Grendel: Boundaries of Flesh and Law

Almudena Nido

Abstract
In Beowulf, Grendel presents itself as a figure of inescapable ambiguity and as
an embodiment of paradox that causes consternation in the human community.
There is no definite way of definition for the monster in the masterpiece of Old
English literature, and Grendel is presented as an exile in space and discourse, his
malicious shadow compared with other types of monsters in Scandinavian
literature or as an allegory of Evil in a Christian perspective. These theoretical
approaches have missed the fact that the monster is something inherent not only to
epic but to society itself.
Following Michel Foucault’s theories of power and resistance, this paper will
offer a more comprehensive vision of what Grendel represents and what its
presence and violence in human society can show. The monster has to be taken
into account not only as the personification of pure evil or as the necessary
antagonist for the hero, Grendel exists because power in Heorot exists. The
monstrous presence in Heorot has an impact as powerful as the forms of human
power that have imposed themselves on space and discourse. Grendel and his
Mother inhabit the darkest space ever possible in society: that of resistance, that of
being the Other against whom members inside society can define themselves and
can assert their position as part of the community. With each stride and attack,
Grendel enforces and articulates the community’s identity. Even though the
monster roams outside the field of human space, at the same time, it is inside
human consciousness and space, and the monster forms the threshold and the very
limit needed by society in Beowulf from a natural and legal perspective.
Importantly, the hero’s actions on the monster will be written on its body revealing
an anxiety on borders and pain in Beowulf. Grendel is the night that Heorot needs
in order to shine. A night that has to be denied but, without which, society cannot
exist.

Key Words: Beowulf, Grendel, Foucault, power, resistance, old English,

mutilation, beheading, monster, medieval.
*****

Boundaries in Beowulf are as fragile as the human body in Grendel’s maws.

Unless they are strengthened or reshaped with the ambivalent power of the hero,
the limits of Heorot cannot protect the order established within them.
Following Michel Foucault’s theories about the monster and incorporating in
the analysis the legal aspects of Grendel this paper will attempt to provide a deeper
reflection on the production of a monster like Grendel taking into account the legal
aspects and the boundaries the monster in Beowulf tears and digest. His specific
2 Grendel: Boundaries of Flesh and Law
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relation to order as a great figure of ambivalence and ambiguity will erode all
boundaries in Beowulf that prove too vulnerable and unstable. Not even the violent
reinforcement by the hero will contain safely the identity as the monster is an
inclusive element needed from the very foundation of the community in its very
specific context in Beowulf.
For the Germanic imagination there was no worse punishment than the
banishment from the known walls of the social centre of the hall, a shadow life
outside the safe boundaries1 of the warrior ethics. Exile from the hall was seen as a
forced disconnection from the safe space and discourse of community. To be too
far away from that safe place, to feel as an exterior entity to those safe boundaries,
with no place in the meadhall,2 was a very dangerous position for the individual3 in
the community Beowulf portrays.
The prolongation of that distance that signalled who belonged to the
community and who was exterior to it seemed to push man closer to the liminal
and rough social and physical territory on the edges of community. And that meant
the entrance into the dark world of monsters, far away from the safety of human
social bonds. ‘Aghast’,4 Hrothgar can contemplate the sudden intrusion and
inscription of that distance into an open wound in the walls of Heorot. Boundaries
are torn by the monster with the too crimson and too visible ink of blood,
suspending with those visible marks the discourse that heralded the safety of
identity. This new terrible and familiar substance signals the frightening fact that
the exile has come back to the centre with such a violence that the whole of the
community is threatened, and a foreboding of total eradication is expressed in no
dubious form, stating with his hostility that, clearly, as Shildrick notes: ‘the issue is
not so much that monsters threaten to overrun the boundaries of the proper, as that
they promise to dissolve them’5 Not even the boundary of literary genres in Old
English.6 As if a giant interlace7 struggled to contain the elements inside the poem
in a static and safe order, joining different threads of monsters and humans,8 the
need and importance of contention in this epic world is constantly at stake. This
persistent insistence on limits and boundaries in Beowulf, from the characteristics
the ideal Germanic king and hero should have (sapientia et fortitudo9) to the very
strength of hero and monster (thirty victims, thirty shirt mails)10 contests as an
impossible desire for order with the need to surpass boundaries and extend
authority beyond the brief imposition of discourse and space. Violence is used both
to consolidate the ever expanding human community in the reign of monsters and
to establish boundaries that are not to be trespassed.11
Due to this ambivalent establishment of boundaries as permanent limits and
possible transgressions, flesh proves a very vulnerable boundary in Beowulf as it
cannot preserve identity from a greedy and blood-thirsty monster,12 but in reality,
space and flesh constitute ineffective boundaries when not even discourse can
bound Grendel in a fixed identity, the farther from humankind the better.13
Notwithstanding the possible allegorical functions of the monsters in medieval
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art,14 Grendel was an entity too real in his terror for the Anglo-Saxon readers, a real
terror against which they had to devise mechanism of protection. 15 He is a monster
‘who live[s] near civilized men and [is] actively hostile and harmful.’16
When Grendel lurks past the frame of the door, he opens an abysmal space, as
incommensurable as the gap between his monstrosity and ambivalent human-like
aspect. With each stride he abridges the safeguard space of transgression that
Hrothgar’s words have caused to appear when edifying Heorot17. But before he
steps into the social space his presence at the threshold of the hall directs the focus
of violence to the interior, highlights the sharp difference between interior and
exterior and the latent promise of immediate violence from the very limit inwards.
