Grendel's Monstrous Mother

The epic struggle to pin down the most enigmatic character in Beowulf

In 2021, feminist author Maria Dahvana Headley released a bestselling translation of Beowulf, which begins with the word ‘bro’ and contains references to ‘hashtags’ and ‘stanning’. If I had to praise any part of this work, it would be the author’s introduction, which almost had me persuaded that a feminist translation of Beowulf would be worth a read. Then I read a few pages – all laden with sarcastic ressentiment towards the male heroic world depicted in the original poem – and realized that a feminist translation of Beowulf can only be more or less analogous to an incel rewrite of Pride and Prejudice.

Let us then stick to quoting the introduction, which wastes no time in telling us what the author is about. Much as an incel rewriting Pride and Prejudice might be partial to the characters of Collins and Wickham, Headley is obsessed with the one female character in the poem who seems to embody her own ideal. Naturally enough, this is Grendel’s mother: a supernatural creature who lives at the bottom of a mere, from which she emerges with murderous intent to avenge her man-eating son after he is killed by the hero of the poem.

My love affair with Beowulf began with Grendel’s mother, the moment I encountered her in an illustrated compendium of monsters, a slithery greenish entity standing naked in a swamp, knife in hand. I was about eight, and on the hunt for any sort of woman-warrior. Wonder Woman and She-Ra were fine, but Grendel’s mother was better. … In the book I first saw her in, there was no Grendel, no Beowulf, no fifty years a queen. She was just a woman with a weapon, all by herself in the center of the page. I imagined she was the point of whatever story she came from. When I finally encountered the actual poem, years later, I was appalled to discover that Grendel’s mother was not only not the main event but also, to many people, an extension of Grendel rather than a character unto herself, despite the significant ink devoted to her fighting capabilities. It aggravated me...

Yet when Headley goes on to justify a more favourable interpretation of this character, she has more to fall back on than aggrieved collective narcissism. Sympathy for the monster (or at least alienation from the hero) comes instinctively to those who set the tone for modern literary culture, and Beowulf is an extensively-studied poem that features three monsters fought in succession by its hero: the man-eating troll Grendel, his mother, and a fire-breathing dragon. It should come as no suprise, then, that the annals have been graced not only by antiheroic novels about Grendel, but also by revisionist scholarship on his mother that aims to debunk the very idea of her as a monster. One example of this school of thought would be ‘The Issue of Feminine Monstrosity’ by Christine Alfano, which tries to explain away every instance of ‘monstrous’ language applied to Grendel’s mother, in the manner of a lawyer trying to exonerate a client who clearly has a lot of explaining to do.

For the moment, we may as well stick with Headley:

Grendel’s mother, my original impetus for involvement with this text, is almost always depicted in translation as an obvious monster rather than as a human woman—and her monstrosity doesn’t typically allow even for partial humanity, though the poem itself shows us that she lives in a hall, uses weapons, is trained in combat, and follows blood-feud rules.

“Ogress ... inhuman troll-wife” —Tolkien, 1926, published 2014

“That female horror ... hungry fiend” —Raffel, 1963

“Ugly troll-lady” —Trask, 1997

“Monstrous hell-bride ... swamp-thing from hell” —Heaney, 1999

It makes some sense that she’d be translated that way. Her son, Grendel, eats people and can carry home a doggie bag full of warriors. It’s just the two of them living in their under-mere hall, and for many late nineteenth-and early twentieth-century translators of this text, it would only have followed for the monstrous portion of Grendel’s parentage to be his mother rather than his absentee father. For most of those translators, the difficulty of imagining a human woman fully armed, fully elderly (she’s been ruler of her kingdom as long as Hrothgar’s been ruler of his), would have been insurmountable.

It takes a lot of matronizing ignorance to declare that the late 19th century saw women as more ‘monstrous’ than men, or that scholars steeped in the Aeneid and the Eddas would have got their tweed bow-ties in a twist at the thought of a woman with a weapon. But Headley is correct to say that the quoted translations – such as Heaney’s ‘monstrous hell-bride’ and Trask’s ‘ugly troll-lady’ – are modern embellishments of an Anglo-Saxon text that is far less florid and gruesome in its descriptions. Although Grendel’s mother is painted very black by the cumulative weight of dark poetic epithets applied to her, there is not one of them that unambiguously denotes a monster or could not be applied in some context to a human being.

But there is a good reason why early translators interpreted these epithets in the way they did, and it is that they were working from the example of Grendel. There is no question about the monstrosity of Grendel: he is described in line 760 of the poem as an ‘etten’ (Old English eoten, a kind of man-eating troll), and after his arm is ripped off by Beowulf its hand is described as having nails like steel spikes. But the explicit description as an etten comes only once, after many lines in which he too is described by the sort of dark but ambiguous epithets applied to his mother; and his hand is the only part of his appearance that is not left to the imagination.

Here, too, modern translators embellish. In Heaney’s translation of the passage in which Grendel approaches the hall of the Danes, he is said to be ‘loping’ where the original text has him ‘walking’ (gongan). Beowulf waits and watches the ‘monster’, who in the original is a ‘crime-wreaker’ (manscaða); and when Grendel attacks, he raises his ‘claw’ or ‘talon’, which in the original is merely his ‘hand’ (hand). Had the poet not dwelt on Grendel at such length (in contrast with his mother, who is introduced and dispatched within the space of 300 lines), the evidence might be sparse enough to allow revisionists to interpret him as a normal human, and pass off his monsterhood as some figment of 19th-century racism or whatever.

The reason why textual pedantry can be used to such misleading ends is that the style of this poem is characterized by understatement. Unlike the poet of the Alliterative Morte Arthure, who spends line after line belabouring the foul appearance of a giant, the Beowulf-poet is accustomed to describe his monsters sparsely and leave the ugly details to our imagination. Modern translators – at least the early, scholarly ones like Tolkien and Gummere – were not falsifying the poem but trying to convey it into a language in which such understatement is much less common.

