What we can learn from Monsters
Our love affair with wild men goes back a long way and despite their fearsome aspect they show us the evil of our ways
I have just returned from watching a shadow puppet version of the ancient poem, Gilgamesh, at my local library and am all fired up by its artful images and wondrous story.* Dating from the seventh century BCE, the poem was later inscribed on clay tablets that remained buried in the ruins of the library of Ashurbanipal in Nineveh (modern Iraq) until the 1850s. It was not translated until the 1870s.
The story goes that when a certain George Smith deciphered a fragment of the text his excitement was such that he tore off his clothes then tore around the British Museum. He thought he had found verification of the biblical story of the flood. Indeed, there is a section in the poem that describes a great flood and a man, Upa Napishti, who, like Noah, is advised to leave his home and build a boat to save his household and to bring aboard the seed of the tree of life.
 Since Smith’s streak through the British Museum Gilgamesh has inspired translators, academics and writers. Rilke famously declared ‘Gilgamesh is tremendous! . . . I hold it to be the greatest thing a person can experience’ (1916) and Charles Olson’s based his poem ‘Bigmans’ (1950) on the ancient poem which, he says, concerns:
The need for friendship, the instinct for loyalty, the impelling urge for fame and name, the love of adventure and achievement, the all-absorbing fear of death, and the all-compelling longing for immortality.
Philip Roth’s The Great American Novel (1995) features a baseball player called Gil Gamesh. The poem is namechecked in Star Trek and there is a manga version. Marina Carr adapted it for stage in 2006 and the spectacle theatre company, Macnas, presented her version of it at the 2020 Galway Arts Festival. It has even been translated into Globish (an international business language invented by an IBM employee).
First, however, the poem had to be, literally, pieced together from an assortment of clay tablets on which it was recorded in cuneiform (wedge-shaped script) and in two ancient languages, Accadian and Sumerian. today we have 3,200 lines of the full 3,600 line poem. Like most epics, it involves transactions between humans and gods, war and peace, quests involving travel to the other world. It ends on a poignantly human note of self-discovery where, in the words of one translator, Andrew George, it portrays ‘a hero who is very human – his career ends in failure’.
 Like Olson, I see it as being, first and foremost, about friendship. Briefly, the plot concerns a Sumerian king, Gilgamesh, a quasi-divine giant, who has lost the run of himself and tyrannises the people of Uruk. Beleaguered by his despotism they ask the gods to send someone to protect them. Instead of sending an assassin they give him a friend and counsellor (lesson for our times there). The goddess Aruru moulds a clay figure in the image of the god Anu and sets him on earth. Enkidu is a magnificent wild man, his body covered in hair, and on his head, hair like a woman’s. He lives among the animals:
With gazelles he ate the grass, With the cattle he quenched his thirst, With the flocks his heart rejoiced to drink. (Trans. N.K. Sanders, 1960)
To protect his animal friends he destroys hunters’ traps, and all is well until a hunter spots him and complains to the king. Gilgamesh advises the man to bring a temple prostitute to seduce this wild creature. The trap works like a charm. After his seven-day tryst with the woman, Enkidu’s old pals spurn him because he has lost his strength and gained a human conscience, or consciousness. He returns to Uruk with the woman where, after a wrestling match, he becomes Gilgamesh’s close friend and probably lover. Peace is restored to Uruk.
 Together they go to destroy Huwawa, king of Cedar Mountain, despite being warned that anyone who fells the trees will be poisoned. On the way home, having killed Huwawa and cut down the forest to make a temple door, Ishtar, goddess of love and war, spies Gilgamesh bathing and sets her cap at him. He’s having none of it and rejects her advances recalling her cruelty to former lovers. Outraged, she sends a heavenly bull to kill him but he and Enkidu tear the animal apart.
No sooner are the friends back in Uruk than Enkidu falls ill eventually dying in Gilgamesh’s arms. Stricken by grief and fearing his own death, Gilgamesh seeks out the flood survivor, Upa Napishti, who has been gifted with immortality.
Enkidu, my friend, my little brother, who chased the panther of the desert, My friend who with me killed lions, My friend who faced with me all difficulties, His fate has overtaken him. Six days and six nights have I wept over him. Then was I afraid of death and I fled through the land. (Trans. Sanders, 1960)
After some adventures and torments he learns that, while individually we are destined to die, ‘like the mayfly on a pond’, society or community abides, as water continues to reflect the sun.
As you can see, even from this summary, it is possible to approach the poem from several angles: there are enough biblical parallels to occupy the theologians, it is open to fruitful feminist and queer readings, and has been used to illustrate Jung’s theory of archetypes. In her version, Carr focuses on the eco dimension, the destruction of a forest and the inevitable retribution.
 For me Enkidu is the star turn, making me curious about our love for human-animal hybrids. Think the Yeti, King Kong and Chewbacca and their near cousins, humans raised by animals, Romulus and Remus, Mowgli and Tarzan. Even when these creatures are tamed or civilised they retain an exotic whiff of the wild. Far from being brutal they are ultimately gentle and wise. Enkidu absorbs Gilgamesh’s excessive violence and tries to restrain him from laying waste to Huwawa’s cedar wood. King Kong is a version of Beauty and the Beast where the beast responds to feminine beauty and courage, leading to the final line of the classic movie that ‘It wasn’t the airplanes. It was beauty killed the beast.’
Do we need these creatures/creations as a corrective to our wanton violence? Gilgamesh the king abuses and terrifies his subjects. Denham and his crew capture King Kong and bring him to America as a circus attraction, an act of needless cruelty that leads to his death. In Olson’s view, the story of Gilgamesh epitomised the separation of our hearts and minds. The corollary seems to be that we have difficulty expressing this in an exclusively human context. Therefore, we conjure alter egos that hark back to our primeval origins.
Yet, in arguing that civilisation has deprived us of instinctive tenderness we can thank it for the works of art that bind us in reflecting on this loss. The epic of Gilgamesh remains vital today, all the more so as war rages in the region where it was first composed. Â Â
*The event in DLR LexIcon was devised by Dr. John McCormick, using the 2022 translation by Sophus Helle, with puppets made by Sacha Burette, helped by Margot Jones, and music by Gerry Anderson.
There is much more to say about this rich story and its many derivatives. Let me know what you think about it here:
Thank you. Indeed it is a salutary tale and we could do with many such friends.
Thank you! I think human nature remains much the same through the ages, despite all our technological advances or developments. And good stories are compelling in any age.