Suddenly, the locus monstruoso manifests itself not far from home, in fact,
Grendel stands expectantly on the ‘edge’ of Heorot itself, penetrating the gates of
the hall. Spatially there is no longer a safe distance to mediate between predator
and prey in Beowulf, even though the monster is identified as an exile.18 It is
precisely the fact that Grendel commits his crimes inside the social space, without
any space mediating between monster and violence, that makes him the more
terrible, his crimes more heinous. Just like in the Hereford Mappamundi the closer
the monster is, the more alarming he becomes.19 No longer a safe adornment of the
borders of maps and manuscripts, ‘at a too great a remove to be personally
verified’,20 the monster is too near for comfort. The only distance separating now
the monster from the centre of the community in Beowulf is an uneasy and fragile
surface that is inclusive to the social space, and this reveals that the locus
monstruoso is ‘nor outside so much as it is the threshold and conductor between
outside and inside.’21
Heorot as the place of civilization, projects itself as a ‘mighty structure that
tames a formless wilderness into representability’ 22 and the very centre of the
Germanic world where social activity and violence were validated23. Social space
conforms ‘humanness’ in Beowulf just as exile or abandonment of that social
centre conforms monstrousness24 as it is implied in the Germanic epic tradition.
Outside the only safe harbour the world is hostile and saturated with war and
blood, the only possible distinction between men and monster in the Germanic
world being these wooden walls and how the warrior can relate to them: ‘Outside
the hall (...) [are the] habitations of monsters’25. But, although the only condition
for the monster in Beowulf seems to be, then, his isolation and exteriority to the
community ‘to be a monster means to be alienated, to be alienated means to move
into the world of monsters’26, in fact, the monster is never as exterior, never that far
away from the centre, as the clear delimitations would have us believe. Grendel is
the threshold limiting what is inside from what is outside, partaking of both at the
same time. In a distance as important as the one between what is acceptable and
what is not, there only appears to be two possible positions. However, the fact is
that behind those delineated walls and projected spaces, delimitation of space
reveals itself to be not so innocent task. Thanks to what it excludes and positions as
4 Grendel: Boundaries of Flesh and Law
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an outside, it creates the social space, obliterating any possibility for a third
position but for the very edge that signals that possibility: ‘whatever is
inadmissible, be it malefic or forbidden, thus has its own hidden space on the near
or far side of a frontier.’27
Inevitably, then, as a consequence of the scarcity of possible positions and this
desire to limit, control and posses that space ‘inside’, the monster materializes:
‘whenever a ‘people’ are circumscribed, someone is left out (...). Violence stems
from any conception of identity forged negatively, against the Other.’ 28 Grendel
cannot be totally outside the space that calls him enticingly and knows of his
presence ever since its own birth. Out of infinity, the same material the monster is
born from, a parcel is defined and appropriated through a discursive spatial action
that instates and presupposes not only the space contained inside those limits but
also a set of relations with respect to that space and with the possibility of passing
through those limits. Every demarcation of space describes an inside and an
outside with different relations to infinite space and the constituent finite space.29
Even though the very existence of the physical boundaries in space is related
with the idea of restricting the entry to that space it is, at the same time, an
invitation. With each stride Grendel abridges the safeguard space of transgression
that Hrothgar’s words have caused to appear when he commanded Heorot to be
built. But his intrusion is in fact inscribed in the very limits as the liminality that
Grendel embodies seems to call into question boundaries themselves and their
fragility and validity. The social space of Heorot is the first boundary that Grendel
transgresses and forces to acknowledge him, revealing in the process that the very
existence of the threshold is inviting the monster. Every door implies the
possibility of entering, of trespassing an elliptic frontier that has been suspended:
‘a limit could not exist if it were absolutely uncrossable and, reciprocally,
transgression would be pointless if it merely crossed a limit composed of illusions
and shadow.’30 Walls, gates and doors constitute gateways for safe conduct into
social space and parts of fortifications and buildings but, at the same time,
emphasize the human illusion of a divided, safe and contained space carved out of
an infinitive supply31 and prove a boundary as vulnerable as skin. Those
ambivalent portals into and out of space are, in fact, gaps for transgression where
there is the possibility of entering into the restricted space and relations given in
that precinct of fixed identity. The very foundations of Heorot seem to imply a
possibility of transgression and of the monster reclaiming his territory by
inscribing in its walls and fortifications the future violence of the monster. Like
man-made wounds in space, they grant access to the most vulnerable interior. And
their threshold, a nowhere space fixed into a poised position of ambiguity calls an
uneasy identification with the most ambivalent figure that can still be considered a
part of society even though it must be kept at the most possible distance.
