Trilling on GM

Beyond Abjection: The Problem with Grendel’s Mother Again

Trilling, Renée Rebecca.

Parergon, Volume 24, Number 1, 2007, pp. 1-20 (Article)

Published by Australian and New Zealand Association of Medieval and Early ModernStudies (Inc.)DOI: 10.1353/pgn.2007.0059

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Parergon 24.1 (2007)

Beyond Abjection: The Problem with Grendel’s Mother Again 1

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.1 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

1 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).


2 Renée R. Trilling

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.’2 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.3 The horror of an avenging mother, he argues, capitalizes on the primordial fear of maternal power that underwrites patriarchal society.4 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.’5 Critics interested in Grendel’s mother have frequently noted the monstrosity of the female avenger,6 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.7 Although it is a far cry from the dismissive treatments of Grendel’s mother common in earlier Beowulf scholarship,8 however, even this article fails to grant centrality to the monstrous

2 Gillian Overing, Language, Sign, and Gender in Beowulf (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1990), p. 81.

3 Paul Acker, ‘Horror and the Maternal in Beowulf’, PMLA, 121.3 (2006), 702–16.4 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.

5 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).

7 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.

8 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



figure herself, focusing instead on Old Norse analogues of female vengeance. Acker’s article offers a convenient place to begin unpacking the paradox of

Grendel’s mother, chiefly because it introduces a key critical concept into the discussion: the abject, or that which is expelled from within a society in order to define cultural boundaries. Julia Kristeva introduces abjection as a fundamental mechanism for charting the limits of culture:

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.9

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.

9 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.



Linking the figure of Grendel’s mother to Kristeva’s abject, as Acker does, is an inspired move; but it re-inscribes a static binary structure that has confounded readings of Grendel’s mother from the beginning. Grendel’s mother is more than simply the abject, and the implications of this line of inquiry demand further consideration. The abject, after all, originates within the culture from which it is expunged; its ‘powers of horror’ stem from precisely the originary unity that precedes abjection, and the abject terrifies us because we recognize that it is really a part of us. Beowulf works hard – perhaps overly hard – to establish the Grendelkin’s origins outside of heroic culture, though the clearly liminal relation between the Grendelkin and the society they invert and mimic is precisely what allows them to terrify. Maternity alone, however, even bound up as it is with the abject, is not enough to account for Grendel’s mother’s powers of horror, since all the named women in the poem, and some who are not named, are also mothers. It is, rather, her uncontainability, in contrast to the clearly delimited agentic potentials of the equally maternal Wealhtheow, Hildeburh, and Modthryth, that sets Grendel’s mother apart from them. More important than her maternity or her abjection is the fact that Grendel’s mother operates outside of the linguistic economy that underwrites social organization within the poem. As such, she is categorically different from the other women of the poem. Numerous critics, prominently Overing and Clare A. Lees, have succeeded in demonstrating that Beowulf is an essentially masculinist poem whose tightly proscribed agenda has little or no room for female agency. They argue that although women are excluded from the power structures of the society they live in, they remain active, if generally unsuccessful, members of that society.12 Yet Grendel’s mother is, by both origin and gender, cut off from the social and linguistic communities that proscribe the agency of the poem’s other female characters. In this sense, it might be more productive to think about Grendel’s mother in conjunction with Kristeva’s notion of the semiotic, the feminine chora that precedes and exceeds representation, especially as it relates to the structuring of the (inherently masculinist) symbolic order.13 The dialectical relation between the semiotic and the symbolic conditions the possibility of the

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.



signifying process: without the unrepresentable, there can be no representation.14 Most importantly, it is constantly in process, and that continuous movement may serve as a more useful model for understanding Grendel’s mother in her constantly shifting signification than Acker’s use of the abject as a static category. Spelling out the implications of that connection, and determining what Grendel’s mother offers to Beowulf and its readers, demands careful and prolonged consideration. Most urgently, it demands a re-examination of the poem itself, to look closely at its portrayal of the monstrous feminine figure and to consider the significance of that portrayal for questions of literary artifice, social cohesion, and the function of language itself. All of the poem’s monsters both threaten and sustain social order, but Grendel’s mother is different. Abject from human culture, acting outside of human language, Grendel’s mother is the figure who grounds the possibility of the symbolic order itself, as well as the society that it helps to uphold. Of all the poem’s characters, she is the most difficult to pin down. Aligning Grendel’s mother with the semiotic may help us to better understand her difference from potentially disruptive women like Wealhtheow or Modthryth, as well as from the other monsters, Grendel and the dragon.

