The Massachusetts Medievalist on Morrison's "Grendel and his Mother"
The Massachusetts Medievalist now sees Headley's Beowulf as something of a translator's response to Morrison's "Grendel and his Mother," wherein Nobel Laureate Toni Morrison turns her critical eye on Beowulf and by extension the western European epic tradition (check out last summer's reading group posts on Morrison's Beloved and its connections to Dante's Inferno). "Grendel and his Mother" was originally presented as a lecture in Toronto in May 2002, and the syntax of some its sentences reflects the essay's origin in oral presentation. It's not surprising that Morrison is subtly and surely connecting her interpretation of this very old poem to twenty-first century concerns about culture and politics and power: she reads Grendel and his mother as warnings about our own inaction and complicities in the status quo.
At the beginning of the essay, Morrison is playing with us, initially giving us the "standard" version and interpretation of Beowulf in such a way that it seems facile, that forces us to question those usual understandings. Of Grendel, she tells us that "even if he had been beautiful, it would not have lessened the horror; his mere presence in the world was an affront to it" so that "Eventually, of course, a brave and fit hero named Beowulf volunteers to rid the kingdom of this pestilence" (257).
With that "of course," Morrison calls out the patriarchal structures of the poem, showing its narrative weaknesses and thus the weaknesses inherent in all the hero narratives, in all the hyper-masculine coming-of-age quest stories in which alpha male identity is constructed through violence. Morrison is working with Heaney's 2000 translation of Beowulf (the source of the secondary quotation on 256), and she draws upon John Gardner's 1971 novel Grendel as well to think about Grendel as a victim of the violence necessary for traditional heroism. Morrison died in 2019, but I think she would have loved Headley's translation and its display of the toxic masculinity in the fabric of the poem.
Her analysis of the giant sword Beowulf uses in the second fight is worth quoting in full:
"The conventional reading is that the fiends' blood is so foul it melts steel, but the image of Beowulf standing there with a mother's head in one hand and a useless hilt in the other encourages more layered interpretations. One being that perhaps violence against violence -- regardless of good and evil, right and wrong -- is itself so foul the sword of vengeance collapses in exhaustion or shame" (258).
And then she returns us to this idea at the end of the essay: for a culture to move toward fascism, "You only have to cooperate, be silent, agree, and obey until the blood of Grendel's mother annihilates her own weapon and the victor's as well" (262). As in many of the essays in The Source of Self-Regard, Morrison's critique comes from outside dominant ideology. She refuses to accept Beowulf's heroism or the values of western heroism, revealing (as does Headley) Beowulf's reliance on domination and violence to construct its culture.
This past spring, I heard a conference presentation arguing for elimination of Beowulf from the standard Brit Lit undergraduate survey (Lesley's former CLITR 2115, English Lit I); the speaker suggested assigning a variety of shorter Old English poems instead. Headley and Morrison have convinced me of the wisdom of this suggestion, of moving away from traditional heroic masculinist narrative and instead presenting to college students the haunting imagery of the crucifixion voiced by the Cross in The Dream of the Rood or the mournful anger of the enigmatic narrator of The Wife's Lament. The irony, then, is that such a move would also eliminate Headley’s and Morrison's voices and their important critiques of this canonical staple, their performance of feminist exposure and interrogation of the flaws in the poem and in the world around us.
Suggestions for comments: do you think Beowulf should be eliminated from the undergraduate survey, so that students would read it only in upper-level or graduate classes? If not, do you think the Headley translation would be a good choice for a survey course, or should a professor stick with a more "traditional" translation?
All quotations and page numbers from the 2019 paperback edition of Toni Morrison, The Source of Self-Regard (Penguin/Vintage).
While I will be responding to comments, the Massachusetts Medievalist will be on hiatus for the remainder of the summer, indulging in pleasure reading and bird watching and less screen time.