Constituting the unwanted third element, the monster’s presence in Heorot
manifests ‘that narrow zone of a line where it displays the flash of its passage, but
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perhaps also its entire trajectory, even its origin; it is likely that transgression has
its entire space in the line it crosses.’32 Every threshold is a possibility of
transgression that can exist in that reduced space between inside and outside,
where the ambiguity of the monster fits.
Even though doors and gates can be said to seem the territory of the monster,
the monster’s presence in space is prior to the very first demarcation and
edification of Heorot by the projection of the monstrous body into space. 33
Monster, space and discourse need each other. There is no way to clearly separate
space and discourse without the monster mediating somehow as, after all, space
belongs to the giant who gives the material out of which space sense and identity
can grow: ‘The giant is the fragmented body written across the landscape to
provide its prehistory, its identity.’34 Grendel’s presence in the gates of Herot, as a
logical reply to the invitation of the hall, explicitly recalls the transgression of all
the possible boundaries including that of the normative discourse of the creative
myth that separates and limits the possible space, ordering space. Not even the
superlative discourse of the ordering God in space and discourse in the Biblical
community35 can detain the ambiguous presence from entering, marring the order
just established by the human figure of authority.36 There is no order, established
by humans or God, that can deter Grendel from irrupting into it and writing his
own words in blood. His presence in Heorot is measured no only in discomfort but
in the breach of law and space the monster embodies.
This points suggestively to the relationship of the monster to order 37 and how
the monster disorders effectively space and discourse and, importantly, also the
most essential order for any kind of life: that of the body. In a strange proportion of
perplexity and recognition, Grendel gets as close as possible to the social fabric of
Heorot only when he disrupts its ‘normality’, when he is eating it, penetrating the
softest surface which is, at the same time, alien and his own. The only proof
Grendel has been able to get the closest possible is the crimson colour of the most
powerful language38 both humans and monsters understand.
If the physical boundaries in Beowulf (those of flesh and wood) are not safe
from Grendel’s voracious attacks, the subtler limits imposed by discourse and
social conventions that form the foundation of social life are in actual danger of
total collapse because they also communicate with blood, the same essential
boundary that the monster uses as his only token of expression. When Grendel
enters into the community he brings with him ‘a monstrous ambiguity’ 39 that
manifests itself with the monster in the space of the community which should be
the safest for its inhabitants.40
Just as Grendel’s teeth penetrate the tenderest surface of the community, his
presence is made known and discursive with the terrible ink of blood. There is no
way to deny Grendel’s presence in Hrothgar’s space and discourse, no way to erase
the terrible tear in the fabric of space and discourse that Grendel has introduced
with his hatred and hunger. As soon as Grendel lurks past the frame of the door, he
6 Grendel: Boundaries of Flesh and Law
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opens an abysmal space too terrible41 to contemplate for the thanes. 42 It is an
opening as inconmensurable as the gap between his monstrosity and ambivalent
human-like aspect43 and as undesirable in the community as the sight of blood in
the social space.44 It is a wound that cracks the very foundation of the human
community in Heorot and threatens to push it back to infinite space and discourse.
Boundaries in Beowulf are not only set in wood and earth or imaginary lines,
but also in violence. As ‘some thing strange and interesting—a prognostication of
death, but one which, no matter how quickly dismissed (...), holds the attention
and, momentarily, dare not even be named’45 the presence of spilled blood in
Beowulf signals that a vital boundary has been trespassed,46 one everyone in Heorot
can relate to, even briefly, because violence is a universal language and sometimes
it is articulated in silence. Disappearing from discourse and space just as fast as he
comes into, Grendel exits back into the night, as if he had lashed out of nowhere,
leaving others to vocalize the horror. The space that had been safe (the safest space
in the community) until now has been newly inscribed, attacked intermittently,
showing in every blood stain a wound that cannot be healed. Indeed, as a deep
fissure in the discourse: ‘a sign of unity now lost.’47
There is no way back to the time before the first transgression. In fact, the
community has lost all unity after the monster’s attacks, not only physical integrity
but every linking element able to produce the social coherence has been affected.
Ritual no longer works in Heorot and sacrifices to restore the peace of the social
space prove inefficient. What is needed in order to restore the community is
Grendel’s own blood,48 the very same entrails he is filling up with the thanes’
blood.
Blood is ‘some thing strange and interesting—a prognostication of death, but
one which, no matter how quickly dismissed or forgotten, holds the attention and,
briefly, dare not even be named’49 that in Beowulf is not only fascinating but,
acting as a linking element, invisible and safe within its bounds, it joins the
different threads of the social fabric in Beowulf, interweaving kin and oaths.50 But
when it is violently spilled, because something has pierced and mangled the natural
bound of skin and flesh, a conflict emerges and it has to be acted upon 51 because its
unwanted presence is staining the social space and the order. With his attacks and
presence the monster is rewriting a different kind of text in the social space.