In light of this, let’s go back to Headley, and take a closer look at the epithets applied to Grendel’s mother:

The tradition of monstrous depiction assisted by monstrous physical descriptors persevered in translation (though not necessarily in scholarship) into the later years of the twentieth century and beyond, particularly after Frederick Klaeber’s 1922 glossary defined the word used to reference Grendel’s mother, aglaec-wif, as “wretch, or monster, of a woman.” Never mind that aglaec-wif is merely the feminine form of aglaeca, which Klaeber defines as “hero” when applied to Beowulf, and “monster, demon, fiend” when referencing Grendel, his mother, and the dragon. Aglaeca is used elsewhere in early English to refer both to Sigemund and to the Venerable Bede, and in those contexts, it’s likelier to mean something akin to “formidable.” … Grendel’s mother is referred to in the poem as “ides, aglaec-wif,” which means, given this logic, “formidable noblewoman.”

The exact meaning of aglæca is a bit obscure, but it is correct to say that it is used of monsters, heroes and (once) the Venerable Bede, and carries connotations of fearsome stature and awesome power. Even so, that does not make it a neutral term, as it is applied much more often to monstrous beings than to humans.

If we must have a single modern English equivalent for this term, or at least a word that expresses its double meaning, I would suggest something like ‘terror’ or ‘beast’. Modern slang usage makes it quite permissible to describe Beowulf or Sigmund as a ‘beast’, and Bede as ‘that beast of a scholar’ (se aglæca lareow). At the same time, we can describe Grendel by the same word with no confusion as to our meaning.

The word brimwylf, or “sea-wolf,” is also used as a supporting argument for monstrosity, but it’s a guess. The manuscript itself reads brimwyl, which may have been meant to be brimwif. Elsewhere, Grendel’s mother is referred to as a merewif, or “ocean-woman,” so it’s very possible that scribal error introduced a wolf where a wife should be, and that traditions of gendered hierarchy made a monster of a mother. In any case, “sea-wolf” is a poetic term, and might be as easily applied to Beowulf as it is to Grendel’s mother.

This claim, repeated by at least one fawning mass media review, is downright wrong. ‘Sea-wolf’ appears twice in the text, both times applied to Grendel’s mother, the first misspelt as brimwyl and the second rendered correctly as brimwylf. (There’s no excuse for a translator to blunder like this when all it takes is a word search on the Electronic Beowulf, but affirmative action is what it is.)

In any case, this is self-evidently not to be taken literally – what matters is the strong connotation of ferocity and animality. Another such word applied to Grendel’s mother is grundwyrgen, which could be translated as ‘outlaw of the deep’, but also implies wolfishness and demonization (especially in the context of brimwylf). Wyrgen is a feminine form of wearg (the same word that Tolkien reintroduced into modern English as warg), which means ‘criminal’ or ‘reprobate’ but also carries wolfish connotations, possibly related to the later legal analogy between outlaws and wolves.¹

Headley concludes:

In Beowulf, it seems likely to me that some translators, seeking to make their own sense of this story, have gone out of their way to bolster Beowulf’s human credentials by amplifying the monstrosity of Grendel’s mother, when in truth, the combatants are similar.

They’re both extraordinary fighters, and the battle between Beowulf and Grendel’s mother is, unlike other battles in the poem, a battle of equally matched warriors. God’s established soft spot for Beowulf is the deciding factor, not physical strength.

The poet’s depiction of Grendel’s mother is complex: as admiring as it is critical…

I don’t know that Grendel’s mother should be perceived in binary terms—monster versus human.

Much of this makes no sense. It should go without saying that a monster can have certain admirable qualities, and fight a hero to a standstill; both are true of the dragon, the third antagonist of the poem, who manages to deal Beowulf a fatal blow before he finishes it off. Headley does not attempt to humanize the dragon, which would presumably be a bit much even for her (though she does trans him from male to female so the girls can sort of win in the end).

She is on firmer ground when she says that “the combatants are similar”. Yet this stylistic trait, like understatement, is not to be misconstrued. For want of a better term, we might call it heroic inversion – the depiction of the monstrous antagonists as negative ‘shadow selves’ of the human protagonists.

Contra Headley, it is Grendel who best resembles an inverted Beowulf. He is physically huge, young enough to have a living mother, described as a ‘border-crosser’ (mearcstapa) who seeks the hall of the Danes, and fights the hero on equal terms without weapons (notwithstanding the fact that he gets trounced). Grendel’s mother corresponds more closely to the figure of Hrothgar, the venerable but beleagured Danish king. She lives underground in a ‘hostile hall’ (niðsele), whereas he lives in the famous hall of Heorot; she has ruled her mere ‘a hundred half-years’ (hund missera), the same length of time that Hrothgar says he has ruled the Danes; she has a warband composed of ‘many sea-beasts’ (sædeor monig) who aid her in battle; and after the death of her son Grendel, she is driven by vengeance to kill Hrothgar’s friend Æschere, after which Hrothgar is motivated in turn to seek vengeance against her. One imagines that the hoary hag of the mere even resembles the aged king to some extent (as Grendel somewhat resembles Beowulf), but this is not to be taken as any sort of indication that she is not monstrous.²

Anyway, we need say no more of Headley, except that she abandons all pretence to nuanced interpretation from the first page of her translation. In the Grendel’s mother episode, she depicts her heroine more or less as Xena the Mary Sue, interpolating lines in which Beowulf flees from her in panic³ and making up epithets like ‘reclusive night-queen’ and ‘Goth goddess girlboss’ (okay, fact check, one of those is mine). It’s eloquent enough, and perhaps still worthy of a reading, if you want to have your expectations mocked by the composite voice of Gollum and Millie Tant for three thousand lines. Seek if you dare – and if you don’t, be sure that your children will come home from school one day and tell you all about it.

