Beyond Abjection: The Problem with Grendels Mother Again

Beyond Abjection:
The Problem with Grendels Mother Again

Rene R. Trilling
Traditional critical paradigms have generally failed to come to grips with the
character of Grendels mother in Beowulf. As a monster in the heroic order, and as
a female in a masculine world, she confounds simple definitions and crosses the
boundaries that define the limits of agency. Grendels mother functions as a nexus
for the representation of the many dialectical tensions male/female, human/
monster, hall/wilderness, feud/peace, symbolic/semiotic that both underwrite and
critique the poems symbolic order. As a result, the character offers insight into
the symbolic process and the ways in which readers approach the distant world
of the medieval text.

Like the poem of Beowulf, Beowulf criticism seems to struggle with effective
ways of understanding Grendels mother in all her complexity and liminality. Her
alienation is clear enough; as both monster and woman, she occupies a subjective
space that is doubly removed from the meaning-making structures of heroic poetry.
Yet the poet deliberately places this ambiguous figure at the narrative and structural
centre of the text, forbidding readers to overlook her impact and using her to
provoke critical commentary on the heroic system that underwrites the poem on
either side of her. The appearance of Grendels mother disrupts the strictly ordered
heroic world of the text, and the narrative engages in a mad scramble to conceal the
disruption behind a mask of masculine reassertion. This response is parallelled, in
some ways, by the critical tradition, which finds it difficult to categorize Grendels
mother. She is a critical aporia, as Gillian Overing has noted, precisely because she

 John D. Niles pointed out decades ago that the battle with Grendels mother is at the
structural centre of the poem; see Ring Composition and the Structure of Beowulf, PMLA,
94 (1979), 92435. The episode concerning Grendels mother, from her first approach to
Heorot to Beowulfs triumphant return from the mere with Grendels severed head, begins
slightly more than one third of the way into the poem (line 1251 out of 3182) and takes up
400 lines, or approximately 13% of the epic poems total length hardly an insignificant
amount. This compares favourably to the 767 lines taken up by the Grendel story, much of
which chronicles Beowulfs journey to Heorot and his interaction with the court there. The
actual battle, culminating in Grendels mothers death, is described in no less than 72 lines
(compared to 90 for the battle with Grendel).

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 Rene R. Trilling

is not quite human, or, rather, she has her own particular brand of otherness; her
inhuman affiliation and propensities make it hard to distinguish between what is
monstrous and what is female. In a recent PMLA article, Paul Acker offers some
provocative suggestions about the figure of Grendels mother as the embodiment
of Anglo-Saxon cultural anxieties surrounding feud culture and heroic identity.
The horror of an avenging mother, he argues, capitalizes on the primordial fear of
maternal power that underwrites patriarchal society. Through Grendels mother,
the text projects the anxieties it cannot otherwise adequately voice concerning
the inherent weaknesses in the system of feuding and revenge. Critics interested
in Grendels mother have frequently noted the monstrosity of the female avenger,
and Ackers claims that her abrogation of the acceptable maternal role reveals
the insecurities of the Anglo-Saxon male psyche continue a tradition of feminist
psychoanalytic scholarship on Anglo-Saxon culture. Although it is a far cry
from the dismissive treatments of Grendels mother common in earlier Beowulf
scholarship, however, even this article fails to grant centrality to the monstrous
 Gillian Overing, Language, Sign, and Gender in Beowulf (Carbondale: Southern Illinois
University Press, 1990), p. 81.
 Paul Acker, Horror and the Maternal in Beowulf, PMLA, 121.3 (2006), 70216.
 The same argument, drawing on the analysis of archetypes, was put forth by Gwendolyn
A. Morgan in Mothers, Monsters, Maturation: Female Evil in Beowulf, Journal of the
Fantastic in the Arts, 4 (1991), 5468.
 Acker, Horror and the Maternal, p. 705; Kevin Kiernan has also argued that a monsters
revenge-killing functions as a critique of the heroic society it mimics (Beowulf and the
Beowulf Manuscript [New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 1981]).
 The earliest feminist analyses of Grendels mother defined this paradigm; see Jane Chance
Nitzsche, The Structural Unity of Beowulf: The Problem of Grendels Mother, Texas Studies
in Literature and Language, 22.3 (1980), 287303. Chance further examines womens roles
in heroic literature, and especially Grendels mothers, in Woman as Hero in Old English
Literature (Syracuse: Syracuse University Press, 1985).
 Helen Bennett first surveyed feminist work in the field in From Peace Weaver to Text
Weaver: Feminist Approaches to Old English Studies, in Twenty Years of the Years Work
in Old English Studies, ed. Katherine OBrien OKeeffe, OEN Subsidia 15 (Binghamton:
State University of New York Press, 1989), pp. 2342. Alexandra Hennessy Olsen offers
an extensive overview of work on the women of Beowulf in Gender Roles, in A Beowulf
Handbook, ed. Robert E. Bjork and John D. Niles (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press,
1997), pp. 31124.
 For example, J. R. R. Tolkien manages almost completely to overlook Grendels mother,
explicating the poem as a bipartite epic based around Beowulfs encounters with Grendel
and the dragon and considering Grendels mother only in a parenthetical comment in