Importantly, blood, both the essence and the most essential form of life,52 is
spilled in Beowulf, saturating the social space with impure violence in a cannibal
‘prohibited consumption’53 of a bestial-man monster feeding54 from men. Being so
ambivalently close to humankind his attacks become more monstrous 55 and his
cannibalism a further form of transgression.56
Grendel’s hunger is the ruin of the community because he eats it and partakes
of it socially with its consumption57 but not with his active social role. He is
usurping the thanes’ position, creating new boundaries of the social in his own
physical body: ‘Flesh is united to flesh in an unbroken round of eating and being
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eaten.’58 Through anthropophagy Grendel achieves a new community where he
cannot be an exile because he is the very centre from which it emerges. His
antisocial behaviour enters the community not only due to his attacks but also in
the integration of the social fabric he consumes in his insides. By spilling and
drinking the thanes’ blood he sins against his dubious percentage of humanity with
a powerful ink of horror and fascination but is also appropriating a position that
does not belong to the monster.
With each attack Grendel communicates in a frenzy of scorn and malice more
than just his need to feed. His cannibal feeding frenzy ‘is never just about eating
but is primarily a medium for nongustatory messages—messages having to do with
the maintenance, regeneration, and in some cases, the foundation of the cultural
order,’59 revealing that his cannibal attacks are part of his relation to order in
Heorot. Again positioned as an element in relation to (dis)order, Grendel’s hunger
is very human ‘the envy of the exile at the joyous singing and communal feeling of
the men in the meadhall, an emotion similar to that of Satan’ 60 and as a ‘human’
violent expression it has a legal and social dimension because of the social and
legal boundaries that he consumes. This proves that the monster in Beowulf is
ambiguously human not only in his possible physical aspect or his relationship to
Cain but, importantly, in his legality, tearing a very important boundary in the
Germanic community.
The human dimension of his crimes, apart from the suffering and bereavement
in the community, appears in the mention of Grendel not paying wergild for his
crimes. It seems it could have been remotely expected in the Germanic context that
crimes like the ones committed by the monster61 should be paid compensation62 by
the monster himself.63 A question arises unexpectedly and with uneasiness: would
the payment of that legal imposition have changed the impression the monster
leaves behind? It seems the lack of due wergild is the only requirement for the
monster to be unambiguously so, as there seems to be no legal or moral doubt that
the monster must be punished, no matter how his ‘human’ plight can be likened to
the Germanic reality of exile: ‘The fight with Grendel, as Beowulf himself
recounts, was one he could take on with a clear moral mandate’64 as a consequence
of Grendel’s impune violation of wergild.
Suddenly, the legal aspects of the monster in the community appear in Beowulf
as a consequence of the monster’s bloody aftermath and blur a boundary already
ambivalent and easily transgressed. The monster has legal life that is specific to the
community and historic context that defines it as a monster65 but as a transgression
whose sole existence seems to depend on his infringement of the legal order he
constantly reproduces its position as a threshold element. Being a legal-natural
complex the monster ‘appears and functions precisely at the point where nature and
law are joined’66 and disappears only when it no longer poses a legal infraction.
Since law cannot apply to him, being exterior to it, the monster is defined as
non-human ‘in a legal and literal case.’67 But no matter how exterior he is
8 Grendel: Boundaries of Flesh and Law
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portrayed to be, paradoxically, he is an irregularity inside law that ‘calls law into
question and disables it.’68 Then, the monster as an exception that disables the
application and action of law is stated in the law. As ‘a legal labyrinth, a violation
of and an obstacle to the law, both a transgression and undecidability at the law of
the law’69 Grendel is included in the legal system of wergild as a flagrant
exception. As a legal system to counteract the consequences of any violent deeds
inside the community70 wergild is a mechanism that substitutes the blood sacrifices
and gives cohesion to the community by preserving it from infinite blood feuds and
‘expressed both the unity of the kindred in paying for the crimes of their members
and the justice of the accuser’s case.’ 71 It constitutes a limit for violence by
establishing the repayment of ending long-term feuds.72 What the payment of
wergild could avert in the case of Grendel’s attacks—the victims’ kin having
physical and legal revenge on Grendel—is impossible. He is too strong and too
violent73 and does not fear the vendetta that could ensue from his actions. There is
no way for any of the thanes in Heorot to be superior in violence to an enemy that
will not respect the civilities of the community in peace and war: ‘Grendel exhibits
disregard if not outright disdain for the symbols and ceremonies of human order,
including even the civilities of warfare’ 74. But, in fact, why should Grendel respect
wergild when he stays in total resistance to all the order established inside the
community: ‘Why should a cat come to terms with mice?’75
The monster, bathed and sated with blood does not threaten with starting a
fratricide war of never-ending feud inside the community (what wergild prevented
against76) in fact, he uses and produces a violence that will engulf the whole of the
community and render useless every social and legal mechanism, including
wergild. Grendel with his total disregard of wergild achieves the same as with his
blood deeds, that is: ‘The dissolution of regulations pertaining to the individual’s
proper place in society.’77 Every time he kills a thane with a particular wergild that
goes unpaid78 he eats his way not only into flesh but also into the hierarchical
position inside the social fabric of Heorot with that specific wergild. With impunity
the monster can attack the very own centre of the community in Beowulf, getting as
close to Hrothgar’s throne as possible, as close as possible to the head of the
community, rendering Hrothgar’s forces futile.