For my part, I propose to put my money where my mouth is, by re-translating the Grendel’s mother episode and advancing an interpretation of the character. Be warned that I am only an autodidact like Headley, not a professional scholar. On the other hand, I have yet to see a single Old English scholar take Headley to task for her misleading claims about this poem, and I cannot help but think that this has to do with a fear of bringing down more struggle sessions upon their field. “Then is the poet’s time, 'tis then he draws”, and all that.

My intention here is not to defend the verdict of early translators on Grendel’s mother. Faced with a text that gave them no explicit instructions to the contrary, they naturally construed her along the lines of her son as a brutal, lumpish troll. But the epithets used for her are different, almost always connected with water. She seems more cautious, more intelligent and cunning. While Grendel attacks the hall straightforwardly, his mother kills one victim and uses his head to bait Beowulf into her mere; and while Grendel ‘cares not for weapons’ (wæpna ne reccað), his mother is armed with a knife.

Then there is another mystery. When Grendel’s mother attacks the hall, we are told that she is less terrible than her son (albeit only as far as an armed woman is less terrible than an armed man to a victim without weapons), and this is borne out by the fact that she kills only one man and runs away whereas her son had slaughtered thirty at a time. Yet when Beowulf comes to grips with her in her underground hall, she somehow outmatches him in unarmed wrestling, whereas her son had hardly managed to put up a fight. Headley’s solution to this problem – rewriting the relevant passages to erase the reference to relative weakness – is ironically not so far removed from that of Tolkien, who rewrote the whole poem into a pseudo-folktale (based partly on actual folktales) in which the troll-mother is stronger than her son. But perhaps it is the subtler idea in the mind of the Beowulf-poet that can tell us more about the traditional conception of Grendel’s mother.⁴

I have opted to cut down the episode considerably, stick to the highlights, and fill the gaps in Eddic style with simple prose narration. I have also modified some names in order to avoid any difficulties in reading the verses aloud, and used a more flexible form of the original meter (explained here). Most of the footnotes can be safely ignored by those uninterested in the original language, but those that relate directly to the nature of Grendel’s mother have been marked with an asterisk (*).

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Rothgar⁵, king of the Shielding dynasty in Denmark, built a great hall for his band of warriors and called it Harthall.⁶ For twelve long winters, that hall was haunted by Grendel, an accursed wight who skulked upon moors and fens. Grendel devoured every man who dared to stay after dark and hold the hall against him – until Beowulf the Goth⁷ fared across the sea to the rescue of the Danish people. When Grendel felt the huge young man’s handgrip – which had the might of thirty men in it – his heart quailed and he strove to flee, but his arm was wrenched off at the shoulder-joint and he limped off to the wilderness to die.

The Danes held a great celebratory feast, in which Beowulf and his companions received many a precious gift from the hands of the king and queen. Then Rothgar retired to his bed, Beowulf was escorted to a guest-room, and a troop of Danes stayed behind in Harthall to guard it through the night. They bore away the benches from the broad floor, and spread out the beds and bolsters, little suspecting that a grim fate yet awaited one of them.

They sank then into sleep. One would sorely pay

For his evening-rest, as had oft befallen

When Grendel had haunted the golden hall,

And committed many wrongs until he met his end —

Death for his misdeeds. Then it was found,

And far-known to men, that an avenger yet

Lived after those horrors, for a long while,

After that grim battle. Grendel’s mother,

Lady she-beast⁸*, on her sorrows brooded;

She who had to dwell beneath the dreadful waters

And the chilling falls, since Cain had played

Slayer-by-the-sword to his sole brother,

His father-kinsman. He fared forth stained,

Marked for his murder, from man’s joys fleeing,

To haunt the wilderness. There woke to birth from him

Fate-shapen wights.⁹* One was Grendel,

A hateful blood-wolf¹⁰ who at Harthall found,

Waiting for battle, a watchful man.

The beast¹¹ attacked him, took him in his grasp

But the man remembered his main strength,

The generous gift that God bestowed on him.

And he upon the One Lord for help relied,

For succor and for solace. He struck down the foe;

Humbled the hell-wight, who abject fled –

Sundered from joy – to seek his death-place,

Humanity’s bane. But his mother then,

Thirsty and grudge-minded, took her way

On a sorrow-bringing journey, her son to avenge.

And so she came to Harthall, where a host of Danes

Slept inside the building. Swiftly there befell

A reversal to those jarls¹², when she ventured inward,

Grendel’s mother. Gentler was the terror

By only so much as is a maiden’s strength –

A woman’s battle-terror – to a weaponless man,

When her wire-bound blade, worked by hammers –

Her blood-spangled sword – upon his boar-crest helmet¹³

Crashes home with its cleaving edge.¹⁴*

Then within the hall was the hard edge drawn –

Swords above the benches, and shields as well,

Hefted up by hands; helms were forgotten,

And broad mail-coats, in the brunt of horror.

She was now in haste – wanted out of there –

To save her life, now that stealth was lost.

So rapidly she seized upon a single highbred¹⁵,

And fled off to the fens with him fast enclutched.¹⁶*

He was the most beloved among Rothgar’s warriors

In the role of a retainer, between the seas,

A powerful shieldman – from his sleep she ripped him,

Who by glory had been blessed. Beowulf was not there;

For some other room had been erst arranged

For the renowned Goth after the gift-exchange.

Harthall was thunderstruck! She took under dark

A well-known hand¹⁷; woe was renewed,

And terror in each home. The trade was ill

By which both sides had to barter away

The lives of loved ones.¹⁸ The long-wise king,

The hoary old warrior, was in haggard mood,

Since the chief of his companions was cold of life –

The dearest of his men he knew to be dead.

Hall of the Hart (as imagined by Enthing)

Whether wittingly or otherwise, Grendel’s mother had slain Asher, the right-hand man of the Danish king. Beowulf was summoned to the hall, all unawares, to find Rothgar disturbed and despairing. Unable to avenge his friend by himself, the old king had no choice but to rely upon the only man whom he knew to be up to the task. He informed him that a “restless blood-wight”¹⁹ had raided them after nightfall, knowing only too well who she was and why she had come.

