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Beyond Abjection The Problem of Grendel's Mother Again PDF
Beyond Abjection The Problem of Grendel's Mother Again PDF
Beyond Abjection:
The Problem with Grendel’s Mother Again
Renée R. Trilling
Traditional critical paradigms have generally failed to come to grips with the
character of Grendel’s mother in Beowulf. As a monster in the heroic order, and as
a female in a masculine world, she confounds simple definitions and crosses the
boundaries that define the limits of agency. Grendel’s mother functions as a nexus
for the representation of the many dialectical tensions – male/female, human/
monster, hall/wilderness, feud/peace, symbolic/semiotic – that both underwrite and
critique the poem’s symbolic order. As a result, the character offers insight into
the symbolic process and the ways in which readers approach the distant world
of the medieval text.
Like the poem of Beowulf, Beowulf criticism seems to struggle with effective
ways of understanding Grendel’s mother in all her complexity and liminality. Her
alienation is clear enough; as both monster and woman, she occupies a subjective
space that is doubly removed from the meaning-making structures of heroic poetry.
Yet the poet deliberately places this ambiguous figure at the narrative and structural
centre of the text, forbidding readers to overlook her impact and using her to
provoke critical commentary on the heroic system that underwrites the poem on
either side of her. The appearance of Grendel’s mother disrupts the strictly ordered
heroic world of the text, and the narrative engages in a mad scramble to conceal the
disruption behind a mask of masculine reassertion. This response is parallelled, in
some ways, by the critical tradition, which finds it difficult to categorize Grendel’s
mother. She is a critical aporia, as Gillian Overing has noted, ‘precisely because she
John D. Niles pointed out decades ago that the battle with Grendel’s mother is at the
structural centre of the poem; see ‘Ring Composition and the Structure of Beowulf’, PMLA,
94 (1979), 924–35. The episode concerning Grendel’s mother, from her first approach to
Heorot to Beowulf’s triumphant return from the mere with Grendel’s severed head, begins
slightly more than one third of the way into the poem (line 1251 out of 3182) and takes up
400 lines, or approximately 13% of the epic poem’s total length – hardly an insignificant
amount. This compares favourably to the 767 lines taken up by the Grendel story, much of
which chronicles Beowulf’s journey to Heorot and his interaction with the court there. The
actual battle, culminating in Grendel’s mother’s death, is described in no less than 72 lines
(compared to 90 for the battle with Grendel).
is not quite human, or, rather, she has her own particular brand of otherness; her
inhuman affiliation and propensities make it hard to distinguish between what is
monstrous and what is female.’ In a recent PMLA article, Paul Acker offers some
provocative suggestions about the figure of Grendel’s mother as the embodiment
of Anglo-Saxon cultural anxieties surrounding feud culture and heroic identity.
The horror of an avenging mother, he argues, capitalizes on the primordial fear of
maternal power that underwrites patriarchal society. Through Grendel’s mother,
‘the text projects the anxieties it cannot otherwise adequately voice concerning
the inherent weaknesses in the system of feuding and revenge.’ Critics interested
in Grendel’s mother have frequently noted the monstrosity of the female avenger,
and Acker’s claims that her abrogation of the acceptable maternal role reveals
the insecurities of the Anglo-Saxon male psyche continue a tradition of feminist
psychoanalytic scholarship on Anglo-Saxon culture. Although it is a far cry
from the dismissive treatments of Grendel’s mother common in earlier Beowulf
scholarship, however, even this article fails to grant centrality to the monstrous
Gillian Overing, Language, Sign, and Gender in Beowulf (Carbondale: Southern Illinois
University Press, 1990), p. 81.
Paul Acker, ‘Horror and the Maternal in Beowulf’, PMLA, 121.3 (2006), 702–16.
The same argument, drawing on the analysis of archetypes, was put forth by Gwendolyn
A. Morgan in ‘Mothers, Monsters, Maturation: Female Evil in Beowulf’, Journal of the
Fantastic in the Arts, 4 (1991), 54–68.
Acker, “Horror and the Maternal’, p. 705; Kevin Kiernan has also argued that a monster’s
revenge-killing functions as a critique of the heroic society it mimics (Beowulf and the
Beowulf Manuscript [New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 1981]).