The ambiguity of Grendel’s mother, and the difficulty critics have in distinguishing between what is monstrous about her and what is simply female, are due in part to the fact that much of her supposed monstrosity is the result of how the poem has been translated. Christine Alfano has demonstrated that Grendel’s mother’s ‘monstrosity’ is often attributed by the lexical choices of modern translators rather than necessarily inherent in the Anglo-Saxon text: the semantic ranges of many words, such as ides [lady] and aglæcwif [warrior-woman] take on shades of monstrosity when referring to Grendel’s mother that they do not necessarily bear in other contexts.15 Such revelations about lexical bias offer strong evidence for traditional feminist arguments about the masculine bias in language itself.16 As Alfano’s work shows, linguistic bias can give rise to critical bias, and scholars approach Grendel’s mother through inherited critical paradigms that arise

14 Kristeva, Revolution in Poetic Language, pp. 21–37.15 ‘The Issue of Feminine Monstrosity: A Reevaluation of Grendel’s Mother’, Comitatus, 23

(1992), 1–1� (p. 2). Sherman M. Kuhn similarly finds linguistic bias in dictionary definitions of aglæca more generally; see ‘Old English aglæca – Middle Irish oclach’, in Linguistic Method: Essays in Honor of Herbert Penzl, ed. Irmengard Rauch and Gerald F. Carr (The Hague: Mouton Publishers, 1979), pp. 213–30.

16 Luce Irigaray, This Sex Which is not One, trans. Catharine Porter (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1985), pp. 68–85.



from an oversimplified understanding of her character. In most cases, her actions, like her titles, are similarly devoid of inherent monstrosity; as most of the critics acknowledge, and as even the Danes admit, she attacks Heorot only to perform the necessary act of vengeance for her kinsman’s death. Since both the men in the poem and the critics who read it are able to identify with her motives, the extent of her monstrosity is necessarily questionable. The dramatic tension between fearing something as monster and understanding it as human has been explored in some detail in relation to Grendel himself, but Grendel’s mother has yet to receive such extensive personal treatment.17 In many ways, such as her desire for vengeance rather than random killing, she is far more human than Grendel is.18

In comparison to her son, Grendel’s mother is a vague figure indeed. Grendel’s role in the text is never in question. His appearance and genealogy might be uncertain, but he is plainly monstrous, a night-stepper who roams the wastelands, haunted by the joys of men.19 His behaviour sets him in opposition to humanity; he attacks the Danes for twelve years through jealousy and hatred, and he has no interest in or desire for any civilized means of feud settlement.20 He meets his end not in battle, as a man should, but in retribution; Beowulf waits to catch him in the act of committing his crime, and Grendel’s death is clearly a punishment. 17 The problem of monsters who seem strangely human has fascinated critics throughout the

history of Beowulf studies. The bibliography of criticism dealing with the monster/human dichotomy in Beowulf is enormous; a few of the more influential studies include Kenneth Sisam, ‘Beowulf’s Fight with the Dragon’, Review of English Studies, n.s. 9 (1958), 129–40; Doreen M. E. Gilliam, ‘The Use of the Term æglæca in Beowulf at Lines 813 and 2592’, Studia Germanica Gandensia, 3 (1961), 145–69; Joseph L. Baird, ‘Grendel the Exile’, Neuphilologische Mitteilungen, �7 (19��), 375–81; Stanley B. Greenfield, ‘A Touch of the Monstrous in the Hero, or Beowulf Re-Marvellized’, English Studies, 63 (1982), 294–300; Raymond P. Tripp, More About the Fight with the Dragon: ‘Beowulf’ 2208b–3182, Commentary, Edition, and Translation (Lanham, MD: University Press of America, 1983); and Andy Orchard, Pride and Prodigies: Studies in the Monsters of the Beowulf-Manuscript (Cambridge: D.S. Brewer, 1995).

18 Several critics, like Alfano, have argued for a more ‘humanized’ reading of Grendel’s mother; see, for example, Keith P. Taylor, ‘Beowulf 1259a: The Inherent Nobility of Grendel’s Mother’, English Language Notes, 31.3 (1994), 13–25; and Melinda Menzer, ‘Aglæcwif (Beowulf 1259a): Implications for -wif Compounds, Grendel’s Mother, and Other Aglæcan’, English Language Notes, 34.1 (1996), 1–6.

