Rethinking Thryth (III)
Freeing interpretation from feminist ideology
In the first part of this post, we reopened the case of a minor personage in Beowulf: the wicked queen Thryth, alternatively named as Modthryth and Fremu, who apparently murders her husband’s retainers for looking at her. On the basis of a close examination of the lines that introduce her, and a look at the sole corroborating source that has come down to us, we argued that early scholarship was correct in rendering the name as Thryth.
In the second part, we examined the highly ambiguous description of Thryth’s murderous career, and noted that it is not at all clear whether she actually killed anyone or whether her husband Offa reformed her by harsh punishment. After enumerating as far as possible the many ambiguities and alternative readings, we left off with a full retranslation of the passage.
One would think, then, that we have said enough on this subject. And as far as the primary sources and essential scholarship are concerned, this is probably the case.
Alas, we cannot wholly afford to ignore a third category of writing: academic papers of more dubious quality, produced by the many progressivist ideologues ensconced in the Old English academy. Needless to say, these include feminists, whose belief that women are harmed by ‘the male gaze’ and indulgence of fake sexual accusations require little comment. Much as the Red Guards of communist China might have found it hard to understand the guilty conscience of Dostoevsky’s Raskolnikov (who had, after all, done nothing worse than bump off some petty-bourgeois hag), the Blue Guards of democratist America and Europe can hardly be expected to share the traditional perspective of the Beowulf-poet on the viciousness of Thryth’s behaviour.
Don’t read me wrong here. Ever since its rediscovery in the 19th century, this poem has been argued over by ideologues in academies, and the competitive grinding of their axes against each other probably did more to advance than retard its study. Unfortunately, the ideology of the Blue Guards is much more hostile to the traditional worldview than that of the old Euronationalists, Angloliberals and folk-whisperers; and because it is more or less uniform across the Western bloc, and cannot be challenged in any fundamental way by anyone trying to pursue a normal scholarly career, its domination of the academy can only produce a dull conformity under a single Axe of Damocles. Here’s how some of the Blue Guards themselves describe the disposition of the Old English field (in the introduction to Feminist Approaches to Old English Studies, 2023):
In January 2016, the field of early medieval English studies was rocked by the revelation that one of its most prominent emeritus scholars [Allen J. Frantzen] had released a men’s rights manifesto [see here] on his website, arguing that feminism had completely dominated academic discourse at the expense of men. In the ensuing weeks, further allegations of misogyny and sexual harassment among early medievalists multiplied, dovetailing with the cultural energy of the #MeToo movement to launch an ongoing conversation about women’s place in the field, both as scholars and as subjects of study. … In the aftermath of 2016, conversations about the state of the field—who defines it, who it is for, who belongs, and who doesn’t—have proliferated on social media, at conference panels and roundtables, and in blog posts and journal special issues. The result is a long-overdue and much-needed reconsideration of how early medievalists, and medieval studies more broadly, demarcate both their objects of study and their methods of inquiry.
Note that no effort is made here to obscure the reality of a political inquisition, sparked by the discovery of anti-feminist tendencies in the writings of a retired professor, and fought in large part by accusations of ‘misogyny’ and ‘sexual harassment’ that conveniently materialized at just the right moment. The choice of a menacing tone over the customary pose of suffering victimhood and spontaneous self-defence might well be intentional, and the message to any scholars tempted to flirt with dissident viewpoints is pretty clear.
I am not part of the Old English academy, and never have been, but I read enough material produced by it to have acquired a vague impression of the results of this sort of thing. This is one in which a relatively select group of scholars holds the fort of established understanding, while a mob of mediocre ideologues (partly in academia, partly in the media) rampages unopposed across the interpretative landscape. The fort is too strong to be sacked, but the ideologues are privileged to defy it with impunity, and even the most ill-construed assault on it is unlikely to meet with retaliation as long as it goes under their banners.1
Note that I am not exactly blaming the scholars here. They want to do their work with minimal interference from political partisans, and find it better to humour or ignore falsehoods than to take up arms against them and end up being forced into surrender. But those further afield can only gain the impression that the established understanding is actually indefensible, or is defended merely by the dead weight of convention. And this is how we get to the nadir point at which a feminist can dress up her inane Beowulf parody as a ‘translation’, meet with gushing praise from the media for defying conventional scholarship, and fail to find anyone in the Old English academy willing to do the basic public service of pointing out her total ignorance of the original text and language.