The earliest feminist analyses of Grendel’s mother defined this paradigm; see Jane Chance
Nitzsche, ‘The Structural Unity of Beowulf: The Problem of Grendel’s Mother’, Texas Studies
in Literature and Language, 22.3 (1980), 287–303. Chance further examines women’s roles
in heroic literature, and especially Grendel’s mother’s, in Woman as Hero in Old English
Literature (Syracuse: Syracuse University Press, 1985).
Helen Bennett first surveyed feminist work in the field in ‘From Peace Weaver to Text
Weaver: Feminist Approaches to Old English Studies’, in Twenty Years of the Year’s Work
in Old English Studies, ed. Katherine O’Brien O’Keeffe, OEN Subsidia 15 (Binghamton:
State University of New York Press, 1989), pp. 23–42. Alexandra Hennessy Olsen offers
an extensive overview of work on the women of Beowulf in ‘Gender Roles’, in A Beowulf
Handbook, ed. Robert E. Bjork and John D. Niles (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press,
1997), pp. 311–24.
For example, J. R. R. Tolkien manages almost completely to overlook Grendel’s mother,
explicating the poem as a bipartite epic based around Beowulf’s encounters with Grendel
and the dragon and considering Grendel’s mother only in a parenthetical comment in
The abject confronts us, on the one hand, with those fragile states where man strays
on the territories of animal. Thus, by way of abjection, primitive societies have
marked out a precise area of their culture in order to remove it from the threatening
world of animals or animalism, which were imagined as representatives of sex
and murder.
Societies use abjection to establish the boundary between sacred and profane,
between culture and chaos. ‘In this sense’, Kristeva writes, ‘abjection is coextensive
with social and symbolic order, on the individual as well as the collective level.’10
From a psychoanalytic perspective, the integrity of the speaking subject depends
on the rejection of the maternal body and the entry into language; for Kristeva,
then, the abject replicates, at the level of the collective, the individual subject’s
rejection of the maternal. It is the key to establishing the boundaries between the
categories of civilized/uncivilized, masculine/feminine, and human/nonhuman
– the same categories that Grendel’s mother persistently disrupts. Most importantly
for Acker, the category of the abject opposes the maternal to the Law of the Father
– the symbolic order that is the condition of possibility of social organization. As
Acker suggests, Grendel’s mother, as the embodiment of the maternal principle,
represents that most basic of fears: the return of the repressed.11
‘Appendix A’; see Tolkien, ‘Beowulf: The Monsters and the Critics’, Proceedings of the
British Academy, 22 (1936), 245–95 (p. 280). Paul Beekman Taylor likewise views the battle
with Grendel’s mother as merely a reprise of the primary Grendel fight; see ‘Beowulf’s
Second Grendel Fight’, Neuphilologische Mitteilungen, 86 (1985), 62–69.
Julia Kristeva, Powers of Horror: An Essay on Abjection, trans. Leon S. Roudiez (New
York: Columbia University Press, 1982), pp. 12–13; emphasis in original.
10 Kristeva, Powers of Horror, p. 67.
11 Sigmund Freud developed the idea of the return of the repressed throughout his work, but
see especially ‘Repression’, in Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of
Sigmund Freud, ed. and trans. James Strachey, 24 vols (London: Hogarth Press, 1953–74),
XIV (1957), 143–58.
12 See Overing, Language, Sign, and Gender; and Lees, ‘Men and Beowulf’, in Medieval
Masculinities: Regarding Men in the Middle Ages, ed. Clare A. Lees (Minneapolis: University
of Minnesota Press, 1994), pp. 129–48. The role of women in Anglo-Saxon literature and
society continues to be debated, however; for a contrasting argument and an overview of
scholarship, see Olsen, ‘Gender Roles’, pp. 311–24.
13 Kristeva, Revolution in Poetic Language, trans. Margaret Waller (New York: Columbia
University Press, 1984), esp. pp. 57–106.