Grendel’s supposed exteriority to the law and the community is not so
important when he attacks it, as his attacks are interpreted and translated into an
operation of human violence and retribution. He is integrated into the rules, albeit
only in the transgression, just as he is integrated into the legal consequences79
inside the social space where these conventions and rituals are essential to preserve
order and to maintain peace:

Grendel’s refusal to negotiate put him morally and socially

speaking, beyond the pale. He did not play by the rules. The
poet’s audience (...) lived in a feuding culture; they were familiar
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with the conventions.80

The conventions that rule and constrict the flux of violence constitute a limit
that authority in Beowulf needs as if it were the ultimate boundary. Each
transgression of this most essential boundary can be seen in the proportionate
response his violence gets in the figure of the hero as it triggers something different
from justice. The same violence the monster uses will be embodied by the hero,
expressing the need to suppress a violent presence, too violent for the legal and
social constraints.
As it has been shown in this paper, it is not only the physical, and the most
easily identified, boundaries that the monster tears into in Beowulf. Implied in the
presence of blood, the legal boundaries have been recalled and transgressed
because they are expressed ultimately with blood, an element that reminds the
community of its own vulnerability and the social bounds within that are its own
foundations. Once impure blood has stained the walls, Grendel has effectively
dissolved all boundaries and distinctions within Heorot by disrupting order in all its
aspects. With no payment for his crimes and no possibility of punishing the
monster, Hrothgar is at loss as to how to recover authority and restore space since
rituals cannot work properly within Heorot and power cannot be regenerated.
Due to Grendel’s cannibalism and ambivalent human nature he is too close to
the community he eats, ambiguous enough because he inhabits the threshold
already before the establishment of social space, proving an inclusive element of
Heorot. But no matter his physical monstrosity the most important monstrous acts
of Grendel seem to be his total disregard of wergild and the legal consequences of
his actions within the social space.
With the new adornments in the walls of Heorot the social space has changed
and collapsed, its social conventions no longer as useful as before, the space no
longer considered safe and the social and legal conventions ignored by the
monster. This results in a community that needs the boundaries that Grendel has
put into question and destroyed with his violent incursions in the very centre of
society but, even when vanquished, mutilated and digested, still needs a monstrous
element81 to conform those boundaries.

Notes
1All Beowulf translations used in this paper belong to Donaldson’s
translation, except where otherwise referenced.
Andreas Haarder, ‘Beowulf’: The Appeal of a Poem, (Viborg: Akademisk
Vorlag, 1975), 278.
2 Jeffrey J. Cohen; Of Giants: Sex, Monsters, and the Middle Ages
(Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1996), 7; James W. Earl.
Thinking about ‘Beowulf’. (Stanford University Press: California, 1994),
117.
3 Haarder, Beowulf’: Appeal, 300.
4 ‘Then as dawn brightened and the day broke,
Grendel’s powers of destruction were plain:
their wassail was over, they wept to heaven
and mourned under morning. Their mighty prince,
the storied leader, sat stricken and helpless,
humiliated by the loss of his guard,
bewildered and stunned, staring aghast
at the demon’s trail, in deep distress.
He was numb with grief, but got no respite
for one night later merciless Grendel
struck again with more gruesome murders.’
(Beowulf, 126-136, translated by Seamus Heaney in Beowulf: A Verse
Translation. Edited by Daniel Donoghue (New York: W. W. Norton, 2002),
6.
5 Magrit Shildrick, Embodying the Monster: Encounters with the
Vulnerable Self (London: Sage Publications, 2002), 11.
6 Heide Estes, ‘Raising Cain in Genesis and Beowulf: Challenges to Generic
Boundaries in Anglo-Saxon Biblical Literature’. The Heroic Age 2010.
Viewed 10 May 2012,
<http://www.mun.ca/mst/heroicage/issues/13/estes.php>.
7 John Leyerle, ‘The Interlace Structure in Beowulf’, in Beowulf: A Verse
Translation, ed. Daniel Donoghue (New York: W. W. Norton, 2002);
Gillian R. Overing, Language, Sign and Gender in ‘Beowulf’. (Carbondale:
Southern Illinois University Press, 1990), xviii.
8 Jane Chance, ‘The Structural Unity of Beowulf: The Problem of Grendel’s
Mother’, in Beowulf: A Verse Translation, edited by Daniel Donoghue
(New York: W. W. Norton, 2002), 157.
9 R. E. Kaske, ‘Sapientia et Fortitudo as the Controlling Theme of
Beowulf’, in An Anthology of Beowulf Criticism, ed. Lewis E. Nicholson
(Indiana: University of Notre Dame Press, 1980 [1964]), 272; Gwyn Jones,
Kings, Beasts and Heroes. (London: Oxford University Press, 1972), 45.
10 Beowulf, 2361.
11 ‘Thereafter they would never hinder the passage of sea-voyagers over
the deep water’ Beowulf, 565-569.
12 In the case of Hondscio his body is effectively dismembered in a chaotic
frenzy that seems to be conveyed in discourse, disintegrating the thane and
dispersing his being (Cohen, Giants, 14; Judy Anne White, Hero-Ego in
Search of self: A Jungian Reading of ‘Beowulf’, [New York: Peter Lang,
2004], 29).