Rothgar spoke thus:

“From the dwellers on the land, from my Danish folk,

From my counsellors in hall, I have heard it said

That sometimes they have seen them – such a pair

Of huge borderlanders haunting the wastelands,

Alien wights. One of them,

As far as they might certainly discern aright,

Had the likeness of a woman. And one, misbegotten,

Strode the wander-ways²⁰ in shape of man,

Except that he was huger than any other one.²¹

They dubbed him Grendel from the days of yore.

None knew his father²²* – the folk on the land –

Nor whether any others had been erst begotten

Of such hidden wights. In an unknown land

They haunt the wolf-cliffs, the windy crags,

The treacherous marsh-paths, where a mountain stream

Under shrouding cliffs, descends downwards

To waters underground. The way’s not far

In measuring of miles, to where that mere is found.

Hanging all around it is a ring of trees²³,

Rathelled by their roots, the lake overshading.

A sinister marvel might be seen at night there:

Fire on the water! No wise man lives

Among the sons of men, who might sound those depths.

Harried by the hounds, a heath-running stag,

A hard-hornèd hart – the holt-woods seeking,

Fleeing very far – will forfeit life

And die upon the bank before he dives therein

To hide his head.²⁴ That is no healthy place.

The seething waves from it surge upwards,

Swart beneath the clouds, when swirled by the wind

Into evil storms, till the sky overglooms

And the heavens weep. Now help again

Depends upon you, though the place you know not,

The fearsome land where you may find her out,

The sin-festooned one. Seek if you dare.”

Haunted waters (Albena Markova)

Beowulf did not hesitate to take on the task of vengeance, and Rothgar leapt up with a word of thanks to God. The king and hero trekked into the wilderness, accompanied by their Danish and Gothish troops.

Onward he traversed, the highborn prince²⁵,

Over steep stone-crags, constricted paths

Only wide enough for one; over ways unknown,

Over plummeting high-cliffs, and homes of nixes.

He fared in the front, with a few at his side

Of the wiser men, to mark the ways,

Until suddenly they found it – the sloping trees

Hanging in a circle over hoar-grey stone,

A woebegone wood. The waters were turbid

And dyed with blood. The Danemen all,

The friends of the Shieldings, were shocked to the hearts

And hard did they endure it, every thane;

It was agony to each of them, when Asher they –

Up there on the height – his head they saw.²⁶*

Blood welled in water; the warriors gazed on it –

Gore yet hot. The horn rang out

A rousing fight-song. Fast stood the troops.²⁷

They saw there, on the waters, serpent-creatures;

Weird sea-dragons, swimming about;

And likewise, on cliff-ledges – lounging nixes.²⁸*

Oft would these betake themselves on tide of morning,

On sorrow-bringing journeys, to the sailing-routes –

Serpents and wild beasts.²⁹ Away they rushed,

Bitter and enraged, when the blast they heard,

The wail of the war-horn. One by a Goth

With his arrow-bow was disarmed of life

And of water-thrashings, when it thrust to his heart,

The hard battle-dart. In the brine he was

More sluggish at swimming, once struck by death.

Swiftly on the waves, by swine-polearms

And hook-bladed weapons, hard was he pressed

And violently harried – to the headland dragged –

The wondrous wave-maker. Warriors stared

At the horrible stranger. Armed was Beowulf

In the clothes of noblemen³⁰, careless for his life…

Nøkken (by Norwegian artist Theodore Kittelsen, 1904)

As Beowulf prepared to dive into the mere, Unferth – the king’s orator – scarcely remembered the mocking words he had thrown at the young hero when he first turned up at Harthall offering to fight Grendel. (They had agreed to agree that he was drunk at the time and hadn’t meant it.) Courageous though Unferth was, he dared not take on an errand like this. But he lent Beowulf his unique sword, decorated with venom-twigs, named Runding.³¹

Hoping triumph, expecting death, Beowulf commended his sword to Unferth and the treasures he had received to his faraway king Highlock. Without another word, he dived down into the mere, and it seemed ages³² before he could descry the bottom. Grendel’s mother, sure enough, was waiting for him.

At once she found – she who the waters’ realm

Had held, bloodthirsty, for a hundred seasons,³³

Greedy and grim – that journeying down

To the otherwights’ domain³⁴, came some man exploring.

She grabbed towards him, grasped the warrior

In her horrible grip – but could not get inside

To his living body. The link-rings held:

Through the house of his armour she could harm him not,

Locked in his mailcoat, with her murderous fingers.³⁵

So the brine-wolf bore him to the bottom of the mere,

The ruler of rings³⁶, until she reached her home,

So that never he might, maugre his valour,

Wield his weapon. And weirdlings too,

Swarmed him in the water; sea-brutes many,

Battering his armour-sark with battle-tusks,

Harrying the beast.³⁷ He was hauled at last

Into some hostile hall³⁸ – who knows where –

But within it not a whit did the water scathe him;

Through the roof of the building it could reach him not,

The violence of the flood. Firelight he saw –

A pallid radiance, brightly shining.

Then the brave one beheld her – the abysmal she-wolf³⁹,

The mighty mere-wife⁴⁰ – and a main blow struck,

With his havoc-blade – did not withhold the swing –

So that his ring-whorled weapon rang upon her head

A greedy war-song. But the guest now found

That his battle-light⁴¹ would not bite upon her,

Or scathe her life. The sword betrayed

The fighter at his need – though before it had seen

Many meetings of hands; helms oft cleaving,

And fated war-gear; it was the first time

That the precious heirloom its repute belied.⁴²*

But soon resolute again – nor slowed nor daunted –

Hungry for high fame, Highlock’s kinsman

Tossed away the wreathen-sword, twisted and glittering,

The furious fighter. On the floor it clattered,

Stiff and steel-edged. In strength he would trust,

In his mighty handgrip; thus a man must do

When he is minded to win at war-faring

His lasting glory – for life he must not care.