The men in the hall rejoice in his death, and peace and order are restored to the
realm (for the time being). Grendel’s mother, on the other hand, does not fit so
easily into the role of monster/outsider. Her actions, unlike Grendel’s, align her
with human heroic values. Her attack on the Danes is not monstrous in the same
way that Grendel’s is, but rather motivated by sadness and anger at the murder of
her son. Danes and readers alike understand that her purpose is vengeance: her
only kinsman has been killed, and there is no one else to avenge his death. The
text states explicitly that she ‘gegan wolde / sorhfulne sið, sunu deoð wrecan’
[wished to accomplish the sorrowful undertaking, to avenge the death of her son].21
Hrothgar himself is aware of this detail, for he too points out that she ‘wolde hyre
mæg wrecan, / ge feor hafað fæhðe gestæled’ [wished to avenge her kinsman, and
has by far avenged the feud].22 Named by the text only as a modor, her identity is
bound up in the existence of her child; without a son, she is no longer a mother,
and Grendel’s death leaves her without identity, without a role to play – she
signifies nothing. Unlike Hildeburh, she has no men to do the job of vengeance for
her; it is up to her alone to seek compensation for the loss of her kinsman. There
is no possibility of a settlement; she is an outsider to the social group, and as a
woman, she is doubly outside.23 So she proceeds to their hall, takes one of their
number – a life for a life – and returns quickly, and not altogether bravely, to her
home beneath the mere. The attack is far from unmotivated and quite unlike the
massive, repeated depredations suffered under Grendel’s reign of terror. To judge
from actions alone, Grendel’s mother has far more in common with the men of
Heorot than she does with her son.24
If the poem is clear about what Grendel and his mother do, it is considerably
less so about how to describe or define them. The true nature of the Grendelkin
is never quite clear, and it is this very uncertainty that makes both Grendel and
21 Beowulf, 1277b–1278.
22 Beowulf, 1339b–1340.
23 As Harry Berger, Jr. and H. Marshall Leicester, Jr. point out, heroic society prefers feud to
monetary settlements anyway; see Berger and Leicester, ‘Social Structure As Doom: The
Limits of Heroism in Beowulf’, in Old English Studies in Honour of John C. Pope, ed.
Robert B. Burlin, Edward B. Irving, Jr., and Marie Borroff (Toronto: University of Toronto
Press, 1974), pp. 37–79.
24 Kevin Kiernan suggests that ‘Grendel’s mother accepted and adhered to the heroic ethic of
the blood feud … . Her grief seems as real as Hrothgar’s, and her response, swift life-for-life
vengeance, is (mutatis mutandis) at least as heroic as Beowulf’s’. See ‘Grendel’s Heroic
Mother’, In Geardagum, 6 (1984), 13–33 (pp. 25–27).
his mother frightening figures to begin with.25 The poem may refer to them at
times as ‘wer’ or ‘wif’ respectively, but it displays considerable confusion about
whether the Grendelkin are actually human.26 Grendel is described as being ‘on
weres wæstmum’ [in the form of a man],27 and as J. R. R. Tolkien points out, ‘he is
called not only by all names applicable to ordinary men, as wer, rinc, guma, maga,
but he is conceived as having a spirit, other than his body, that will be punished.’28
Yet he also receives the epithets of demon, devil, and spirit, and his hostility to
men makes him something other than human. It seems reasonable to infer, then,
that Grendel’s mother would be equally indistinct, and indeed Tolkien finds that
‘Grendel’s mother is naturally described, when separately treated, in precisely
similar terms: she is wif, ides, aglæc wif ... ; and rising to the inhuman: merewif,
brimwylf, grundwyrgen.’29 Her humanity seems similarly unclear; like Grendel,
she also has a soul, and the two occupy a liminal space between the human and
the demonic.30 As Melinda Menzer points out, on the other hand, the many –wif
compounds used to describe Grendel’s mother clearly denote a woman, not just
a female creature.31 The poem’s imprecision about Grendel’s mother blurs the
clearly drawn boundaries between humans and monsters, us and them – the very
boundaries that abjection works to create and sustain. Perhaps most importantly,
25 Grendel’s indistinct nature is precisely what makes him a terrifying figure, and the poem’s
shadowy descriptions of the Grendelkin are fundamental to the reader’s perception of fear;
see Michael Lapidge, ‘Beowulf and the Psychology of Terror’, in Heroic Poetry in the Anglo-
Saxon Period: Studies in Honor of Jess B. Bessinger, Jr., ed. Helen Damico and John Leyerle
(Kalamazoo: Medieval Institute Publications, 1993), pp. 373–402.
