Monster, Demon, Warrior: St. Guthlac and the Cultural Landscape of the Anglo-Saxon Fens

This essay argues that Old English and Latin literature from the eighth to eleventh centuries reveal the cultural understanding of the swampy English Fens along the eastern coast of the North Sea. This cultural notion defines the Fens as a haunted landscape and a marginal space suitable only for prisoners, exiles, monsters, and demons. For example, the monster Grendel from the poem Beowulf possesses a hybridized human-animal nature that mimics the tumultuous land/water dynamic of his native fen-dwelling. Throughout the Anglo-Saxon corpus, symbolic fens act as a mythical landscape of uncertainty, danger, and monstrosity, and this cultural subject matter is present most profoundly in the historically attested literature of St. Guthlac. This Christian warrior establishes a hermitage in the Fens at Crowland, and through his heroism and religious warfare, he survives the demons and other terrors of the mysterious landscape and colonizes the Fens as an Anglo-Saxon cultural landscape.