19 Beowulf, 86–90a. Beowulf, ed. Friedrich Klaeber, 3rd ed. (Boston: Heath, 1950). All quotations are taken from this edition and are denoted by line number. All translations are my own.

20 Beowulf, 154b–158.



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

32 Kristeva writes: ‘Ultimately, such a dialectic lets us view signifying practices as asymmetrically divided – neither absolutizing the thetic into a possible theological prohibition, nor negating the thetic in the fantasy of a pulverizing irrationalism … . Instead we see the condition of the subject of significance as a heterogeneous contradiction between two irreconcilable elements – separate but inseparable from the process in which they assume asymmetrical functions’ (Revolution in Poetic Language, p. 82; emphasis in original).

33 See below, pp. 14–16.34 Helen Bennett, ‘The Female Mourner at Beowulf’s Funeral’, Exemplaria, 4 (1992), 35–50

(p. 42).



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:

Wæs se gryre læssaefne swa micle, swa bið mægþa cræft,wiggryre wifes be wæpnedmen,þonne heoru bunden, hamere geþruen,sweord swate fah swin ofer helmeecgum dyhtig andweard scireð.37

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:

‘Ne sorga, snotor guma! Selre bið æghwæm,þæt he his freond wrece, þonne he fela murne.…Aris, rices weard, uton hraþe feran,Grendles magan gang sceawigan.Ic hit þe gehate: no he on helm losaþ,ne on foldan fæþm, ne on fyrgenholt,ne on gyfenes grund, ga þær he wille!’…Þa wæs Hroðgare hors gebæted,wicg wundenfeax. Wisa fengelgeatolic gende; gumfeþa stoplindhæbbendra.40

[‘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.



There is no mistaking the sense of urgency in this passage; Grendel’s mother is a threat which must be eradicated immediately, and the text itself begins this eradication through the use of masculine pronouns to describe the threat.41 There is no time for Beowulf’s usual heroics. While the attacks of the supposedly more terrifying Grendel were borne for twelve years, Grendel’s mother, presumably less fearsome and therefore less dangerous, stirs the Danes to immediate retaliation. Not only that, but it is a battle to which Beowulf will not march alone. The brave warrior who faced Grendel alone and without armour or weapons sets out accompanied not only by Hrothgar on his noble horse, but by an entire troop of armed men, both his retainers and Hrothgar’s. A whole army pursues this single female attacker in a martial display that underscores both the masculinity and the propriety of their response. Though Beowulf will face the enemy alone, his brothers-in-arms rally to support him, and this display of force works to reassert masculine symbolic control over the business of feud and revenge.

The urgency of the Danes’ response becomes all the more evident as Beowulf prepares for the fight at the mere. When he was making ready for his battle with Grendel, he boasted

‘[I]c þæt þonne forhicge, swa me Higelac sie,min mondrihten modes bliðe,þæt ic sweord bere oþðe sidne scyld,geolorand to guþe, ac ic mid grape scealfon wið feonde ond ymb feorh sacan,lað wið laþum; ðær gelyfan scealDryhtnes dome se þe hine deað nimeð.’42

[‘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.



Gyrede hine Beowulfeorlgewædum, nalles for ealdre mearn;scolde herebyrne hondum gebroden,sid ond searofah sund cunnian,seo ðe bancofan beorgan cuþe,þæt him hildegrap hreþre ne mihte,eorres inwitfeng aldre gesceþðan;ac se hwita helm hafelan werede,se þe meregrundas mengan scolde,secan sundgebland since geweorðad,befongen freawrasnum, swa hine fyrndagumworhte wæpna smið, wundrum teode,besette swinlicum, þæt hine syðþan nobrond ne beadomecas bitan ne meahton.Næs þæt þonne mætost mægenfultuma,þæt him on ðearfe lah ðyle Hroðgares;wæs þæm hæftmece Hrunting nama;þæt wæs an foran ealdgestreona;ecg wæs iren, atertanum fah,ahyrded heaþoswate; næfre hit æt hilde ne swacmanna ængum þara þe hit mid mundum bewand,se ðe gryresiðas gegan dorste,folcstede fara; næs þæt forma sið,þæt hit ellenweorc æfnan scolde.43