26 Hrothgar can refer only to vague reports about mysterious figures prowling the moors,
one of whom is known as Grendel (Beowulf, 1347b–1355a). Nora Chadwick surveyed the
question ‘What is the nature of the monsters?’ with reference to the Norse tradition in ‘The
Monsters and Beowulf’, in The Anglo-Saxons: Studies in Some Aspects of their History and
Culture Presented to Bruce Dickins, ed. Peter Clemoes (London: Bowes and Bowes, 1959),
pp. 171–203
27 Beowulf, 1352a.
28 Tolkien, ‘Beowulf’, p. 279.
29 Tolkien, ‘Beowulf’, p. 280.
30 Frank Battaglia suggests that Grendel’s mother stands in for the Germanic Earth Goddess,
which the pseudo-Christian Beowulf defeats; see ‘The Germanic Earth Goddess in Beowulf?’
The Mankind Quarterly, 35 (1995), 39–69. Thomas D. Hill has also connected Grendel’s
mother to a tradition of helrunan, or giantesses (‘Haliurunnas, Helrunan, and the History
of Grendel’s Mother’ [paper, annual meeting of the Modern Language Association, New
Orleans, 29 December 2001]).
31 Menzer concludes that ‘whatever else she may be, she is a woman’ (‘Aglæcwif’, p. 5).
however, there is something about her that exceeds representation; the process of
signification leaves something behind when it grapples with her, making her the
dialectical obverse of the clearly defined social hierarchies that structure the heroic
world.32 The language of the poem is thus uncertain about how to contain Grendel’s
mother, and the breakdown in linguistic designation becomes increasingly more
pronounced as her agency manifests in action.33
If the titles applied to Grendel’s mother render her humanity questionable,
however, they leave little doubt as to her gender. She is named specifically and
repeatedly as modor [mother] and mæg [kinswoman], and the repeated use of these
epithets would seem to indicate that the relation holds some meaning within the
poem; why, for example, is she not an avenging brother or uncle? Her primary title,
naming as it does the uniquely female capacity to give birth, genders her beyond
question; the poem makes her his mother, not just any avenging relative, and it
does so for a variety of reasons. The horror of the maternal and its relation to the
abject is certainly chief among them; yet, at the same time, the poem assumes
the same kind of affective bond between Grendel and his mother as that between
a human mother and child, and this bond provides the motivation for Grendel’s
mother’s attack on Heorot. Additionally, maternity is nothing if not a physical,
bodily state; to be a mother is to fulfil the functional destiny of the female body.
Her role as mother forces us to focus on her femininity, but not in the abstract; she
is a concrete, material, bodily representation. This emphasis on bodily materiality,
then, reminds us that Grendel’s mother operates in the realm of physical agency.
Grendel’s mother is a woman of action, and her actions respond forcefully to a
maternal problem – the loss of a child – that Wealhtheow can only forestall with
words, and to which Hildeburh cannot even give voice in mourning. As Helen
Bennett notes, ‘Absent from the field of action [in Beowulf], women surround
the action with their words: urging before and officially mourning after.’34 The
words of women – Wealhtheow’s attempt to protect her sons with well-spoken
words, and the keening of a woman beside a funeral pyre – stir pathos with their
brave futility, but they are unable to turn the course of events away from tragedy,35
and Hildeburh’s complete silence, lacking even the capacity to mourn her son
and brother, embodies the catastrophic destiny of the women of Beowulf.36 The
contrast between the active agency of Grendel’s mother and the passive agentic
capacities of other women, such as Wealhtheow, Hildeburh, and the female
mourner at Beowulf’s funeral, sharpen the typical heroic dichotomy of words
and deeds. While the actions of Grendel’s mother underscore the limitations of
women interpellated by the symbolic order, however, they also stem, paradoxically,
from her own limitations. As perennial outsiders, without access to the symbolic
order, the Grendelkin seek solace because the cultural rituals of friðe [peace] are
denied to them. In contrast to Wealhtheow, whose linguistic propriety dooms
her attempts at agency to failure, Grendel’s mother manifests not only as the
abject, transgressing boundaries of the social, but also as that which is outside the
boundaries of language – the semiotic chora that both sustains and threatens the
symbolic order itself. Whether or not her agency can be counted as successful,
however, is a question to which we shall return in due course.
