MONSTERS.

I was thinking last night about monsters.  Real life, monsters.  The big blue fuzzy ones, the brown alligator-skinned ones that carry axes and can't tie their shoe laces.  Real ones.  And I wondered, what would I have pictured monsters as if I'd never seen The Labyrinth or any Jim Henson puppet?  No Lord of the Rings or films aimed at children and young teens.  If I were to create a monster entirely out of a vacuum of experience or imagery, what would it be? Just drafting from scratch in my own brain?  I wonder.  How do we ever create something unique and creative when we've been saturated in ideas and images all of our lives?  How can we even start to create and not just recycle?  And then I thought, has anyone?  Before films, there were stories, pictures, and books.  And before books there were myths and legends.  Just think of Grendel and Grendel's mom, monsters in Beowulf, a book dated back to sometime between the early 8th to 11th century.  And dragons.  As far as we know, they seem to always have been a part of grand tales being told.

I stole this picture from Frequency of Words, who found it here... it was just too perfect for this post to not snag it and go back and add it here. ;)

PS. DID YOU KNOW: According to wikipedia (yep, I just did that):  In 1936, J.R.R. Tolkien's Beowulf: The Monsters and the Critics discussed Grendel and the dragon in Beowulf. This essay was the first work of scholarship in which Anglo-Saxon literature was seriously examined for its literary merits—not just scholarship about the origins of the English language as was popular in the 19th century.   (I'd like to read that article!)