[Beowulf prepared himself in a warrior’s trappings, he was not at all worried about his life; the battle corselet woven by hand, broad and stained with battle, had to try the waters, that corselet which knew how to protect the bone chamber so that the battle-grip, the malicious grasp of the angry one, could not harm his life, and the shining helmet protected his head, the helmet, made worthy with treasure, surrounded by a mail net, which had to stir up the mere-bottom, to seek the surging water; thus did the smith of weapons fashion it long ago, furnished it with wonders, adorned it with boar-images so that afterwards no edge or battle-sword would be able to cut it. That was not then the least of powerful aids that the court spokesman of Hrothgar gave to him in his need; the battle-sword was called Hrunting; that was the foremost of ancient treasures; the edge was iron, shining with twisted lines, hardened with battle-blood; it had never failed at battle any man of those who grasped it with his hands, he who dared to undertake the tide of battle at the meeting place of the hostile ones; that was not the first time that it had to perform courageous deeds.]

43 Beowulf, 1441b–1464.



We already know that Grendel’s mother is supposed to be less terrifying than Grendel; for a man about to demean himself by fighting a female rather than a male, Beowulf is surprisingly well outfitted. His sudden need for armour and weapons indicates that he is about to face a greater enemy than Grendel, not a lesser one. Moreover, his gear is described as the oldest, most battle-worn, and therefore most reliable of warrior’s equipment. These are the specifically masculine symbolic trappings of warrior culture, functioning even more powerfully as signs of heroic ideology than they do as protection in battle. Perhaps we are simply meant to be reassured by the statement that Hrunting ‘næfre ... æt hilde ne swac,’ but all of these factors work rhetorically to indicate that Beowulf is rather more nervous about this encounter than he was about his fight with Grendel. He certainly isn’t taking any chances. The conscious and deliberate display of masculinity counteracts and works to overpower the feminine nature of the threat – as do the masculine pronouns used to refer to Grendel’s mother as ravager of Heorot. As female attacker and semiotic chora, Grendel’s mother provokes a massive mobilization of the symbolic system that upholds heroic values and social structure.

The extent to which the language of the poem itself works to cover up the agency of her character is perhaps the most compelling evidence that Grendel’s mother presents a greater threat even than Grendel, and a threat that strikes at the most basic levels of social/linguistic organization from its semiotic outside. When the entity about to attack Heorot is introduced, she is described first as the distinctly feminine ‘Grendles modor’44 and then is masculinized two lines later as ‘se þe wæteregesan wunian scolde’ [he who had to dwell in the terrible waters].45 As the poem prepares us for Grendel’s mother as an attacking monster, it masculinizes her; similarly, as Beowulf promises to follow her, he turns her into a him:

‘… 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 2�85) 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.



– is a particularly telling reversal of this logic. I would argue, analogously, that the substitution of a masculine pronoun for a physically feminine body can be understood as the triumph of gender over sex, and that when grammar replaces or attempts to alter nature, something very significant is taking place.52

If, as the switching of pronouns seems to indicate, gender can be defined by action rather than (or in spite of) biology, then Grendel’s mother is breaking a linguistic boundary as well as a social boundary with her action. Her position outside the cultural and even linguistic constraints of Danish society gives her more scope for agency than any other female in the poem has and allows her body to signify in ways for which the poem is not necessarily prepared. Grendel’s mother has disrupted the poem at the level of language as well as plot; as semiotic chora, she threatens the existence of the symbolic structures that uphold representation. As a result, her action and its signification provoke immediate attempts, both by Beowulf and by the language of the poem, to reabsorb her agency into the masculine signifying economy. Even more disturbing than the thought that a female could become aggressively active is the possibility that she could, indeed, ‘become’ a man, calling all the traditional definitions of masculinity into question. This is the possibility extended, and quickly countered, in the brief narrative of Modthryth, the only other woman in the text to act forcefully as her own avenger.53 Like Grendel’s mother, Modthryth is an antitype of fitting queenly behaviour,54 and her improper agency is hastily quelled by marriage and motherhood.55 Yet Modthryth’s retaliations, which take the lives of innocent men, are motivated by her pride and vanity, not the loss of a child that motivates (and to some extent humanizes) Grendel’s mother. If it strikes readers as contradictory to have one woman’s agency contained by the same condition – maternity – that gives rise to the horror of the avenging female, such contradictions only underscore the unassailable complexity of gender and its relation to the social and linguistic in Beowulf.56

52 For the theory of the performativity of gender, see Judith Butler, Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity (New York: Routledge, 1990), esp. pp. 1–34. Numerous texts, such as Judith, Elene, and Juliana, suggest that Anglo-Saxon conceptions of gender might have more to do with action than with biology, and the Lives of the transvestite saints, Eugenia and Euphrosyne, explore this theme at great length. See above, n. 48.