It is, finally, the very indeterminacy of Grendel’s mother, as a very material
female avenger, that makes her so threatening to the Danes, and the varying layers
of ambiguity – monster or human, woman or warrior – add up to a proportionally
more dangerous creature. To compensate, the text’s language goes to great lengths
to reassure us that because she is female, her attack is less fearsome than Grendel’s
was. The poem asserts that, because of her gender, she could not be as strong as
her son:
35 As Overing argues in Language, Sign, and Gender, pp. 88–101. But see also Helen
Damico, who ascribes significant agency to Wealhtheow’s social role as queen in Beowulf’s
Wealhtheow and the Valkyrie Tradition (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1984).
36 Martin Camargo, ‘The Finn Episode and the Tragedy of Revenge in Beowulf’, Studies in
Philology, 78.5 (1981), 120–34.
37 Beowulf, 1282b–1287.
[The terror was less by just as much as the strength of a female, the war-terror of a
woman, is less than that of a weaponed man’s, when the ornamented sword, forged
by the hammer, the sword shining with blood, the doughty edge, cuts through the
boar-image adorning the helmet opposite.]
We now face an enemy whose weaknesses are repeatedly underscored in the text and
whose ferocity is always subordinated to that of her son. Yet the narrative action of
the poem belies this assertion, and her attack, though of less magnitude, is far more
disturbing to the Danes.38 While their response to Grendel’s attack was twelve years
of passive suffering, in this case they call for immediate action: ‘Hraþe wæs to bure
Beowulf fetod, / sigoreadig secg’ [Beowulf was quickly fetched to the chamber, the
victorious man].39 Beowulf does not wait in the dark for her to attack the following night.
Rather, he replies to Hrothgar’s summons at first light, and encourages the old king:
[‘Do not worry, wise man. It is better for a man to avenge his friend than to mourn
much ... . Arise, king of the realm, let us go quickly to follow the track of Grendel’s
kinswoman. I promise you this: he will not escape to his refuge, nor to the protection
of the field, nor to the mountain wood, nor to the bottom of the ocean, go where
he will!’ ... Then Hrothgar’s horse, the mount with braided mane, was bridled. The
wise, splendid prince advanced; the foot-troop of shield-bearers marched.]
38 Martin Puhvel suggests that Grendel’s mother’s strength and fearsomeness place her in the
tradition of the demonic hag of early Irish legend; see ‘The Might of Grendel’s Mother’,
Folklore, 80 (1969), 81–88.
39 Beowulf, 1310–1311a.
40 Beowulf, 1384–85; 1390–94; 1399–1402a.
[‘I shall then disdain – so that my liege lord Hygelac may be pleased with me in
spirit – that I should carry a sword or a broad shield, a yellow shield boss to battle,
but with my grip I must grasp the enemy and struggle for life, foe against foe; there
he whom death takes must trust in the judgment of the Lord.’]
The situation now is quite different. Beowulf might be expected to boast once
again that he can dispatch this monster with his bare hands; after all, her attack
was far less devastating than Grendel’s, and she is only a female. But he takes an
entirely different approach. In order to contend with the merewif, Beowulf straps
on the full protection of the battle-hardened warrior in an amazingly detailed
descriptive passage that is worth quoting in its entirety:
41 See below, pp. 14–16.
42 Beowulf, 435–41.
43 Beowulf, 1441b–1464.
‘… no he on helm losaþ,
ne on foldan fæþm, ne on fyrgenholt,
ne on gyfenes grund, ga þær he wille!’46
[‘ ... he will not escape to his refuge, nor to the protection of the field, nor to the
mountain wood, nor to the bottom of the ocean, go where he will!’]
Finally, Hrothgar himself refers to her as the ‘sinnigne secg’ [sinful man] who
44 Beowulf, 1258b.
45 Beowulf, 1260; emphasis mine.
46 Beowulf, 1392b–1394b; emphasis mine.
lives in the terrifying mere.47 In all three cases, the active and powerful figure
is identified by the masculine pronoun, regardless of her biological gender or
even her primary identity as a mother. Neither the narrator nor the characters can
comfortably attach a feminine pronoun to the perpetrator of an attack on Heorot.