13 Grendel’s identification with his preys and his ambivalent human nature
seem to be largely based on his association with Cain as a forefather and
origin of evil in community: (Frederich Klaeber, ‘Die christlichen Elemente
im Beowulfe’. Anglia 35 [1911] and Anglia 36 [1912], trans. ‘The Christian
Elements in Beowulf”, Old English Newsletter Subsidia 24 [1996]: 111-135;
Dorothy Whitelock, The Audience of ‘Beowulf’. [Oxford: Clarendon Press,
1958 (1951)], 5-12; David Williams, Deformed Discourse: The Function of
the Monster in Medieval Thought and Literature. [Exeter: University Exeter
Press, 1996], 11). Grendel is identified as a ‘hated fugitive’ (Andy Orchard,
Pride and Prodigies: Studies in the Monsters of the Beowulf-Manuscript.
[Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1995], 63) and his hybrid nature
(Fred C. Robinson, ‘Lexicography and Literary Criticism: a Caveat’, in
Philological Essays: Studies in Old and Middle English Literature in
Honour of Herbert Dean Meritt, ed. James L. Rosier [The Hague: Mouton,
1970], 102-103) and what could conform a description of the monster ‘a
sentient human[shaped] being’ (Orchard, Pride and Prodigies, 36)
identified with the Germanic notion of exile (Joseph L. Baird, ‘Grendel the
Exile’. Neuphilologische Mitteilungen 67 [1966]: 378-379; Stanley B.
Greenfield, ‘The Formulaic Expression of the Theme of ‘Exile’ in Anglo-
Saxon Poetry’. Speculum 30 [1955]: 205; Stanley B. Greenfield, Hero and
Exile: The Art of Old English Poetry, ed. George H. Brown. [London:
Hambledon Press, 1989], 130). The use of the terms man and aglaeca to
define not only Grendel and the monsters but also the hero in the poem
further complicate a clear distinction between monster and man (Doreen M.
Gillam, ‘The Use of the Term ‘Aglaeca’ in Beowulf at lines 893 and 2592’.
Studia Germanica Gandensia 3 [1961]; Sherman Kuhn, ‘Old English
aglaeca—Middle Irish ochlach’. In Linguistic Method: Essays in Honor of
Herbert Penzl, ed. Irrnengard Rauch and Gerald F. Carr, [The Hague:
Mouton Press, 1979], 228; Marion L. Huffines, ‘Old English Aglaeca:
Magic and Moral Decline of Monsters and Men.’ Semasia 1 [1974]).
14 Susan Kim, ‘Man-Eating Monsters and Ants as Big as Dogs’.
Medievalia Groningana XX, Animals and the Symbolic in Medieval Art
and Literature. (Gronigen: Egbert Forsten, 1997), 43.
15 Asa Mittman, ‘Headless Men and Hungry Monsters’. The Sarum
Seminar Stanford University Alumni Center, (March 2003), 3.
16 John B. Friedman, The Monstrous Races in Medieval Art and Thought.
(New York: Syracuse University Press, 2000 [1981]), 107.
17 Beowulf, 67-79.
18 Beowulf, 106-110; 1351-1352. Kaske, ‘Sapientia et Fortitudo, 287-288;
Orchard, Pride and Prodigies, 63.
19 Mittman, ‘Headless Men’, 10.
20 Asa Mittman, Maps and Monsters in Medieval England, (New York:
Routledge, 2006), 11.
21 Williams, Deformed Discourse, 17.
22 Cohen, Giants, 13.
23 Barbara Raw, ‘Royal Power and Royal Symbols in Beowulf’, in The Age
of Sutton Hoo, ed. Martin O. H. Carver, (Rochester: Boydell Press, 1992),
168.
24 Outside the limits of the hall man suffers a degradation and
transformation, condemned to ‘a meaningless monsterlife outside the hall of
man, the death of the damned’ (Haarder, Beowulf’: Appeal, 237).
25 Cohen, Giants, 7.
26 Haarder, Beowulf’: Appeal, 278.
27 ‘Walls, enclosures and façades serve to define both a scene (where
something takes place) and an obscene area to which everything that cannot
or may not happen on the scene is relegated: whatever is inadmissible, be it
malefic or forbidden, thus has its own hidden space on the near or far side
of a frontier.’ Henry Lefebvre, The Production of Space. (Oxford:
Blackwell Publishing, 2000 [1974]), 36.
28 Regina Schwartz, The Curse of Cain: The Violent Legacy of
Monotheism. (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1997), 88
29 Lefebvre, Production of Space, 36.
30 Michel Foucault, ‘A Preface to Transgression’, in Language, Counter-
Memory, Practice: Selected Essays and Interviews by Michel Foucault, ed.
Donald F. Bouchard, (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1980 [1977]), 34.
31 Schwartz, Curse of Cain, 40.
32 Foucault, Preface, 33.
33 The perception of space is constituted, as Lacan theorized, by a
projection of the monster into space (Jacques Lacan, Écrits. Selections.