53 Beowulf, 1931–1957a.54 Chance, Woman as Hero, pp. 105–06.55 Overing, Language, Sign, and Gender, pp. 101–0756 Stacy S. Klein points out that the containment of retributive violence in Grendel’s mother

and Modthryth may, in fact, be the poet’s subtle indication that not all masculine behaviours should necessarily be imitated; see Ruling Women: Queenship and Gender in Anglo-Saxon



Grendel’s mother eventually reverts to femininity, but not without effecting a critique of the social structures that underwrite the poem and its heroic action.57 She has exacted the right of the kinsman of the slain, who is not offered compensation in the form of wergild, to avenge that loss with a death of her own, and this action is, after all, what allows us to perceive her humanity more easily than we perceive Grendel’s. With this act and the heroic and linguistic responses it occasions, however, she introduces a revolutionary possibility: that the categories of identity which uphold the structures of heroic culture are not, in fact, iron-clad, but are socially constructed and therefore subject to change. If women can sometimes be men, and monsters can sometimes be human, then others, outsiders, can become like us, and the foundational oppositions that ground heroic identity break down in consequence of one being’s action. With Grendel’s mother’s forceful assertion of an identity that is indeterminate by conventional standards, heroic society itself comes under attack. Grendel’s mother signifies the threat of alterity to a closed system, and she becomes a nexus for the representation of the many dialectical tensions – male/female, human/monster, hall/wilderness, feud/peace, symbolic/semiotic – that underwrite the system. She reminds society of the parts of itself that it attempts to expunge through abjection, and she represents the continual presence of that alterity, despite its abjection, in an explicitly gendered way. She exposes the inability of language, at its most fundamental levels, to proscribe the limits of gender and agency. The warriors respond with a conspicuous performance of masculinity – the mustering of troops, the donning of armour and weapons, the manly boasting that precedes heroic deeds – which allows patriarchy to reassert itself with an overwhelming and completely unnecessary display of force, in the hopes that this demonstration will patch over the tear in the social/linguistic fabric caused by a woman’s manly vengeance and prevent it from unravelling any further.

This is why Beowulf does need the armour: as the hero, he is responsible for repairing that breach. The danger he faces is not just from the fangs and claws of a monster; he must also uphold the unity and stability of society as a whole, and he

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).



by which to understand the world. The poem, of course, ultimately manages to repress her – it cloaks her in masculine pronouns and finally kills her off. With her destruction, and with Beowulf’s refusal to commemorate her demise, Grendel’s mother functions to reaffirm the boundaries between monsters and men, feminine and masculine, words and deeds. But the 400-odd lines detailing her actions are not similarly repressed, and they leave us to grapple with the complexity of the character and her role in constructing meaning in the poem. In the minds of readers and in her critical afterlife, Grendel’s mother returns, again and again.

Grendel’s mother is far from the only ambiguous figure in Beowulf; one need only scratch the surface of Beowulf, Hrothgar, Unferth, Wealhtheow, Hildeburh, Grendel, or many others to reveal the tensions and anxieties about heroism, kingship, queenship, feud, gender, and alterity that the poem explores. Yet Grendel’s mother is unique in that the poem embodies so many of these tensions in one character, and she is defined by her ability to transgress the boundaries that ultimately limit the agency of other characters. As maternal abject or as semiotic chora, Grendel’s mother stands in for that which exceeds representation – and hence exceeds the totalizing grasp of criticism as well. The strict categories we have created for understanding Anglo-Saxon literature result from criticism’s tendency to privilege coherence and unity, but they fail to account fully for Grendel’s mother, and in this way she threatens readers as well as the Danes by exposing the ideologically conditioned bases of literary evaluation. She has the power to horrify modern readers because she reminds us that there is no such thing as a unified, coherent identity, effecting a critique of culture that bridges the historical divide between the Anglo-Saxon text and its modern audiences.61

Department of English University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign

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.

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