According to the text, then, the creature who attacks Heorot, and whom Beowulf
tracks to the mere, is not a female after all – it has, on the literal level, become
male, because an active body in this cultural economy is, by definition, a masculine
one.48 This is a radical moment for the poem, and it is reductive to dismiss these
markings as scribal errors or to say simply, ‘There are similar examples in other
OE texts.’49 If anything, the four other instances of gender-switching pronouns in
Beowulf (lines 1344, 1887, 2421, and 2685) confirm suspicions that the poem has,
at best, a vexed relationship to notions of gender, agency, and power. The other
examples deal solely with shifts from grammatically feminine nouns to masculine
pronouns. In two cases, the grammatically feminine hand (seo hand) of a male
character is replaced by a masculine pronoun (Æschere at line 1344 and Beowulf at
line 2685). Masculine pronouns likewise replace the grammatically feminine ‘old
age’ and ‘fate’ (lines 1887 and 2421), both powerful forces which Bruce Mitchell
and Fred Robinson suggest ‘probably shifted in the poet’s mind to a masculine
figure.’50 Mitchell sees the substitution of a masculine pronoun for a grammatically
feminine hand as ‘the triumph of sex over gender’, thus arguing implicitly that the
natural gender of a man trumps the grammatical gender of his hand in the poet’s
mind.51 If we agree with Mitchell’s logic, then replacing Grendel’s mother with a
masculine pronoun – that is, privileging grammatical gender over natural gender
47 Beowulf, 1379a.
48 Studies of females who become male are frequent in hagiographic literature, where the
actions performed by a female body reveal the existence of a male mind or soul; see, for
example, Gopa Roy, ‘A Virgin Acts Manfully: Ælfric’s Life of St Eugenia and the Latin
Versions’, Leeds Studies in English, n.s. 23 (1992), 1–27; and Paul E. Szarmach, ‘Ælfric’s
Women Saints: Eugenia’, in New Readings on Women in Old English Literature, ed. Helen
Damico and Alexandra Hennessey Olsen (Bloomington: University of Indiana Press, 1990),
pp. 146–57, and ‘St. Euphrosyne: Holy Transvestite’, in Holy Men and Holy Women:
Old English Prose Saints’ Lives and their Contexts, ed. Paul E. Szarmach (Albany: State
University of New York Press, 1996), pp. 353–65.
49 Beowulf: An Edition, ed. Bruce Mitchell and Fred C. Robinson (Oxford: Blackwell, 1998),
note to line 1260.
50 Mitchell and Robinson, Beowulf, note to line 1887.
51 See Bruce Mitchell, Old English Syntax, 2 vols (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1985), §2178 and
§2358.
England (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 2006), pp. 108–11.
57 That the poem itself is at best ambivalent about heroic virtue was established by John
Leyerle in ‘Beowulf the Hero and the King’, Medium Ævum, 34 (1965), 89–102. Kiernan
and James W. Earl both view Grendel’s mother as a particularly feminine critique of heroic
society; see Kiernan, ‘Grendel’s Heroic Mother’; and Earl, ‘The Role of the Men’s Hall
in the Development of the Anglo-Saxon Superego’, Psychiatry, 46 (1983), 139–60, and
Thinking About Beowulf (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1994).
will accomplish this by maintaining his own physical integrity.58 Unlike Grendel’s
mother, however, he needs to create a martial, masculine body to take on a feminine
adversary. His masculinity was not in doubt when he fought Grendel, but his new
adversary’s very existence qua adversary brings categories of identity into question,
and the masculine performance of donning armour reassures us as much as it does
Beowulf and the Danes. He needs the weapons as well. He cannot afford to take any
chances with Grendel’s mother – he must make sure that she is dead, severing her
head as proof positive that she cannot return to further disrupt the group’s stability.
And yet, in what is perhaps the most telling erasure in the poem, he does not bring
that head back as a trophy for the Danes; rather, he boldly chops the head off of
the dead body of her son, which has lain at the bottom of the mere for over a day.
