'White Teeth, Terrible-Faced, Grim, Blood-red, Dreadful, Engaged in Conflict': Monsters on the Battlefield, in Homer and Elsewhere
Invisible to men, the Keres stalk the edge of the battlefield, waiting for men to slip, un-noticing, into their waiting clutches. From there, the man is gone: grasped, dragged, torn, ripped from battle and into a death wrought with oblivion. This is not a noble, heroic death: death at the hands of Ker leaves little of the man to bury, little to remember, little to commemorate. And with no burial, remembrance, or commemoration, the life of the man is meaningless and his soul unable to enter the eternal darkness of Hades.
This paper will examine Ker, in light of Homeric conceptions of battlefield death and burial requirements, in order to discuss issues of ‘monsterisation’ for divinities who represent ‘unrepresentable’ actions, such as the grim reality of battlefield death. We do not actually find personified Ker on the Homeric battlefield. Or maybe we do. She is personified on Achilleus’ shield (Hom. Il. 18.535-538), although this is a fiction within a fiction. Elsewhere we find non-personified κὴρ, who is given agency though the active verbs that are associated with her; for instance, when Patroklos’s ghost visits Achilleus to beg for burial, he tells the hero that ‘loathsome ker has gaped around (ἀμφέχανε) me’ (Hom. Il. 78-79). The verb ἀμφέχανω – rare, even in Homer – drives the personal agency of the non-personified ker. In Hesiod she is described in monstrous terms, with gnashing teeth, blood-stained, with great claws, and she acts monstrously. Her corporeal grimness is an outward representation of her grim actions, but neither act nor image can, itself, denote monstrousness. There are numerous examples of creatures with claws, or large frightening teeth, or terrible ugliness in nature that are not monsters.
Neither monster nor demon, immortal but maybe not divine, visible to men only at the last moment. The Ker is an embodiment of an (inanimate) action on the battlefield that is not – and cannot – be represented by the contemporary mythology of war-time death, a mythology that does not include the violence of war. She is the monstrous fear that awaits men in battle – a reality which is divorced from the heroics they were promised.
This paper will examine Ker, in light of Homeric conceptions of battlefield death and burial requirements, in order to discuss issues of ‘monsterisation’ for divinities who represent ‘unrepresentable’ actions, such as the grim reality of battlefield death. We do not actually find personified Ker on the Homeric battlefield. Or maybe we do. She is personified on Achilleus’ shield (Hom. Il. 18.535-538), although this is a fiction within a fiction. Elsewhere we find non-personified κὴρ, who is given agency though the active verbs that are associated with her; for instance, when Patroklos’s ghost visits Achilleus to beg for burial, he tells the hero that ‘loathsome ker has gaped around (ἀμφέχανε) me’ (Hom. Il. 78-79). The verb ἀμφέχανω – rare, even in Homer – drives the personal agency of the non-personified ker. In Hesiod she is described in monstrous terms, with gnashing teeth, blood-stained, with great claws, and she acts monstrously. Her corporeal grimness is an outward representation of her grim actions, but neither act nor image can, itself, denote monstrousness. There are numerous examples of creatures with claws, or large frightening teeth, or terrible ugliness in nature that are not monsters.
Neither monster nor demon, immortal but maybe not divine, visible to men only at the last moment. The Ker is an embodiment of an (inanimate) action on the battlefield that is not – and cannot – be represented by the contemporary mythology of war-time death, a mythology that does not include the violence of war. She is the monstrous fear that awaits men in battle – a reality which is divorced from the heroics they were promised.