In light of all this, returning to our topic, it should come as no surprise that feminists have managed to corner the market in interpretations of Thryth that depart from the range of views established by the mid-20th century. Thus, when we open the Wikipedia article on ‘Modthryth’ and scroll down to ‘alternate readings’, what we find in actuality are feminist readings:
While scholars such as R. D. Fulk read Modthryth in terms of the limiting tamed virago motif, it has been suggested that this reflects preconceptions among scholars. Erin Sebo and Cassandra Schilling point out that many of the negative attitudes to her are based on phrases that are unclear or seem to be the result of scribal error. They note that the Beowulf Poet introduces Modthryth by stressing "the importance of her role in the prosperity of the community, describing her as “fremu folces cwen” (1932a), a “good queen of the people”."
These quotations are from a paper by Sebo and Schilling (“Modthryth and the Problem of Peace-Weavers: Women and Political Power in Early Medieval England”, 2021) that is either inaccessible or steeply paywalled on all academic sites; but the style of argumentation is all too familiar to me from an early foray into feminist revisionism on Grendel’s mother. The modus operandi is to downplay or deny an obviously negative portrayal of a character by practicing a highly selective form of text-pedantry: seizing on some words, explaining away others, and all the while showing little respect for context and traditional referentiality (a.k.a. ‘limiting motifs’, ‘preconceptions’). This is how Christine Alfano was able to argue that a creature who lives at the bottom of a mere, gives birth to man-eating trolls, and takes sword-blows to the skull without damage was unjustly portrayed as a monster by conventional translators. Perhaps someone with an institutional subscription can let me know how Sebo and Schilling exonerate Thryth from the ‘awful crime’, ‘unqueenly behaviour’ and ‘false injury’ attributed to her by the Beowulf-poet.
But let’s return to Wikipedia’s wide selection of ‘alternate readings’. The remaining quotations are from feminist Helen Damico, feminist Mary Dockray-Miller, feminist Pat Belanoff, and Adrien Bonjour (a representative of older scholarly views, presumably thrown in to provide the barest appearance of variety). Belanoff’s article is not directly relevant to Thryth, and Damico’s is quite far off our topic as well (it draws a connection between Thryth and the valkyries that may or may not be valid)2; so that leaves us with Dockray-Miller’s paper, “The Masculine Queen of Beowulf” (1998).
Dockray-Miller, someone who was only too happy to egg on the post-2016 anti-rightist paranoia against her colleagues, would seem to be the most doctrinaire ideologue of the lot. It takes her a page or so of gender ideology from Judith Butler to get onto the subject of ‘Modthrytho’ proper, after which point she turns for further unlightenment to the theories of Luce Irigaray. The main principles that she extracts from them, respectively, are that 1) “performance, not biology, determines gender” and that 2) “woman has value only in that she can be exchanged”. I leave it to the reader to consider whether this amounts to a useful description of modern society, Anglo-Saxon society, ancient Germanic heroic society or any society at all, but the application to Beowulf is as follows: Thryth, interpreted here as a maiden who kills her suitors, is subverting the trade in peace-weaving queens by refusing to become an object of exchange and instead appropriating the masculine violence of a warrior.
At this point I can almost understand the reluctance of scholars to engage with feminists; it’s hard to know where to start hacking away at the roots and tendrils of this bizarre, poisonous, hothouse-flower ideology. Let’s step past Dockray-Miller’s utterly caricatured view of the role of queens, and focus on her apparent inability to distinguish one type of ‘performative masculinity’ from another. If Thryth is rejecting the female role of ‘peace-weaving’, and taking up the masculine one of violence and life-or-death decision, then there must be one or more male personages in the poem to whom she can be aptly compared. Dockray-Miller’s choice is none other than its hero: “Modþryðo, though female, is ultimately masculine in that she wields power in the same way that Beowulf does.”
Does she now? Perhaps the better part of Beowulf’s heroism has to do with his successful utilization of violence against enemies. But this is how the poem (lines 2179-80) describes his behaviour in his own hall, towards his own retainers:
Dreah æfter dome, neallas druncne slog
heorðgeneatas; næs him hreoh sefa...
(He acted with judgement, never ale-drunk slew
His hearth-companions; his heart was not brutal…)
Just as Thryth’s behaviour is contrasted to that of Hygd (the virtuous wife of King Hygelac of the Geats), Beowulf’s mildness to his own people is explicitly contrasted with the violence of Heremod, a tyrannical king of the Danes who ended up being driven into exile and meeting his death:
Breat bolgenmod beodgeneatas,
eaxlgesteallan, oþ þæt he ana hwearf,
mære þeoden, mondreamum from..
(Angrily he cut down his own companions,
His shoulder-comrades, until sole he went,
The great leader, from the joys of men… [lines 1713-15])
Dockray-Miller’s choice of Beowulf and not Heremod as male analogue to Thryth speaks volumes about her views on both characters. By way of evidence, she cites two words that supposedly show a “lexical association” between Thryth and Beowulf: handgewriþene (‘hand-twisted’, used of the bonds that tie Thryth’s victims) and mundgripe (‘hand-grip’, apparently used of their arrest). Only the second of these words is exclusively associated with Beowulf elsewhere in the poem, and the context of its use is quite different, unless you subscribe to the unlikely notion that Thryth wrestled her victims before sentencing them to death.