The event is quite literally at the centre of the poem (line 1590 out of 3182 lines),
and its centrality underscores the extent to which Grendel’s mother has threatened
social order. War trophies and booty play a vital role in the memorialization of
heroic deeds; when Grendel’s arm is displayed on the wall of Heorot, it functions
as a representation of the victorious hero by metonymically evoking the strength
and terror of his defeated adversary.59 Were the head of Grendel’s mother to adorn
the walls of Heorot, the Danes would face a daily reminder of her disruptive power;
the trophy would signify, not Beowulf’s victory, but the terrifying agency of the
semiotic, the horrible Other of social cohesion. The possibility of signification
outside the symbolic order, of agency beyond masculinity, threatens the very
structures of meaning on which Hrothgar’s kingdom, Beowulf’s fame, and the
poem itself depend. Leaving Grendel’s mother’s head behind consigns her to
infamy rather than legend, denying her status as adversary and replacing the
memory of her attack with the more acceptable reminder of Grendel’s. Given
the importance of trophies and booty throughout the poem, Beowulf’s seemingly
inconsistent act becomes not only understandable but extremely significant. Like
the conspicuous display of arms and armour and the masculine pronouns, this act
functions to cover up Grendel’s mother’s activity and forestall representation of
58 Seth Lerer introduces the notion that the hero’s body can symbolize society as a whole;
when that body is dismembered, social instability follows. The hero’s responsibility, then, is
to keep his body intact as a sign of the unified community. See ‘Grendel’s Glove’, ELH, 61
(1994), 721–51 (p. 742).
59 See Leslie Lockett, ‘The Role of Grendel’s Arm in Feud, Law, and the Narrative Strategy
of Beowulf’, in Latin Learning and English Lore: Studies in Anglo-Saxon Literature for
Michael Lapidge, ed. Katherine O’Brien O’Keeffe and Andy Orchard, 2 vols (Toronto:
University of Toronto Press, 2005), I, pp. 368–88.
an outside agency. In like manner, the hero does not regale the hall with his own
account of the fearsome battle. Abjecting Grendel’s mother once more through his
refusal to acknowledge her actions by traditional forms of representation, Beowulf
re-establishes the boundary between culture and chaos.
Just as masculine pronouns obscure female agency, the characters’ performance
of denial buries the troubling implications of her actions. The men return home with
Grendel’s head as a trophy, re-inscribing Beowulf’s victory over a more appropriate
foe and refusing to commemorate his female adversary. In this, perhaps, Grendel’s
mother displays her greatest power: the power to uphold the boundary that separates
civilization from its terrifying outside – a boundary that is established, in the first
instance, through the recognition and subsequent abjection of those parts of itself
which it cannot, or will not, accept as its own. She is visible, tangible proof that
the heroic world has a hidden inverse. It is possible, then, that instead of being
simply a reprise of the horrifying Grendel, Grendel’s mother is intended to be
something even more terrifying. Grendel himself is a fearsome threat to the life
and well-being of Heorot’s inhabitants, but his mother represents something far
worse. Grendel, at least, is a clear adversary. His mother, on the other hand, is
ambiguity incarnate; her indeterminate nature wreaks havoc with representation,
and her attack threatens not the life and well-being of the Danes and Geats – she
only kills one of them before she makes her exit – but the very structure of the
society Heorot is founded on: she calls into question the legitimacy of the heroic
order, of a feud-oriented and exchange-based culture that excludes certain people
(namely women and outsiders) from meaningful action.60 In this way, the character
of Grendel’s mother functions as a critique, not only of the world of Beowulf, but
of Anglo-Saxon society more generally; she stands as evidence of the many, many
subjects whose positions outside social power structures both maintain and menace
the foundations of culture. The threats of war, feud, and internecine struggle so
common to early medieval political life are stock tropes of the heroic world, and
Beowulf abounds with them. But the poem also offers, at the centre of the narrative,
a threat that cannot be classified according to the terms of heroic understanding. In
this character, Beowulf recognizes the inherent complexity of social and political
life, and it challenges those who would seek easy answers and solid structures
60 Gayle Rubin discusses how women function according to a logic of exchange in establishing
social networks in the now-classic essay ‘The Traffic in Women’, in Toward an Anthropology
of Women, ed. Rayna R. Reiter (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1975), pp. 157–210, and
Irigaray explores the implications of exchangeability for women’s signifying potential in
This Sex Which is Not One, pp. 170–91).
61 I would like to thank Jim Hansen, Maura Nolan, Katherine O’Brien O’Keeffe, Rebecca L.
Stephenson, Charles D. Wright, and the anonymous Parergon readers for their helpful and
insightful comments on this article at various stages in its development.