BBC History - UK (2022-01)

MYTHOLOGY

Hunting monsters

Basilisks and Beowulf:

Monsters in the

Anglo-Saxon World

by Tim Flight

Reaktion Books, 2 64 pages, £ 15 .9 5

Many people have heard

of the grotesque Grendel,

his mother and the dragon

with whom the hero Beowulf contends in

the great Old English epic poem. But the

imaginative world of the Anglo-Saxons was

populated by many more such creatures.

Tim Flight’s new book starts with ques-

tions and beliefs about monsters inherited

from earlier writers. What were they? What

were they for? Could some of them be human,

capable of salvation? Using illustrations from

Old English manuscripts and artefacts, he

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• a dog-headed being who pretends to
  befriend the unwary traveller before devour-
  ing him and mourning over his detached head


• and the Grendelkin themselves. (Two minor
  quibbles here: Grendel does not attack King
  Hrothgar’s hall, Heorot, every night, as Flight
  suggests. Nor can Hrothgar or Beowulf
  properly be described as Christians.)
  The Anglo-Saxons believed in many more
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  Some – such as the wolf – we would not now
  classify as monsters at all. Other creatures
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  the world – in the distant eastern lands, where
  Alexander encountered them in his expedition
  to conquer the globe.
  Closer to home, fens, forests and

ESPIONAGE

Out of the shadows

Spymaster: The Man

Who Saved MI6

by Helen Fry

Yale University Press,

36 0 pages, £20

When someone you

barely know invites you

to a party, you won’t

spend long questioning

their motives for doing so – if you have a good

time. This was, in essence, the thinking of

Thomas “Tommy” Kendrick who, between

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throwing cocktail parties.

In truth, South Africa-born Kendrick was

a spymaster for Britain’s Secret Intelligence

Service, commonly known as MI6. He ran

a network of agents across central Europe,

including Countess Marianne Szápáry, the

mother of Princess Michael of Kent. After the

1938 Anschluss – the annexation of Austria

by Nazi Germany – Kendrick also helped to

process thousands of visas that allowed

many Austrian Jews to escape.

This intriguing individual is the subject

of Helen Fry’s detailed and assiduously

researched biography, based on two of her

earlier self-published works. With so little

known about MI6 operations in central

Europe, this is a priceless addition to interwar

intelligence history.

Readers may come away with a limited

sense of Kendrick’s inner world, but this is

more than compensated for by the weight of

new material Fry has unearthed. Her real tri-

umph is in detailing the wartime eavesdrop-

ping operation run by Kendrick that targeted

German prisoners of war (PoWs) in Britain.

“Herrgott, was haben wir die verkackert!”

(roughly translated as “My God – what shit we

served them up!”) was a typical utterance by

a German PoW after questioning in one of

Kendrick’s centres – before a hidden micro-

phone picked up the PoW’s account of key

details he had held back in the interrogation.

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uncultivated lands harboured creatures

both corporeal and demonic, which Flight

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and claw to defend their territory from

encroaching Christian civilisation, and they

also made incursions into cultivated human

space, attacking warriors and men of God,

only to be repelled by heroes or saints.

Among these domains of the monstrous

is that most dangerous expanse: the sea.

Flight skilfully unpacks the evil ways of the

whale – both the marine mammal and the

cunning sea monster who pretends to be

an island in order to drown poor mariners.

Immensely readable, thought-provoking

and entertaining, this book is a splendid

introduction to the thought-world of the

early English.

Carolyne Larrington, professor in medieval

literature at the University of Oxford

Fry’s central argument is that Kendrick’s

eavesdropping work “saved” MI6 after set-

backs earlier in the war, notably the 1939

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though this might be an overstatement –

MI6 was not in danger of being shut down

• her other argument is more convincing:
  that Kendrick should be seen as “the ‘Oskar
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  survival of up to 10,000 people, an epic feat
  for which he should be better known.

Henry Hemming, historian and author of

M: Maxwell Knight, MI5’s Greatest Spymaster

(Cornerstone, 2018)

Saviour spy

Thomas Kendrick in Latimer

House, a British intelligence

centre in Buckinghamshire, in the

later years of the Second World

War. The spymaster’s

eavesdropping work yielded

important information for MI6