So he grasped her by the hair – not regretting the foul⁴³ –

Then the Gothish war-leader, Grendel’s mother

Wrenched down, battle-hard, burning with anger,

His mortal foe – she folded to the ground –

But quickly she again requited him a hand-gift

Of grim grappling, and grasped him fast.

And exhaustedly he tumbled, strongest of warriors

And foot-champions – he was felled to earth.⁴⁴*

She sat upon her hall-guest, unsheathed her knife –

Broad and brown-edged – her boy to avenge,

Her sole descendant. On his shoulder lay

His woven breast-net – his blood was spared –

Nor the ord nor the edge could inwards thrust.

He would have come to an end there, Edgethew’s son,

Beneath the breadth of the ground – the Gothish champion –

Were it not for the help of his mail-corselet,

His hard armour-net. And holy God

Held sway over the victory. The sage Ruler,

Helm of the Heavens, easily

Decided it aright when he stood up again.

Grendel’s mother tries to stab Beowulf (as imagined by J.R. Skelton, 1908)

Now he saw amidst the weaponry a win-blessed blade:

An old sword of ettens, with edges stout;

Worthy of a warrior, a weapon of choice –

Save only too big for any other man

To possibly bear it to the play of war –

Great it was and splendid, giantish work.

By the hilt-straps he hoisted it – hero of the Shieldings,

Rough and blood-grim – the ring-sword drew out –

Anxious for his life – and angrily struck,

So that straight upon the neck it seized her hard,⁴⁵

And broke the bone-rings. The blade sheared through

The fated flesh-house. To the floor she sank.

The sword was bloodstained, the swordsman overjoyed.

Now there limned a radiance – light stood within –

No less than, in the heavens, luminously shines

From the lantern of the skies. He looked across the hall.⁴⁶

Then he went by the wall, the weapon hefting

Hard by the hilt – Highlock’s thane –

Ireful and focused. The edge was not worthless

To the war-champion, for he wished to soon

Pay Grendel back for the brutal raids

That he had wickedly inflicted on the Western Danes –

Oftener by far than on the first occasion,

When he had Rothgar’s hearth-companions

Slain in their slumber, and the sleepers gorged:

Fifteen men of the folk of Danes,

And the same again, spirited away

As a grisly booty. He gave him his reward,

The vehement warrior, when he found in a rest-place

Grendel lying, grapple-weary

And bereft of life, as was ere long decided

At the battle of Harthall. The body splattered

When it took a drubbing, dead though it was,

From his hard sword-swing – and he severed its head.

Soon afterward they saw it – the discerning karls

Who gazed upon the lake, and Rothgar with them:

The upsurge of waves, all bemingled,

Blood-sullied water. White-haired men,

Greyheads round the great one, agreed that they

Could hold out no more hope that the hero, now,

Exulting in his conquest, would come again

To seek out the king. It seemed to most

That the wolf of the brine⁴⁷ had pulverized him.

The ninth-hour came. From the cliff they went,

The bold Shieldings. He departed homeward,

The gold-giving king. The guests yet stayed –

Though sick to their hearts – and stared on the mere,

Wished without expecting that their prince and friend

Might be seen again in person. The sword began,

Bloodied with battle-sweat, in blade-icicles

To wane and waste away. It was a wonder to see

How the lot of it melted, like unto ice,

When the Father unloosens the frosted bonds

And unwinds the water-ropes – the One who sways

The times and the seasons – the true Lord.

He took not from that place, the prince of Goths,

Any prizes more – though many he saw –

Than the head of Grendel, and the hilt as well,

Beset with adornments.⁴⁸ The sword had melted,

The blade all forburnt. The blood was too hot

Of that venomous alien who was vanquished there.⁴⁹*

At once he was swimming⁵⁰, he who’d weathered strife

And downfall of foes. He drove through waters

Purified and cleansed – the eddying waves

And the breadth of the area – since the alien wight

Relinquished her life-days and this loanèd world.

Beowulf at last broke the surface of the mere and his men rejoiced to see him. The once-turbulent water was stilled, dyed with the blood of the slain. They carried the head of Grendel back to Harthall, taking turns with it, four men at a time hoisting it on spear-shafts. Beowulf strode into the hall, interrupting the funeral-toasting, and tossed the head by its hair onto the broad floor in sight of the king and all his men.

He had ended the long nightmare of the Danish people and won everlasting glory.

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In conclusion, Grendel’s mother (in my understanding, which builds on that of Martin Puhvel and others) is a type of demonic water-spirit best described by the modern term ‘nix’ or ‘nixie’. She draws strength from proximity to her mere and is weakened by separation from it, which is why she rarely leaves her underground hall. She is quite different from her son, with venomous blood and the requisite cunning to use weapons and set traps for her enemies.

And yes, in modern parlance, she is very much a ‘monster’ – although this term is hardly adequate to the concept of a misshapen, infernal, negative anti-humanity as conceived by the Beowulf-poet. Note that I have kept it out of my translation, which is as nearly word-for-word with the original as I could make it.

It is fair to say that early translators misconstrued Grendel’s mother, by assuming her to be an older female version of her son. Feminist revisionism has made things worse, but has at least forced those of us who respect the tradition to examine the character more closely. Perhaps the greatest pity is that Tolkien deferred to the established conception of her, and so was not inspired to populate his Middle-Earth with a few sinister lake-ladies in addition to the trolls and dragons.

1. In ‘The Issue of Feminine Monstrosity’ (p.7), Alfano accuses early translators and Old English scholars of falsifying the meaning of grundwyrgen, by stretching the definition of wearg to include ‘wolf’ as well as ‘outlaw’ under the influence of brimwylf. Presumably this little conspiracy extends to all speakers of the Old Norse language, which attributed the meaning ‘wolf’ (as well as ‘outlaw’) to the same Germanic root and bequeathed it to a host of modern Scandinavian languages. This sort of thing is why modern students of Beowulf must grant due respect to the men who deciphered the poem in the first place, even when we dissent from their views; they often had extensive knowledge of related languages, whereas we know how to look up words in dictionaries.