[New York: W. W. Norton, 1977]). Natural space is described and
appropriated by using the projection of a monstrous body, thus allowing the
individual to interpret space spatially (Michael Gaudio, ‘Matthew Paris and
the Cartography of the Margins’. Gesta vol. 39, 1 [2000]: 50; Lefevbre,
Production of Space, 36) making space corporeal, ‘the world coheres only
after the body has been projected across its contours, arranging rivers,
valleys, and mountains into a geography that gigantizes the somatic’
(Cohen, Giants, 12), the same can be translated into language through a
process of distinction and separation: ‘language achieves the crucial
distinction and separation when the ‘I’ is discovered as independent of what
it means’ (Williams, Deformed Discourse, 67). Reality in all its extension
cannot be assimilated, there is a need to limit the morsels, to delimit
identity, space and discourse into smaller compartments as individual,
consistent and properly defined as the human body. Space is not different,
turning itself when compartmented into a surface to transgress.
34 Cohen, Giants, 12.
35 Averil Cameron, ‘Redrawing the Map: Early Christian Territory after
Foucault’. Journal of Roman Studies 76 (1986): 268.
36 Beowulf, 89-98.
37 Andrew N. Sharpe, Foucault’s Monsters and the Challenge of Law.
(New York. Routledge, 2010), 24; Michael Foucault, Abnormal: Lectures
at the College de France 1974-1975. (London: Verso, 2003), 63.
38 The conjunction of violence and society prompted Eric Wilson (‘The
Blood Wrought Peace: A Girardian Reading of Beowulf’. English Language
Notes 34 [1996]) to posit a Girardian reading of Beowulf that explained the
inherent violent nature of society in Beowulf and the ambivalent violence of
the hero.
39 Shildrick, Embodying, 10.
40 Beowulf, 120-125.
41 Probably just as terrible as it is for the Geats to see their king Beowulf
being bitten by the dragon (Beowulf, 2594-2599; White, Hero-Ego, 101;
Christine Rauer, Beowulf and the Dragon. [Cambridge: Brewer, 2000],
142).
42 Beowulf, 189-193.
43 Grendel can be considered as a bestial man due to the consistent
association with the biblical tradition of Cain and his plight as an exile. He
would be an understandable monster for the Germanic thanes who would
regard his restlessness and sorrow as the fate of the human exile (Baird,
‘Grendel the Exile’, 378-379; Kathryn Hume, “The Theme and Structure of
‘Beowulf’” Studies in Philology. 72 No. 1 [1975]: 7; Greenfield, ‘Formulaic
Expression’, 200; S. L. Dragland, “Monster-man in Beowulf”,
Neophilologus 61. 4 [1977]: 606; Dorothy Whitelock, The Beginnings of
English Society. [Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1963 (1952)], 31-41).
44 Earl, Thinking about ‘Beowulf’, 112.
45 Jonathan Sawday, The Body Emblazoned: Dissection and the Human
Body in Renaissance Culture, (New York: Routledge, 1995), 8.
46 Not only the physicality of bodies but also of the rituals of the
community: the peace of the king (grid) was a ritual of kingship that strictly
forbid internal violence in the precinct surround the king and his hall ‘in
which all violence and threat of violence, (...) is prohibited and punished’
(Earl, Thinking about ‘Beowulf’, 112).
47 ‘The monster is a sign of unity now lost, the unity of Being dispersed in
the multiplicity of forms and the plenitude of creation, and like language,
the monster is the possibility of the reconstruction of the very thing that it,
itself, has deconstructed.’ Williams, Deformed Discourse, 63.
48 Wilson ,‘Girardian Reading’, 1996.
49 Sawday, Body Emblazoned, 8
50 As foundational parts in the study of women in Old English literature
(Shari Horner, The Discourse of Enclosure: Representing Women in Old
English Literature. [New York: State University of New York Press, 2001],
66) the queens in Beowulf have been considered as paradigms of the
possible roles for women in Anglo-Saxon Old English literature, revealing
that one of the main traditional roles of women in the Germanic society is
that of peace-weavers (freoduwebbe) (Alexandra H. Olsen, ‘Gender Roles’,
in A ‘Beowulf’ Handbook, ed. Robert E. Bjork and John D. Niles, [Lincoln:
University of Nebraska Press, 1997], 314). Although this term has found a
problematic definition all along the critical Old English studies (Gillian R.
Overing, ‘The Women of Beowulf: A Context for Reinterpretation’, in
Beowulf: Basic Readings, ed. Peter S. Baker, [New York: Garland
Publishing, 1995], 224) it can refer either to the reproductive function of
women (Helen Damico, Beowulf's Wealhtheow and the Valkyrie Tradition.
[Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1984].) considering women as
‘the intermediary of authority (...) part of a system of filiation’ (Simone de
Beauvoir, The Second Sex. (London: Pan Books, 1988 [1953], 103). The
metaphor of peace-weaver would refer in Beowulf to ‘a woman’s arranged
marriage to a member of a hostile tribe (...). She is framed symbolically
between two groups of men, confined by a strict kinship system, enclosed
by an exchanged between the groups’ (Horner, Discourse of Enclosure, 68).
