship of Saint Michael.” The Abbey of Mont St. Michel was an important religious site during the Middle Ages, and Malory’s conclusion of this story offers a fanciful etiological myth about its origins.
What we learn from this story:
Monsters in medieval folklore and literature are often held up as a kind of distorted mirror to the civilized world. They reflect society’s greatest fears, its worst nightmares, the inverse of all that is held most sacred and dear.
And the Giant of Mont St. Michel is no exception. He is the antithesis of the chivalric code, of all that a knight should be. Chivalry as a medieval ideal unites great strength with even greater restraint. A knight must be skilled in violence, but temper that violence with gentleness and mercy. Elsewhere in Le Morte Darthur, one of Arthur’s knights eulogizes Sir Lancelot, whom Malory considers the greatest of Arthur’s knights, by saying:
Thou was the meekest man and the gentlest that ever ate in hall among ladies. And thou were the sternest knight to thy mortal foe that ever put spear in the rest.
This tribute encapsulates the strict demands that chivalry makes on its adherents. They must be fierce and courageous in battle, but be capable of harnessing that violence in times of peace, when they must behave with courtesy and humility. Throughout Le Morte Darthur, and medieval romance in general, knights often struggle to live up to this moral code. Sometimes they behave cowardly in the face of danger; at other they allow their rage to get the better of them and use force in illicit ways.
The Giant repudiates the chivalric ideal entirely. He places no restraint upon his strength, using it to oppress and exploit. He employs force indiscriminately, using it to kill his enemies in battle, but also to rape women and devour babies. Like Polyphemus the Cylcops in Homer’s Odyssey, he is a law unto himself, a living embodiment of Might Makes Right. He is a hypermasculine distortion of chivalry’s masculine ideal, with all the power to dominate and none of the responsibility to protect. Instead of caring for the common people as a good medieval liege lord is supposed to do, he preys upon them as a tyrant, literally devouring them.
The Giant poses a direct threat to the values of Malory’s medieval civilization, spitting in the face of chivalry and courtly love. He threatens to rape and kill Guinevere just as he has raped and killed the Duchess of Brittany, and he threatens Arthur’s masculinity through his coat of beards. Beards in medieval literature, as the scholar Laura Clark notes, are often synonymous with masculinity:
“Beards represent the qualities of a man’s character – wisdom, experience, maturity, military prowess, nobility, and honour (or lack thereof) – medieval beards also serve the more obvious and natural purpose of distinguishing men from women.”1
Along with his massive iron club, the Giant’s coat of beards is a signifier of his hypermasculinity, his desire and ability to dominate. By taking the beards of other kings, he has appropriated their manliness, shaming them and positioning himself as a man above men. The beards that line his coat announce that he is stronger than everyone else, and that, because of that strength, he has the right to kill, rape, and eat whomever he desires.
And these desires are magnified to monstrous levels. Rather than governing his appetites, the Giant is ruled by them. He lacks all restraint, not only in matters of violence, but also in his enjoyment of sex and eating. In each of these areas, the Giant transgresses the boundaries imposed by civilization. Violence becomes murder, sex rape, and eating cannibalism. There is a reason why Arthur addresses him as “glutton,” for the Giant indulges in the worst and most monstrous excesses of every pleasure.
The best monsters, like the best villains, reveal something about the nature of both the hero and the social order he embodies. And the Giant shows us the perils attendant upon the very knighthood which Arthur represents. What if all these knights, who spend their days honing themselves into ever more effective killing machines, decide that power alone is a worthy goal, that it need not be subsumed to a “greater good.” If the Lancelots and Gawains of the world decide to turn their strength upon the common people, they will easily overpower and exploit them, metaphorically cannibalizing the population they are ostensibly to protect. If might makes right, and the nobility is mighty, it need not restrain itself or bow to a higher moral law.
And this is not mere speculation. Read some accounts of the Hundred Years’ War or the Wars of the Roses (which Malory lived through and fought in) and you’ll see plenty of examples of the nobility behaving more like the Giant of Mont St. Michel than worthy Sir Lancelot. Malory himself was imprisoned for rape and murder while writing Le Morte Darthur. Clearly, he knew a thing or two about just how fragile chivalry was as an ideal, how easily it gave way to violent excess.
But this monster story is a romance, in which good must ultimately triumph over evil. And in Arthur’s battle with the Giant, he does not merely match him strength for strength. In defeating him, he asserts the moral superiority of chivalry and reestablishes the social order.
Arthur’s first move is to “hit him again that he carved his belly and cut off his genitours. His “carving” of the belly punishes the Giant for his cannibalism and removes his ability to consume human flesh, while his amputation of the genitalia literally emasculates the Giant and nullifies his hypermasculine threat of rape.
After killing the Giant and beheading him, Arthur takes his beard coat and iron club, thereby appropriating his symbols of strength. As a king who lives out the chivalric ideals imposed on the nobility, Arthur is able to wield the hypermasculine power of the Giant without its excess, harmonizing it with the courtesy and restraint required of a medieval knight.
Order is restored. The threat to civilization nullified. Yet the warning posed by the Giant’s story remains, a chilling example of the monstrosity of power without restraint.
I hope you enjoyed this brief foray into one of my favourite monster stories. In the next post, we will look at a very different kind of monster: a werewolf who does his best to embody the same chivalric values which the Giant rejects.
Thank you,
Andrew LiVecchi
If you enjoyed this post, please consider checking out my epic fantasy novella, Son of the Thunder Goddess. It builds on a lifelong love of mythology and literature and engages with a lot of the themes I wrestle with in my Substack posts.
Laura Clark, ‘Fashionable Beards and Beards as Fashion: Beard Coats in Malory’s Morte d’Arthur’, Parergon, 31.1 (2014), pp. 95-109 (p. 101).