2. For further evidence that Grendel’s mother is construed by the poet as ‘kingly’, see this article from the revisionist school. For circumstantial evidence that old men were sometimes analogized to women in Germanic heroic culture, see Lotte Hedeager’s Iron Age Myth and Materiality on old Norse society.

3. “The puglist panicked. His certainty / crumbling, he took flight and fell. He began / sick-hearted, to hear his death-knell, his sure feet / fumbling, his fight-spirit fugitive.” This reads like an elaboration of Heaney’s translation: “the sure-footed fighter felt suddenly daunted / the strongest of warriors stumbled and fell”. Both depart from the original text, which says only that Beowulf ‘fell down weary-hearted’ and not that he was cowed.

This does not necessarily mean that Headley, like Doug Wilson, worked off translations without bothering to read the whole original text. She ‘translates’ very loosely, making it impossible to tell, and her prejudice against the Beowulf character (whom she portrays as a swaggering musclebound idiot) is reason enough for her to favour Heaney’s account.

4. If there is one notion in this field that is taken seriously by scholars, yet seems to rest on nothing at all, it is that of traditional poems as elaborations of simple folktales that began and ended with the common people. Given that the texts of traditional poems far antedate the collection of oral folktales, and that no-one has demonstrated how a people could collectively create a tale, surely it is more likely that poems began with oral bards and degenerated after the advent of literacy until they ended up solely in the hands of ordinary people. This, of course, would have entailed narrative simplification as well as the loss of the specialized poetic language. What this implies, needless to say, is that a simple narrative is not necessarily to be treated as prior to a subtle one.

5. Hroðgar

6. Heorot, which means ‘hart’.

7. His people are called the Geats (Geatas), but the substitution of ‘Goth’ for this forgotten ethnonym is appropriate, as it was used almost indiscriminately for many Germanic tribes.

8. Ides, aglæcwif – ‘lady, beast-woman’ (using ‘beast’ in the sense discussed above)

9. Geosceaftgasta, which is a bit obscure. Gasta is best translated as ‘wights’, not ‘ghosts’, because there is nothing insubstantial about these creatures. Geosceaft could refer to their being ‘mortally doomed’, or ‘sent by fate’, or ‘shapen of old’.

Regardless, the reference is to ‘Cain’s kin’ (Caines cyn), named elsewhere as the race of misbegotten beings to which Grendel belongs. In addition to the gigantas (giants who warred with God before the Flood), it is said to include eotenas (ettins or trolls), ylfe (elves), and orcneas (an obscure word that might denote ‘hell-demons’, ‘undead corpses’ or ‘sea-monsters’). Note that all of these different beings are conceived as belonging to one race, and that this race is technically a subset of the human species. (And, yes, before you ask, ‘race’ is the appropriate word here; recall in this connection the medieval idea of ‘the curse of Ham’, which may actually be referenced here.)

In light of this, there is no reason to assume that Grendel’s mother is the same type of supernatural creature as he is (i.e. an etten or troll). The early reference to her dwelling in the water may have cued the audience to imagine her as something along the lines of the nix, a humanoid water-spirit (in the mind of our good Christian poet, a water-demon) in Germanic tradition. Alternatively she may be derived from the Celtic water-hag tradition, as argued in this article, and by Martin Puhvel in Beowulf and Celtic Tradition.

10. Heorowearh, a compound composed of heoro- (obsolete word for ‘sword’, probably understood by the poet as denoting battle and slaughter) and wearg (‘outlaw’ or ‘evil, accursed one’, metaphorically ‘wolf’).

11. Aglæca

12. The word used is eorl(um), literally ‘earl’, but the Norse analogue jarl is less saturated with the associations of later centuries.

13. Germanic battle-helmets were often decorated with boar imagery, and the lines mentioning boars (eoforas or swin) in Beowulf invariably refer to decorations on helmets.

14. This means that Grendel’s mother is weaker than her son, but still deadly to the humans she attacks – just as as a hypothetical armed woman may be weaker than an armed man, but is still deadly to an unarmed man when she smashes in his helmet with a sword.

15. €Æþeling, a nobleman

16. This passage implies that Grendel’s mother is much weaker, relative to her son, than human women are weak relative to men. Whereas Grendel had slaughtered thirty men at a time, and could not be injured by swords (because he, or perhaps his mother on his behalf, had ‘forsworn’ them by magic), his mother takes one man in his sleep and runs away in the face of the blades drawn against her. Yet in the battle with Beowulf under her haunted mere, she will take a direct hit from a sword without damage, and then go on to outwrestle the hero (who is stated elsewhere in the poem to possess ‘the might of thirty men’). How so?

This is by no means an idle question, but one that touches upon the nature of Grendel’s mother as tacitly understood by the tradition. If she is conceived as a water-spirit, then it could be that she is powerful only in proximity to her water source, and weakened or demoralized by separation from it. That would explain why she tends to stay in her mere; why she adopts a hit-and-run strategy instead of rampaging in the hall; why she uses the head of her victim to bait the hero into the mere instead of rising out to face him; and why he has so much trouble with her when he tries to fight her in her element.

17. The hand of her son Grendel, which Beowulf had ripped off and hung up under the roof of the hall (probably just above the entrance) as a trophy.

18. This ‘both sides’ could conceivably mean ‘both the Goths and the Danes’, ‘both Beowulf and Rothgar’ (since Beowulf has also lost a man to Grendel); but it probably means ‘both sides of the feud’, i.e. Grendel’s mother and Rothgar.

19. Wælgæst wæfre, ‘restless slaughter-ghost’ (with secondary ironic connotations of ‘guest’) – another sinister, inhuman term, reminiscent of some epithets applied to Grendel.