The diplomatic function with no intended emphasis on gender (Alexandra
H. Olsen ‘Gender Roles’ in A ‘Beowulf’ Handbook, ed. Robert E. Bjork and
John D. Niles, 311-324. [Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1997],
311) has been emphasized by John Sklute (‘Freoduwebbe in Old English
Poetry’, in New Readings on Women in Old English Literature, ed. Helen
Damico and Alexandra H. Olsen, [Bloomington: Indiana University Press,
1990]) for whom the peace-weaver would be a mediator for peace through
her social functions. Both approaches have to take into account that
woman’s main aim in the world of Beowulf seems to be to join ‘either
biologically through her marital ties with foreign kings as a peace-pledge or
mother of sons, or socially and psychologically as a cup-passing and peace-
weaving queen within a hall’ (Jane Chance,‘The Structural Unity of
Beowulf: The Problem of Grendel’s Mother’, in Beowulf: A Verse
Translation, ed. Daniel Donoghue, [New York: W. W. Norton, 2002], 156)
and so propitiate a peaceful social atmosphere within the safe bounds of a
community.
51 René Girard, Violence and the Sacred, (London: Continuum Books,
1977 [2005]), 52; Wilson ,‘Girardian Reading’, 1996.
52 Reay Tannahill, Flesh and Blood, (London. Hamish Hamilton, 1975), 5.
53 Foucault, Abnormal, 104.
54 Peggy R. Sanday, Divine Hunger: Cannibalism as a Cultural System.
(New York: Cambridge University Press, 1986), 26; Fitz John Poole,
‘Cannibals, Tricksters and Witches: Anthropophagic Images among Bimin-
Kuskusmin’, in The Ethnography of Cannibalism, ed. Paula Brown and
Donald Tuzin, (Washington DC: Society for Psychological Anthropology,
1983), 31.
55 Friedman, Monstrous Races, 104.
56 Grendel’s consumption of his enemies can be considered as either a way
of feeding or as ‘an ultimate demonstration of hatred or scorn’ (Tannahill,
Flesh and Blood, 9). Cannibalism implies a repulsion because a basic social
boundary is passed over and this elicits a ‘response to concerns about the
antisocial power of hunger’ (Sanday, Divine Hunger, 102) regarding the
cannibal monster as a ‘screen against which social humanity is defined in
contrastive images’ (Sanday, Divine Hunger, 102).
57 Tannahill, Flesh and Blood, 6.
58 Sawday, Body Emblazoned, 24.
59 Sanday, Divine Hunger, 3.
60 Friedman, Monstrous Races, 106.
61 ‘He [Grendel] wanted no peace with any of the men of the Danish host,
would not withdraw his deadly rancor, or pay compensation: no counselor
there had any reason to expect splendid repayment at the hands of the
slayer’ (Beowulf, 153-158).
62 Beowulf, 153-158.
63 Ward Park, ‘How Heroes Perceive Monsters in Beowulf’. The Journal of
English and Germanic Philology vol. 92 No. 1 (1993): 6-8.
64 Albrecht Classen and Nadia Margolis, ed. War and Peace: Critical
Issues in European Societies and Literature 800-1800. (Berlin/ Boston:
Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co, 2011), 147.
65 Foucault, Abnormal, 55.
66 Foucault, Abnormal, 65.
67 Sharpe, Foucault’s Monsters, 23.
68 Foucault, Abnormal, 64.
69 Ibid. 63.
70 D. J. Fisher, Anglo-Saxon Age. (Harlow: Longman, 1992 [1973]),121-
122.
71 Mary Murray, The Law of the Father? Patriarchy in the Transition from
Feudalism to Capitalism, (London: Routledge, 1995), 99
72 Stephen S. Evans, Lords of Battle: Image and Reality of the ‘Comitatus’
in Dark-Age Britain, (Suffolk: Boydell Press, 1997), 68; Guy Halsall,
Violence and Society in the Early Medieval West, (Rochester: Boydell
Press, 1998), 25.
73 Beowulf, 129-137; 144-150.
74 Parks, ‘How Heroes’, 6.
75 Parks, ‘How Heroes’, 7.
76Whitelock, Beginnings of English Society, 260-261.
77 Girard, Violence and the Sacred, 59.
78 Frank Stenton, Anglo-Saxon England. (Clarendon: Oxford University
Press. 1989 [1943]), 303.
79 Hrothgar pays for the human victims (Beowulf, 1052-1054) and
Grendel’s Mother’s vengeance is defined as inadequate and unfair from a
human perspective of wergild (Beowulf, 1333-1344) (Whitelock,
Beginnings of English Society, 41, 143).
80 Richard A. Fletcher, Bloodfeud: Murder and Revenge in Anglo-Saxon
England. (New York: Oxford University Press, 2003), 10.
81 Only the hero can restore the boundaries the monster has torn and contain

the community safely again into the limits of pure violence. But this time,
responding to the community’s needs, his response will not only encompass
the very same boundaries the monster has eaten into and jeopardized but
also his own physical boundaries of flesh and strength. Only when the hero
dies will the last boundary of the community be torn, feeling again the dire
need for a hero (Nido, ‘Figuras de poder’, 305).

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Viewed 18 March 2011 <http://lonestar.texas.net/~mseifert/girard.html4>

Almudena Nido is an independent researcher in the University of Oviedo

(Spain) whose research focuses on Anglo-Saxon epic poem Beowulf and the
interactions of power and resistance in the poem. Currently her research and
writing are devoted to analyzing the monsters in Beowulf as figures of
resistance in space and discourse.
81