NOTES

INTRODUCTION

This tempting theory is from Raymond Tripp’s “The Dragon King of Beowulf,” published in 2005 in In Geardagum, and also dealt with in More About the Fight with the Dragon (Lanham, MD: University Press of America, 1983). It’s not unprecedented. In Iceland’s Volsunga Saga, Fafnir starts out a dwarf and ends up becoming a dragon due to cursed gold. Perhaps, for a translator, more pragmatically, shape-shifting the last survivor into the dragon makes sense of difficult pronouns in that section, which create consistent bafflement about which character is being referenced—the dragon, the last survivor, or the thief.
I do think both those interpretations are incorrect, but one of them is a generally accepted truth of text, a supporting argument for monstrosity in Grendel’s mother. The other interpretation would these days be considered an embarrassing, though delightful, error—almost no one thinks that by beorn, and indeed by “Beowulf,” as in “Bee-Wolf,” as in “honey-eater,” as in “Bear,” the poet meant Beowulf to be (even partially) a bragging, talkative bear (never mind our hero’s supernatural strength and capacity to swim long distances, dive, and hold his breath for a full day). It’d be fun, though: an armored, perpetually unwed bear, a predecessor of Philip Pullman’s panserbjørne, especially in a narrative already populated with wonders. Friedrich Panzer’s (no relation to Iorek Byrnison’s tribe) 1910 Bear’s Son thesis, surveying possible folkloric lineage for the Beowulf story, is a highly recommended storyzone. And if we felt like it, we could wander for a long time in bear cult ties (check out Richard Neal Coffin’s 1962 PhD dissertation, “Beowulf and its Relationship to Norse and Finno-Ugric Beliefs and Narratives,” Boston University; in warriors buried on bearskins with hounds and gold beside them; in notions of Beowulf-as-stealth-berserker.
In the original manuscript, for example, Scribe A wrote that Grendel was doomed because he was descended from chames cynne—or “Ham’s kin.” That got scratched out, presumably by Scribe B, and replaced with caines cynne, “Cain’s kin.” Subsequent references to Abel make a case for that palimpsestic edit, and for the curse—which makes of Cain a fugitive wanderer. Grendel, of course, isn’t a wanderer. His (and his mother’s) home address is well known to Hrothgar, so he’s not exactly a fugitive, either. Biblically, Ham’s kin also got cursed, because Noah’s son Ham saw a drunken, naked Noah (it’s up for grabs what that “seeing” actually consisted of), and so Noah cursed Ham’s kin with servitude. The notion of Noah’s curse on Ham persevered over the centuries into the still-cited American insistence that slavery is ideologically justified by the Bible, and onward into the potential queerness of Ham being justification for homophobia. Two for one Biblical bias support! Notions of othering lineage may be applied to Grendel either way, but the two curses, while often conflated, are different. One curse makes of Grendel a fugitive, the other, a slave. Neither gives us the full story of Grendel’s grievance, but the cursed lineage has often been used to simplify Grendel’s identity through association, rendering him irrationally and indubitably evil, rather than someone provoked by specific Danes. For more on this topic, see Toni Morrison’s “Grendel and His Mother,” collected in The Source of Self-Regard: Selected Essays, Speeches, and Meditations (New York: Alfred K. Knopf, 2019).
And who was this poet, anyway? No one knows. Someone alive at some point in a three-century swath, someone (probably) in England, (probably) not a woman, but again, who knows? The poet was certainly a genius; genius defies gender. The idea that there are only a couple of poems in the Old English corpus that could plausibly have been written by female poets (specifically “The Wife’s Lament” and “Wulf and Eadwacer,” both because of POV) is a ridiculous one. The notion that women write only about women’s business is equally ridiculous—as indeed is the idea that there is such a circumscribable arena as “women’s business” at all. A wonderful thing one learns when one writes about imaginary kingdoms for a living is that, in fact, anyone can imagine anything, and if the writer is good, they can do it persuasively.
“On Translating Beowulf,” collected in The Monsters and the Critics, and Other Essays (New York: HarperCollins, 2006).
Read Chauncey B. Tinker’s exuberantly claws-out The Translations of Beowulf: A Critical Bibliography (New York: Henry Holt and Company, 1903) for a catalog and critique of Beowulf translations, verse, prose, fragments, and paraphrases up to 1902. Of Wackerbarth’s translation, Tinker shudders: “It would seem that if there were a measure less suited to the Beowulf style than the Miltonic blank verse used by Conybeare, it would be the ballad measures used by Wackerbarth. The movement of the ballad is easy, rapid, and garrulous. Now, if there are three qualities of which the Beowulf is not possessed, they are ease, rapidity, and garrulity … But there is still another reason for shunning them. They are almost continuously suggestive of [Sir Walter] Scott. Of all men else the translator of Beowulf should avoid Scott” (48).
See Heaney’s wonderful introduction to his Beowulf: A New Verse Translation (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1999).
See: Timothy J. Burbery, “Fossil Folklore in the Liber Monstrorum, Beowulf, and Medieval Scholarship,” Folklore 126, no. 3 (2015). See also:
For more on this, see the wonderfully titled chapter “Bone-Crones Have No Hearth: Some Women in the Medieval Wilderness,” by Marijane Osborn and Gillian R. Overing, in Textures of Place: Exploring Humanist Geographies (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2001). See also: Osborn’s original poem “Grendel’s Mother Broods Over Her Feral Son,” Old English Newsletter 39, no. 3 (2006), based on a 1914 scrap of philological interpretation by William A. P. Sewell, the notion that Scyld Scefing decimated the Ereli, the tallest people of Scandinavia, who “fought like wild beasts.” In Osborn’s poem, Grendel’s mother is part of that massacred tribe, and Grendel’s father, by rape, is Scyld’s descendant the Halfdane, making Grendel brother to Hrothgar, and Grendel’s war on Heorot Hall an act of blood-feud vengeance. Also, the poem is in Grendel’s mother’s voice, which is reason enough to read it.
Often depicted as male, rather than as ungendered.
I wish I could tell you which compendium of monsters it was. Hunts have revealed two images that may have been conflated into the version I remember. Brian Froud and Alan Lee’s Faeries (New York: Harry N. Abrams, Inc., 1978) contains an assortment of eldritch figures from English folklore, among them the nightmare-provoking two-page spread of Jenny Greenteeth and Peg Powler, both child-eating greenish river hags, each depicted solo, partially immersed. Neither of these align wholly with my memory (they’re unarmed), but they’re similar to other (monstrous) depictions of Grendel’s mother. However, I grew up in a house full of art books; my mother’s a painter. J. R. Skelton’s illustration of Grendel’s mother, from Stories of Beowulf (1908), depicts a greenish, profoundly muscular warrior-woman kneeling atop a golden-armored Beowulf, raising her seax to slay him. It’s very much like paintings of the heroic Judith (beheading Holofernes and posing with her sword) I saw around the same time, and it’s possible that all these ingredients converged into the Grendel’s mother I remember. On a less literary, but incidentally very Beowulf-related note, add some Sigourney Weaver (Alien, 1979) to this. All that said, I spent a lot of my childhood in library corners, looking at books no one knew I was looking at. It’s still possible the image I remember exists out there somewhere. If you find it, let me know. Adrienne Mayor, The First Fossil Hunters: Dinosaurs, Mammoths, and Myth in Greek and Roman Times (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2001).