The Massachusetts Medievalist on Beowulf 1255-1644 (Grendel's Mother)
First of all, let's start this second installment of the Massachusetts Medievalist's summer reading group by acknowledging this part of the poem as a separate episode in its own right-- not exactly a revolutionary statement in 2021, but for most of the poem's critical history Beowulf was assumed to have two sections, Grendel and the Dragon, with Grendel's mother (OE Grendles Modor) as an unimportant sub-episode of the first section.
"Grendel's Mother" by Yoann Lossel (2017), now on view as part of Enchanted: A History of Fantasy Illustration at the Norman Rockwell Museum, Stockbridge MA
Second-wave white feminist medievalists made compelling arguments in the 1980s and 1990s for Grendel's Mother as the lynchpin of a "feminine" center to the poem - the cluster of female characters that execute various activities like serving beer, serving mead, serving wine, wearing ornate jewelry, and enacting subtle diplomacy. In the same way that Beowulf and Grendel are literary foils, Grendel's Mother and Wealhtheow refract each other's performances as Queen in the Hall. Wealhtheow does it "right," according to the patriarchal ethos of the poem: she passes the cup in the hall while speaking praise of the men she serves. Grendel's Mother does it "wrong": she attacks the "guest" in her hall and literally jumps Beowulf with a knife when he enters her home. Like so many women throughout history, she is known through her relationship to a male relative rather than by her own name. Her bereaved maternity is her identifying characteristic.
Promotional poster for the 2007 Beowulf movie with Angelina Jolie as a CGI-enhanced Grendel’s Mother
Headley has a history with Grendel's Mother already, as some of you may know. Her 2018 novel The Mere Wife used a plot loosely analogous to the first half of Beowulf to tell a twenty-first century story of a US Marine veteran, Dana Mills, whose PTSD leads her to hide her son Gren on the edges of a community named Herot. So Headley had already done some serious thinking about this "monstrous" woman before she started working on her translation.
The title of Headley's novel comes from one of the many epithets used to described Grendel's Mother; OE mere-wif (l.1519) could be translated as "sea-woman" or "water-woman," although Headley keeps the archaic cognate. Headley translates OE brimwylf as "sea-wolf" (ll.1504, 159), and also refers to Grendel's Mother as a "murdering mother" (l.1444) and "a woman / seeking vengeance for her son" (ll.1339-40). As such, Headley presents us with a provocatively sympathetic Grendel's Mother, a woman -- not a monster -- driven to rage and revenge by the death of her only child.
For me, part of the sympathy Headley generates comes from the description of the fight, which reads uncomfortably like a sexual assault. Note the subjunctive mood of the verb, which increases the discomfort:
He'd fight like a man, and take her hand to hand,
his fingertips blueprinting her skin. This is what
real men must do, come on, we all know the truth. (ll.1532-34)
Headley here draws on the OE tradition of gnomic wisdom -- broad philosophical statements about life that also apply to the situation at hand. So these lines refer specifically to the way that Beowulf plans to fight as well as the way to "fight like a man" more generally, reiterating assumptions about masculine performance embedded in combat. Beowulf then entwines "her hair around his fist, / raging, swinging her by her own skein" (ll.1538-9) before he kills her. The imagery recalls, I'd argue quite deliberately, descriptions and enactments of domestic violence in multiple media.
One final point about the sexualized violence that pervades this episode: I was very struck by the oblique reconfiguring of the Persephone myth in a simile as the fight ends. The giant sword-blade melts, just as ice melts when God permits the seasons "to uncage / His prisoner, Spring, and let her stumble into the sun" (ll.1609-10). This brief simile dispenses with the anodyne version of the Greek myth that simply "explains why we have seasons" and presents Hades/God as brutal kidnapper and rapist. I even went back to the original OE, to see if Headley was inventing or embellishing from the original text, but the lines in question use wael-rapas (death-ropes) and forstes bend (frost's fetters), so the violence is there -- I had just never paid attention to it before.
Please add your thoughts, ideas, and questions about the second section of the poem via the comments function! A jump start idea: What does Grendel's mother look like in your imagination? (I'm assuming "not like Angelina Jolie" and "not like in Yoann Lossel's imagination")
There’s a lot on my mind with this section. First and foremost I feel compelled to draw attention to the hypocrisy of Beowulf telling Hrothgar, “for each it is better,
His friend to avenge than with vehemence wail him,” (apologies for the quote from the wrong translation) while the narrative itself, along with essentially the entire cast of characters condemn Grendel’s Mother for doing that very same thing which the hero says is better than sitting in grief. Not only do Beowulf and Grendel’s mother both actively seek out murderous violence, they do it with much the same motivation. By painting one as a hero and the other as a villain, the narrative seems to say that it is not our choices or actions that make us good or evil, but in fact something innate to who (or what) we are, and most likely beyond our control to change. This ties back into what I was saying before about the presence of a god in the story taking some agency away from the characters.
I was interested in the images you included in this post, and started thinking about what Grendel’s Mother might look like before reaching the question about it at the end (which I was then irrationally excited to get to). In my last reply I talked about what Grendel’s species might be, and my interest in the question has redoubled after a series of image searches have suggested that Grendel and his Mother don’t appear to be members of the same species. At least not in the majority of the illustrations and other representations I’ve found. Certainly sometimes they are both depicted as non-humanoid monsters, but at least as often, Grendel’s mother is shown as the embedded images here suggest: just as a woman, usually naked, perhaps with some subtle representative monstrous features. There’s something about the apparent sexual dimorphism of this unknown species that’s very familiar, that has clear echoes in contemporary media. I’m reminded of a trend in portraying so called “beast races” in fantasy video games, where the women look like humans in skimpy Halloween costume versions of the species that the men actually seem to be.
While I can appreciate Headley’s sympathetic portrayal of Grendel’s Mother, and absolutely understand the motivation to humanize her, a part of me just really wants her to be a monster. There’s such a widespread reluctance to portray truly monstrous women. But I want her to be twice the size of Grendel, with algae and moss growing from the cracks between her scales, hooves the size of Beowulf’s head, and a dozen different types of horns and antlers growing out of her head to form a parody of a crown. I want her to have gills and fins modeled after some deep sea creature, and be bioluminescent, and have her eyes in completely the wrong part of her head. I could fill so much space describing how I imagine Grendel’s mother. Standard narrative form seems to dictate that each subsequent challenge faced by a story’s hero should be more harrowing, and demand more sacrifice than the last, and I want Grendel’s Mother to represent that. I know I’m supposed to be analyzing this story, rather than rewriting it, but I would love to see something concrete that shows that this battle was a greater trial for Beowulf than the last one was. I want him to emerge from the swamp, victorious, having defeated his enemy, but missing an arm, and I want her to have ripped that arm off with rows upon rows of mismatched teeth taken from the mouths of various other animals. I want Grendel’s Mother to be a monster.