20. Wræclastas, ‘paths of exile’; Grendel is a wrecca or ‘wandering exile’, sundered from the rest of mankind, as are all of his Cain-descended race.

21. Note the equivalency here: “one has the likeness of a woman, the other the stature of a man.” It would be absurd to suggest, after the fashion of revisionists, that this can be taken as an indication that either of these creatures looked like normal human beings.

The word used for ‘woman’ here is ides, usually translated ‘lady’, perhaps etymologically related to Norse dís (goddess or female ghost). I would not make too much of this supernatural connection, as it seems to be as far from the meaning of the word as used in this poem as the modern word giddy is far from the original meaning ‘god-possessed’. But it is true that ides tends not to be used generically, but of queens and other notable women.

22. The fact that Grendel’s father is an unknown quantity forestalls one obvious objection to the ‘water-hag’ thesis, which is that Grendel’s mother must be like unto her son. Presumably, the various sub-types within the ‘kin of Cain’ would have been understood as mixing together and producing hybrid traits, just like different types of humans.

Alternatively, Germanic tradition may have had clearer ideas on this subject. In the Swedish folk-ballad ‘Sir Mannelig’ – gloriously set to music by Garmarna – a mountain-troll is described as af Neckens och Djävulens stämma, ‘the spawn of the Necken and the Devil’ Näcken is the Swedish word for nix, whereas stämma is apparently this word, which perhaps ought to be ‘stock’ and not ‘spawn’. Although it seems a bit much to assume that Germanic peoples had a casta system for monsters, in which the Devil and a nixie makes a troll, it is interesting to find these types associated in tradition.

23. Hrin[g]de bearwas (the first word is somewhat obscure); alternatively perhaps ‘lifeless trees’ or ‘rind-gnarled trees’ or ‘hoar-rimed trees’.

24. The verb is omitted in the MS and assumed to be hydan (to hide), though it could be practically anything else. It could be something like ‘to save’ or ‘to preserve’, meaning that the stag would not cross the mere, not that it would not dive in to conceal itself.

25. Rothgar, who is guiding Beowulf

26. It would seem that Grendel’s mother is baiting her son’s killer into her mere by displaying the head. We learn two things from this: first that Grendel’s mother has more forethought and cunning than her son, and second that she feels the need to fight the hero under her own mere (though not, as we shall see, necessarily in the water). This lends some circumstantial evidence to the theory that Grendel’s mother draws power from her watery home and is magically dependent on it.

27. Feþa eal gesæt, usually translated along the lines of ‘the foot-troops sat down’. I doubt that the verb gesittan is meant in this sense (any more than the modern idiom ‘to dig in’ means to literally dig a hole and stand in it); as we see in the next lines, there are enemies to fight, and the horn is calling the troops to battle.

28. As you can see, this passage contains two references to ‘nixes’, both translated from the Old English nicor. This word ended up in English as the dialectical knucker, which denotes a sort of water-dragon, but it also stems from the same root as the German word Nix.

Nicor is usually understood to mean a non-humanoid aquatic monster – perhaps a hippopotamus, crococile, walrus, or sea-dragon. This article provides a useful overview of all instances of nicor in Old English, showing that the conventional view does not rest upon much evidence. The instance in Alexander’s Letter to Aristotle has been translated from Latin hippopotamus, and compares nicoras to elephants, but a reader unfamiliar with these animals might have looked at the description and imagined some sort of man-eating giants. In the Blickling Homily XVI, which contains the same scene of grim trees hanging over stone and water as does Beowulf and would thus seem to be connected to it, the nicoras who pull condemned souls into the water seem more like demons than dumb animals. As for the instances in Beowulf, nicoras are often mentioned alongside fishlike or serpentlike sea-animals, but these are always described by other terms like meredeor (‘water-beast’) or sædeor (‘sea-beast’) when the narrative focuses upon them; and in the present passage, nicoras alone are described as living in ‘homes’ or ‘houses’ (nicorhusa fela) and lying outside of the water. On consideration, I have translated the word simply as ‘nix’ so that the reader may imagine what he will.

Ultimately, this question is not vitally important to our speculations on Grendel’s mother. Perhaps the entity that we now call a nix was denoted by a different word, and perhaps a ‘woman of the water’ needed no further clarification. But it is notable that when Grendel is defeated earlier in the poem, he is described as fleeing to a ‘mere of nixes’ (on nicera mere, line 845), and this is the first mention of his mother’s home. One wonders whether this word would have conjured up some associations with humanoid water-demons.

29. Wyrmas and wildeor. If this encompasses the nicoras, it might imply that they are the ‘wild beasts’ (as opposed to the ‘many of serpent-kind’, wyrmcynnes fela, mentioned just before them) and thus not humanoid in form. However, this is likely to be a generic formula. As for the creature that is shot by the Gothish archer (who could be Beowulf himself), none of the epithets applied to it shed much light on its physical form.

30. That is to say, chainmail and helmet

31. Hrunting, an obscure word. Tolkien believed it was a name for a sword with a wooden haft, and portrays it in his folktale version of the story as a dummy sword that Unferth lends to his rival out of malice. Perhaps this was so in some versions, but the Beowulf-poet portrays Unferth as honourable, and makes much of the deadliness of his sword. The description ‘decorated with venom-twigs’ (atertanum fah) could refer to depictions of snakes on the blade, or magical runes carved upon the sword, either of which may have been understood to grant it venomous properties. Unferth, an ‘orator’ (þyle) who is described as having ‘unbound a battle-rune’ (onband beadurune) before his contest of words with Beowulf, may have been associated with such black arts.

32. The text says hwil dæges, a day’s while, but I doubt this is to be understood literally. As we shall see, Beowulf does not take a whole day to return to the surface from the bottom.

33. Hund missera – a hundred half-years, i.e. fifty years.

34. Ælwihta eard, a ‘land of alien creatures’.

