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Beyond Abjection:
The Problem with Grendels Mother Again
Rene R. Trilling
Traditional critical paradigms have generally failed to come to grips with the
character of Grendels 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. Grendels 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 poems 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 Grendels 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 Grendels 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 Grendels
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 Grendels mother is at the
structural centre of the poem; see Ring Composition and the Structure of Beowulf, PMLA,
94 (1979), 92435. The episode concerning Grendels mother, from her first approach to
Heorot to Beowulfs triumphant return from the mere with Grendels 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 poems total length hardly an insignificant
amount. This compares favourably to the 767 lines taken up by the Grendel story, much of
which chronicles Beowulfs journey to Heorot and his interaction with the court there. The
actual battle, culminating in Grendels mothers 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 Grendels 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 Grendels 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 Grendels mother have frequently noted the monstrosity of the female avenger,
and Ackers 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 Grendels 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), 70216.
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), 5468.
Acker, Horror and the Maternal, p. 705; Kevin Kiernan has also argued that a monsters
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 Grendels mother defined this paradigm; see Jane Chance
Nitzsche, The Structural Unity of Beowulf: The Problem of Grendels Mother, Texas Studies
in Literature and Language, 22.3 (1980), 287303. Chance further examines womens roles
in heroic literature, and especially Grendels mothers, 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 Years Work
in Old English Studies, ed. Katherine OBrien OKeeffe, OEN Subsidia 15 (Binghamton:
State University of New York Press, 1989), pp. 2342. 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. 31124.
For example, J. R. R. Tolkien manages almost completely to overlook Grendels mother,
explicating the poem as a bipartite epic based around Beowulfs encounters with Grendel
and the dragon and considering Grendels 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 subjects
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 Grendels 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, Grendels 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), 24595 (p. 280). Paul Beekman Taylor likewise views the battle
with Grendels mother as merely a reprise of the primary Grendel fight; see Beowulfs
Second Grendel Fight, Neuphilologische Mitteilungen, 86 (1985), 6269.
Julia Kristeva, Powers of Horror: An Essay on Abjection, trans. Leon S. Roudiez (New
York: Columbia University Press, 1982), pp. 1213; 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, 195374),
XIV (1957), 14358.
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. 12948. 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. 31124.
13 Kristeva, Revolution in Poetic Language, trans. Margaret Waller (New York: Columbia
University Press, 1984), esp. pp. 57106.
The men in the hall rejoice in his death, and peace and order are restored to the
realm (for the time being). Grendels mother, on the other hand, does not fit so
easily into the role of monster/outsider. Her actions, unlike Grendels, align her
with human heroic values. Her attack on the Danes is not monstrous in the same
way that Grendels 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 si, sunu deo 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
mg wrecan, / ge feor hafa fhe gestled [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 Grendels 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 Grendels reign of terror. To judge
from actions alone, Grendels 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, 1277b1278.
22 Beowulf, 1339b1340.
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. 3779.
24 Kevin Kiernan suggests that Grendels mother accepted and adhered to the heroic ethic of
the blood feud . Her grief seems as real as Hrothgars, and her response, swift life-for-life
vengeance, is (mutatis mutandis) at least as heroic as Beowulfs. See Grendels Heroic
Mother, In Geardagum, 6 (1984), 1333 (pp. 2527).
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 wstmum [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 Grendels mother would be equally indistinct, and indeed Tolkien finds that
Grendels mother is naturally described, when separately treated, in precisely
similar terms: she is wif, ides, aglc 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 Grendels mother clearly denote a woman, not just
a female creature.31 The poems imprecision about Grendels 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 Grendels indistinct nature is precisely what makes him a terrifying figure, and the poems
shadowy descriptions of the Grendelkin are fundamental to the readers 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. 373402.
26 Hrothgar can refer only to vague reports about mysterious figures prowling the moors,
one of whom is known as Grendel (Beowulf, 1347b1355a). 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. 171203
27 Beowulf, 1352a.
28 Tolkien, Beowulf, p. 279.
29 Tolkien, Beowulf, p. 280.
30 Frank Battaglia suggests that Grendels 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), 3969. Thomas D. Hill has also connected Grendels
mother to a tradition of helrunan, or giantesses (Haliurunnas, Helrunan, and the History
of Grendels 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 (Aglcwif, 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 Grendels
mother, and the breakdown in linguistic designation becomes increasingly more
pronounced as her agency manifests in action.33
If the titles applied to Grendels mother render her humanity questionable,
however, they leave little doubt as to her gender. She is named specifically and
repeatedly as modor [mother] and mg [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 Grendels
mothers 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 Grendels mother operates in the realm of physical agency.