Once we follow up Dockray-Miller’s references, we learn that her argument is an inferior knock-off of a more convincing one by Constance Hieatt (a serious scholar, and not to my knowledge a feminist). In “Modþryðo and Heremod: Intertwined Threads in the Beowulf-Poet’s Web of Words” (1984), Hieatt draws the more intuitive analogy between Thryth and Heremod. She mentions the mundgripe association with Beowulf in passing, but notes that this could also reinforce an association with Heremod, since his role is that of a negative counterpart to Beowulf.3 She also draws a direct lexical association between Thryth and Heremod through another word, leodbealu (‘people-bale’, which seems to denote both regal oppression of a people and popular rebelliousness towards a ruler):
When Modþryðo married Offa and reformed, we are told (with typical litotes [i.e. understatement]) that she committed fewer leodbealewa (l. 1946). The last we hear of Heremod, however, is that at the end of his misspent life he suffered leodbealo longsum (l. 1722). The compound leodbealo does not appear anywhere else in Beowulf, or, for that matter, in the [Anglo-Saxon Poetic Records]. Surely it is not claiming too much to see it as a verbal link between these two contrasted figures…
Unlike the incidental mundgripe, the word leodbealu is of character-defining importance, and the fact that it is only ever used of Thryth and Heremod should be regarded as highly significant. The same can be said for the fact that Thryth and Heremod are deployed as negative counterparts to Hygd and Beowulf respectively. It would seem that the poet had in mind a consistent analogy between these personages, which might be represented as follows:
Beowulf : Heremod :: Hygd : Thryth
This brings us neatly to the question of why Thryth and Heremod act as they do. We are not told of Heremod’s reasons for cutting down his hearth-companions, other than that he was ‘swollen with rage’ (bolgenmod); but one imagines that they excited his rage with trivial or imagined insults, to which a good king like Beowulf would not have responded with violence. The difference has to do with Heremod’s ‘arrogant pride’ (oferhygd), portrayed as a corrupting force that caused kings to become stingy, touchy and ultimately violent towards their subordinates. This sort of masculine oversensitivity would be perfectly analogous to the ‘false outrage’ (ligetorn) that Thryth directs against any man who dares to look upon her beauty.
Once this point is grasped, much else falls into place, and falls like a ton of bricks upon Dockray-Miller’s argument. The difference between the traditional roles of the war-making king and peace-weaving queen is not at all relevant here; what is at issue is rather the gracious treatment of those under one’s command, which seems to have been seen as a duty (or at least an ideal) common to both men and women of high rank. Conversely, although the Beowulf-poet obviously had no concept of ‘sexual harrassment’, we can infer from his general attention to courtly propriety that he would not have approved of actual insults to a queen (which one expects would include openly lustful gawking and much more besides). We might even go so far as to reverse Dockray-Miller’s projection of modern ideology onto this poem, by applying the Thryth-Heremod analogy to modern society under the reign of that ideology. If Thryth has “something in common” with women who channel their aggression into nebulous sexual accusations4, then perhaps Heremod has something in common with young men corrupted by gang culture, who see fit to mete out savage retribution for anything they interpret as disrespect.
Here I leave the reader to draw out all the implications. Let us instead turn to an obvious difference between Heremod and Thryth, which is that the one ended up in fatal exile while the other became a virtuous queen. Since, as we have established, Thryth’s murderous motives are analogous to those of Heremod, I cannot but suspect that this difference in their fates implies a difference in the magnitude of their crimes.
One problem with allowing feminists to monopolize ‘alternate readings’ that some legitimate criticisms of older interpretations never come to light. One such criticism is that late-19th and early-20th-century scholars did not just ‘diminish’ female personages by making them out to be gentler than they really were5, but were also far too uncomfortable with the thought of their being treated ungently for any reason at all. (Case in point: Tolkien’s rather squeamish dismissal of the possibility that Thryth was ‘hamstrung’, addressed in the previous part of this post.6) Perhaps the main contributing factor in some cases was the influence of high-medieval chivalry; but in others, I suspect that it was the culture of the modern state, which was already well on its way to sanctifying the ‘fairer sex’ and converting its more fairly-off members into a self-righteous activist class.
Whatever you think of medieval chivalry, or its modern parody, it is clear that neither had much to do with the society reflected in traditional Germanic poetry. In Beowulf itself, Grendel’s mother is granted no more quarter than she gives, first seized by the hair and then summarily beheaded. In the Icelandic Prose Edda, Thor breaks the backs of the daughters of Geirrod when they try to crush him against a ceiling, and Hildebrand in the German Nibelungenlied hews down Queen Kriemhild for taking the lives of her brothers. This, perhaps, is ‘sexual equality’, but not as feminists know it.