35. It is possible that Grendel’s mother has steel-sharp nails just like her son. This is not necessarily contradicted by the fact that she later uses a knife.

36. Hringa þengel, possibly Beowulf but more likely Grendel’s mother, who has many ‘rings’ (a common synecdoche of ‘treasures’) in her hall. Gummere’s translation as ‘lord of the rings’ inspired the title of Tolkien’s book.

37. Aglæca, presumably referring to Beowulf. Alternatively, it may refer to Grendel’s mother, if the word ehtan (‘to pursue’, ‘to follow’, or ‘to harass’) is interpreted simply to mean that the sea-beasts followed her as she bore her victim downwards. This may actually be more likely, as aglæca is paired with eorl (jarl, meaning Beowulf) in the original line, suggesting contrast. In that case the translation should read: “Following the beast. / Now he found himself…”

38. Niðsele, which could also be an ‘evil hall’.

39. Grundwyrgenne

40. Merewif mihtig – more precisely, ‘mighty mere-woman’.

41. Beadoleoma, a kenning for a sword.

42. This passage, in which Unferth’s sword fails to harm Grendel’s mother, deserves some attention. Note the language used – the sword ‘would not bite her’ (bitan nolde), and the hero is ‘betrayed’ by it (geswican, which can mean ‘to fail’ but also ‘to betray’ or ‘to deceive’). Note the belabouring of the point that the sword had never failed before. And note also what is not said – that Grendel’s mother is protected by the same magic charm that prevented her son from being harmed by any bladed weapon.

I suspect that the failure of Unferth’s sword has a different cause. If its ‘venom-twigs’ (atertanum) indeed serve to charge it with venomous magic, then this might have had the opposite effect against the venom-blooded woman of the mere. Yet there might have been other explanations in other versions of the tale.

43. Feaxfeng, i.e. hair-pulling – note that Beowulf, who renounced his weapons in order to fight Grendel fairly, has no such compunction with Grendel’s mother. The MS reads not feaxe (‘hair’) but eaxle (‘shoulder’), which would mean that he grabbed her by the shoulder, but the usual emendation to feaxe makes more sense of the rest of the line.

44. The most important words in this passage are oferwearp (‘[he] fell over’, ‘[he] tumbled over’, possibly ‘[she] threw him over’) and werigmod (‘weary-hearted’). Note that the passage does not explicitly say that she was stronger and grappled him down; rather, he becomes exhausted and either stumbles or is thrown.

This could imply no more than that Grendel’s mother, in her own element, is indeed stronger than Beowulf (or that he is somehow sapped of strength in her ‘hostile hall’, though not to the extent of being unable to heft a huge sword a few lines later). Or, bearing in mind the dangers of imposing too much rationalization, it could be that the Celtic theme of the water-hag who is more dangerous than her son (see Martin Puhvel, Beowulf and Celtic Tradition, pp.14-24) has asserted itself in conflict with other elements of the narrative.

But if Grendel’s mother was conceived by the poet as a water-spirit, as we have suggested, one of her characteristics might be slipperiness. This would make her difficult to wrestle against even for a stronger opponent – one is reminded of the duel between Reynard the Fox and Isengrim the Wolf, in which the fox turns up covered in oil to negate his adversary’s strength. Shapeshifting, traditionally attributed to the nix, can be understood as an extension of the idea of slipperiness (e.g. as in the Greek stories of Proteus and Thetis).

45. Heard grapode. The use of grapian (‘to touch, grope or seize’), related to the concept of gripping, may or may not imply that Grendel’s mother was physically difficult to grasp.

46. There is a lack of clarity as to whence this light comes, but the most obvious interpretation is that it shines from the giant sword that has just been mentioned. In the third chapter of his Beowulf and Celtic Tradition (pp.24-38), Martin Puhvel cites many examples of light-emitting swords from Celtic and Germanic tradition. As the light is compared to the sun (rodores candel, ‘candle of the heavens’), I think we are to understand it as being considerably brighter than the ‘pale light brightly shining’ elsewhere in the hall.

In the next few lines, when Beowulf walks through the hall holding the sword and looking for Grendel, we are told that næs seo ecg fracod hilderince (‘the edge was not useless to the warrior’). This could mean that the sword was not useless to him (‘edge’ being a common synecdoche for ‘sword’), but it could also be read as something like ‘the sword was not just useful as a light source, the edge was still needed as well’.

47. Brimwylf

48. This is a curious detail, since Beowulf is described elsewhere in the poem as swimming from Frisia back to his homeland with thirty captured mailshirts in his arms. One imagines that he felt some need to resist the temptation of the maðmæhta (‘valuable possessions’, ‘treasure-ownings’, here translated as ‘prizes’) in the evil hall.

49. Ættren ellorgæst se þær inne swealt (‘the poisonous alien-wight that perished therein’). This is a bit ambiguous, as is the similar reference to se ellorgæst (‘the alien-wight’) a few lines later. But the context of the passage suggests that it denotes Grendel’s mother, not Grendel: she is the subject of the episode; she is the one who has just died in the hall (although Grendel technically died there too); her blood is hot, whereas his would by now be cold; his blood has not previously been described as poisonous; etc.

One problem, though: why the long delay between the killing of Grendel’s mother and the melting of the sword, during which Beowulf is able to use it to strike Grendel’s corpse? Well, recall that a ‘light’ is described as shining from within the sword immediately after it is used to slay Grendel’s mother. This implies that the sword is burning under the hot blood from the moment it is spilled, and that it later melts because it ‘forburns’ (burns up entirely). Note that when the light first appears it is compared to the sun’s light, and when the blade melts this is compared to the effects of the sun’s heat.

50. Note that at no point does the poet tell us how Beowulf gets in and out of the hostile hall. On this I have no ideas. But the concept of a hall under the water that is accessed by mysterious means is consistent with tales in which water-spirits abduct human beings.