Grendels 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 Wealhtheows 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 Hildeburhs 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 Grendels mother and the passive agentic
capacities of other women, such as Wealhtheow, Hildeburh, and the female
mourner at Beowulfs funeral, sharpen the typical heroic dichotomy of words
and deeds. While the actions of Grendels 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 frie [peace] are
denied to them. In contrast to Wealhtheow, whose linguistic propriety dooms
her attempts at agency to failure, Grendels 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 Grendels 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 texts language goes to great lengths
to reassure us that because she is female, her attack is less fearsome than Grendels
was. The poem asserts that, because of her gender, she could not be as strong as
her son:
Ws se gryre lssa
efne swa micle, swa bi mga crft,
wiggryre wifes be wpnedmen,
onne heoru bunden, hamere geruen,
sweord swate fah swin ofer helme
ecgum dyhtig andweard scire.37
35 As Overing argues in Language, Sign, and Gender, pp. 88101. But see also Helen
Damico, who ascribes significant agency to Wealhtheows social role as queen in Beowulfs
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), 12034.
37 Beowulf, 1282b1287.
[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 mans, 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 Grendels attack was twelve years
of passive suffering, in this case they call for immediate action: Hrae ws 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 Hrothgars 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 Grendels
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 Hrothgars 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 Grendels mothers strength and fearsomeness place her in the
tradition of the demonic hag of early Irish legend; see The Might of Grendels Mother,
Folklore, 80 (1969), 8188.
39 Beowulf, 13101311a.
40 Beowulf, 138485; 139094; 13991402a.
[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 Grendels, 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. 1416.
42 Beowulf, 43541.
43 Beowulf, 1441b1464.
no he on helm losa,
ne on foldan fm, ne on fyrgenholt,
ne on gyfenes grund, ga r 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, 1392b1394b; 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 (schere 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 poets 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 poets
mind.51 If we agree with Mitchells logic, then replacing Grendels 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: lfrics Life of St Eugenia and the Latin
Versions, Leeds Studies in English, n.s. 23 (1992), 127; and Paul E. Szarmach, lfrics
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. 14657, 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. 35365.
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. 10811.
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 vum, 34 (1965), 89102. Kiernan
and James W. Earl both view Grendels mother as a particularly feminine critique of heroic
society; see Kiernan, Grendels Heroic Mother; and Earl, The Role of the Mens Hall
in the Development of the Anglo-Saxon Superego, Psychiatry, 46 (1983), 13960, and
Thinking About Beowulf (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1994).
will accomplish this by maintaining his own physical integrity.58 Unlike Grendels
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
adversarys 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 Grendels mother he must make sure that she is dead, severing her
head as proof positive that she cannot return to further disrupt the groups 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 Grendels mother has threatened
social order. War trophies and booty play a vital role in the memorialization of
heroic deeds; when Grendels 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 Grendels mother to adorn
the walls of Heorot, the Danes would face a daily reminder of her disruptive power;
the trophy would signify, not Beowulfs 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 Hrothgars kingdom, Beowulfs fame, and the
poem itself depend. Leaving Grendels mothers 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 Grendels. Given
the importance of trophies and booty throughout the poem, Beowulfs 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 Grendels mothers activity and forestall representation of
58 Seth Lerer introduces the notion that the heros body can symbolize society as a whole;
when that body is dismembered, social instability follows. The heros responsibility, then, is
to keep his body intact as a sign of the unified community. See Grendels Glove, ELH, 61
(1994), 72151 (p. 742).
59 See Leslie Lockett, The Role of Grendels 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 OBrien OKeeffe and Andy Orchard, 2 vols (Toronto:
University of Toronto Press, 2005), I, pp. 36888.
an outside agency. In like manner, the hero does not regale the hall with his own
account of the fearsome battle. Abjecting Grendels 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
Grendels head as a trophy, re-inscribing Beowulfs victory over a more appropriate
foe and refusing to commemorate his female adversary. In this, perhaps, Grendels
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, Grendels mother is intended to be
something even more terrifying. Grendel himself is a fearsome threat to the life
and well-being of Heorots 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 Grendels 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. 157210, and
Irigaray explores the implications of exchangeability for womens signifying potential in
This Sex Which is Not One, pp. 17091).
61 I would like to thank Jim Hansen, Maura Nolan, Katherine OBrien OKeeffe, 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.