The possible hamstringing of Thryth more or less fits into this traditional context (even if the use of this word is, in my opinion, better interpreted as some obscure metaphor); so too does the banishment and killing of ‘Quendrida’ in the Lives of Two Offas (even if the story has been heavily monkeyed with as we argued in the first part of this post). What does not fit in is the notion that Thryth could have terrorized and slaughtered her husband’s retainers, been let off scot-free (even ‘made light of’, in Tolkien’s phrase) by Offa, and then gone on not only to suffer no vendetta or rebellion but also to acquire a reputation for goodness.
Thus, without pretending to know any more about this forgotten tale than others, I must incline to the view that Thryth’s reputation for murderous accusations preceded her marriage to Offa; that she was, perhaps, banished by her father or packed off to Angel for her own protection; that her likely attempt to sentence one or more of her husband’s retainers to death was thwarted or ‘hamstrung’ by him before anyone was actually killed; and that she may have suffered punishment for any deaths that she did cause prior to her reformation. You may or may not agree; but if you too aspire to translate this great poem, I would at least advise you to approach this passage with a fine antenna to its ambiguities.
Note that the introduction to Feminist Approaches to Old English Studies, quoted above, goes on to applaud the (over)representation of women in the academy while complaining that feminist papers are still a very small percentage of Old English scholarship. This fits quite well with my impression of the situation; it is the clash of opposing views that causes the proliferation of papers, whereas those written from an ideological standpoint that cannot be seriously opposed without manufactured outcry and defenestrations can only sink like stones tossed into an empty well.
For an example of a new scholarly approach that was enforced by no political cosh, and generated a large amount of discussion, you can read my account of the progress of the oral theory in the Old English field: first treated as incontrovertible by its early proponents, then subjected to pushback by scholars like Larry Benson, causing it to dial back its claims considerably while still retaining some validity. Now let us imagine, first, that oral theory had been considered politically sacrosanct; further, that a certain number of sub-literate rustics (analogous to feminist quotistas) had been over-recruited and over-promoted into scholarly positions in order to peddle it; and finally, that these tribunes of the folk had been given special rights to make career-ending accusations against their colleagues for such nebulous things as ‘mockery’ and ‘elitism’. In this counterfactual scenario, the critics would almost certainly have stayed silent, and the oral theory would have carried on an uneasy coexistence with established literary approaches without generating much discussion or doing much to advance human knowledge.
This is not to say that there are no grounds for criticizing Belanoff’s article (available on JSTOR) or Damico’s (“The Valkyrie Reflex in Old English Literature”, in New Readings on Women in Old English Literature, 1990). One claim that stands out in both of them is that the Old English word ides ‘lady’ and its Old High German cognate itis (pl. idisi) referred to a type of minor goddess, as did the Old Norse cognate dís. This is questionable, since the Old English word was used for any woman of rank without supernatural connotations, and the Old Norse one could also be used for a sister or maiden in general; the Old High German word is attested on a charm that apparently refers to supernatural women, but some Old English charms refer to similar entities merely as ‘women’ (wif). One suspects that ‘lady’ or ‘woman’ was the primary meaning of the Proto-Germanic word, since this is the most commonly attested meaning in the daughter languages; the opposite argument is quite defensible, but Damico states it as fact and goes on to build key parts of her argument on it, which strikes me as being a bit misleading.
My view is that the choice of this word is without significance as far as the analogy is concerned. In the previous part of this post, I suggested that the poet used mundgripe in this context as a pun on mund ‘lordly protection’, which is of course subverted by the wife of a lord who murders the retainers under his protection.
Dockray-Miller compares Thryth to Anita Hill, the accuser of US Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas. Perhaps the closer analogy with Carolyn Bryant slipped her mind.
This article seems basically correct in its criticism of Klaeber, but is also marred by what appears at this point to be a common pattern of stretching and distortion in feminist scholarship, specifically in the footnote on pages 8-9 in which Bloomfield claims that Old English milde ‘mild’ is a false friend that primarily meant ‘munificent’. This claim at least has not gone without (somewhat inconspicuous) pushback: in a footnote to an article entitled “Some Lexical Problems in the Interpretation and Textual Criticism of Beowulf” (steeply paywalled, but the footnotes are free), R.D. Fulk points out that Bloomfield’s argument is not only wrong but also based on a misrepresentation of another paper.
In Tolkien’s defence, this ‘squeamishness’ or ‘softheartedness’ was not reserved for the female sex alone, at least not in his own works. In The Road to Middle-Earth, Tom Shippey discusses Tolkien’s unwillingness to subject his characters to scenes of pain.