Why the Monsters Matter in the Odyssey

Natalie Lawrence
Aug 3
4 min read

Tolkien complained that critics studiously overlooked the monsters at the centre of Beowulf. I wonder whether we have done something similar with the Odyssey. We ask where the monsters lived, what inspired them, or whether they were based on real places. These are interesting questions, but perhaps not the most important ones...

See my Odyssey Monsters: Afterlives series to explore further

With Christopher Nolan’s Odyssey out and smashing it in the box-office, Homer’s monsters are enjoying a rare moment in the cultural spotlight. While the Sirens might be some of the most recognisable figures in Greek mythology, the cyclops Polyphemus, the Laestrygonians, Scylla and Charybdis have been enjoying unprecedented levels of attention from relative obscurity.

Yet, in discussions around the poem and the film, these monstrous beings are often treated as little more than colourful obstacles on Odysseus’ journey home. They're seen as just memorable episodes that interrupt the real story. Certainly, there has been fairly easy agreement that the film's special effects for Polyphemus were excellent, while debates rage about human elements such as casting decisions and script.

I wonder if we’re making the same mistake that critics once made with Beowulf.

In 1936, J. R. R. Tolkien delivered what would become one of the most influential lectures in literary criticism, published as Beowulf: The Monsters and the Critics. At the time, many scholars regarded Grendel, his mother and the dragon as embarrassing relics of ancient fantastical thinking. They preferred to focus on the poem’s history, kings and heroic culture. The monsters, they argued, were little more than entertaining distractions.

Tolkien turned the argument on its head. He showed that the monsters were not an “inexplicable blunder of taste”, but were “essential, fundamentally allied to the underlying ideas of the poem.” Without them, Beowulf would simply be another story of armour-clad men quarrelling over kingdoms. The monsters gave the poem its philosophical weight.

Grendel by Skelton Stories of Beowulf — Grendel by J. R. Skelton from the 1908 *Stories of Beowulf*

Why do the Monsters Matter in the Odyssey?

I think the same is true of the Odyssey. The monsters are not there simply to make Odysseus’ voyage more exciting - they are the engine of the poem. Each one explores a different limit of human existence, confronting Odysseus with problems that no ordinary human enemy could embody.

Take Polyphemus. At first glance he is simply a giant cannibal. But Homer makes him something far more unsettling. The Cyclops has no assemblies, no laws and no concept of hospitality. His cave is a grotesque inversion of the Greek household, where guests become food rather than recipients of generosity. Odysseus does not overcome him through brute strength, but through the distinctly human qualities of language, cunning and social intelligence. The encounter asks what separates civilisation from barbarism.

The Laestrygonians push the question even further. Unlike the Cyclopes, they live in a town ruled by a king. Their cannibalism is not the crime of one monstrous individual, it is the accepted custom of an entire people. They are a strange people at the edge of the world, in a land of the midnight sun. But they are also a mirror: the Greeks, who have collectively committed terrible destruction of civilisation, are not so different from them after all. Homer invites us to consider whether a society can look civilised while abandoning the values that civilisation depends upon.

The Sirens present a different danger altogether. Modern culture has turned them into seductive mermaids, but Homer’s Sirens tempt Odysseus with neither beauty nor desire. He doesn’t even describe their physicality, and in Nolan’s film they are only vague suggestions on top of distant rocks. Instead, the Sirens promise knowledge. They claim to know everything that happened at Troy and everything that will happen thereafter. Their song offers a kind of divine omniscience. The danger lies not in lust but in curiosity: the desire to know more than any mortal should.

Then comes perhaps the bleakest lesson of the entire poem. Between Scylla and Charybdis there is no victory. Odysseus cannot save everyone. Circe tells him plainly that six men must die if the rest are to survive - he has to veer close to Scylla to save the ship. Faced with two impossible options, he learns that wisdom sometimes lies not in triumph but in choosing the lesser catastrophe. Some losses cannot be avoided.

Taken together, the monsters become something more than they appear individually. They are different ways of imagining the limits of human life: civilisation, appetite, humility, sacrifice and mortality.

Polyphemus and Odysseus — Odysseus and Polyphemus - Arnold Böcklin (1896)

This is where Tolkien’s insight becomes so illuminating. He argued that Beowulf’s monsters gave visible form to the poem’s deepest concerns. Grendel embodied humanity’s struggle against violence and social collapse; the dragon represented the inevitability of death. The monsters carried the poem’s meaning.

Homer’s monsters perform a similar function, though they ask different questions. Each monster exposes a different weakness or dilemma at the heart of the human condition. They are not simply creatures to be defeated, but ideas made flesh.

Perhaps this explains why they have survived for nearly three thousand years.

The kings of the Odyssey are largely forgotten outside classical scholarship. Yet some of the monsters have continued to evolve in our imaginary. Polyphemus became a tragic lover in Ovid. The bird-bodied Sirens gradually transformed into medieval mermaids. Scylla became a beautiful sea nymph cursed into monstrosity. Their forms changed because we found new meanings in them over time. They proved infinitely more adaptable than the heroes themselves.

The monsters are not just digressions from Odysseus’ journey, they drive it.