Epic violence requires enemies dehumanized but not bestial, with religion marking the irredeemable line

Evidence

The goal of the poet here is the same as that of the filmmaker portraying quintessential bad guys: to allow the reader (or viewer) to enjoy the violence, to revel in the blood and killing, without remorse. Only by dehumanizing the adversary, making him sufficiently “other,” is this possible. Yet he cannot be made too other, for it is not valorous to slaughter mere beasts. Hence the paradoxical, mixed nature of the Saracen host in Roland: alongside the monstrous creatures are virtuous knights who seem to be mirror images of their Christian adversaries, for whom the poet can proclaim (of Baligant): “God! What a knight, if only he were Christian!” (l. 3164). It is the religion of the Saracens that makes them irretrievably other, even if Baligant seems a mirror image of the valiant Charlemagne. — John V. Tolan, Saracens, 691

Categorization

• ADDENDUM: Directly supports the reader’s Sacrifice/othering threads: the logic ‘dehumanize just enough to kill without remorse, but not so much that killing loses valor’ parallels the ritual-othering mechanism in the sacrificial corpus.
• XREF: Echoes Said’s Orientalism and the Anidjar/Razack genealogy of how religious alterity is produced to license violence — this is the medieval root case.
• QUESTION: This framework of ‘needs to be other but not too other’ could be tested against other colonial/racial dehumanizations — worth chasing how far the Goldilocks logic generalizes.
• CANDY: ‘God! What a knight, if only he were Christian!’ is a quotable line showing the epic poet’s own awareness that his enemy is a mirror image.