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Beyond Abjection: The Problem with Grendels Mother Again 

figure herself, focusing instead on Old Norse analogues of female vengeance.

Ackers article offers a convenient place to begin unpacking the paradox of
Grendels mother, chiefly because it introduces a key critical concept into the
discussion: the abject, or that which is expelled from within a society in order to
define cultural boundaries. Julia Kristeva introduces abjection as a fundamental
mechanism for charting the limits of culture:

The abject confronts us, on the one hand, with those fragile states where man strays
on the territories of animal. Thus, by way of abjection, primitive societies have
marked out a precise area of their culture in order to remove it from the threatening
world of animals or animalism, which were imagined as representatives of sex
and murder.

Societies use abjection to establish the boundary between sacred and profane,
between culture and chaos. In this sense, Kristeva writes, abjection is coextensive
with social and symbolic order, on the individual as well as the collective level.10
From a psychoanalytic perspective, the integrity of the speaking subject depends
on the rejection of the maternal body and the entry into language; for Kristeva,
then, the abject replicates, at the level of the collective, the individual subjects
rejection of the maternal. It is the key to establishing the boundaries between the
categories of civilized/uncivilized, masculine/feminine, and human/nonhuman
the same categories that Grendels mother persistently disrupts. Most importantly
for Acker, the category of the abject opposes the maternal to the Law of the Father
the symbolic order that is the condition of possibility of social organization. As
Acker suggests, Grendels mother, as the embodiment of the maternal principle,
represents that most basic of fears: the return of the repressed.11

Appendix A; see Tolkien, Beowulf: The Monsters and the Critics, Proceedings of the
British Academy, 22 (1936), 24595 (p. 280). Paul Beekman Taylor likewise views the battle
with Grendels mother as merely a reprise of the primary Grendel fight; see Beowulfs
Second Grendel Fight, Neuphilologische Mitteilungen, 86 (1985), 6269.
 Julia Kristeva, Powers of Horror: An Essay on Abjection, trans. Leon S. Roudiez (New
York: Columbia University Press, 1982), pp. 1213; emphasis in original.
10 Kristeva, Powers of Horror, p. 67.
11 Sigmund Freud developed the idea of the return of the repressed throughout his work, but
see especially Repression, in Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of
Sigmund Freud, ed. and trans. James Strachey, 24 vols (London: Hogarth Press, 195374),
XIV (1957), 14358.

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 Rene R. Trilling

Linking the figure of Grendels mother to Kristevas abject, as Acker does, is

an inspired move; but it re-inscribes a static binary structure that has confounded
readings of Grendels mother from the beginning. Grendels mother is more than
simply the abject, and the implications of this line of inquiry demand further
consideration. The abject, after all, originates within the culture from which it
is expunged; its powers of horror stem from precisely the originary unity that
precedes abjection, and the abject terrifies us because we recognize that it is really a
part of us. Beowulf works hard perhaps overly hard to establish the Grendelkins
origins outside of heroic culture, though the clearly liminal relation between the
Grendelkin and the society they invert and mimic is precisely what allows them
to terrify. Maternity alone, however, even bound up as it is with the abject, is not
enough to account for Grendels mothers powers of horror, since all the named
women in the poem, and some who are not named, are also mothers. It is, rather,
her uncontainability, in contrast to the clearly delimited agentic potentials of the
equally maternal Wealhtheow, Hildeburh, and Modthryth, that sets Grendels
mother apart from them. More important than her maternity or her abjection is
the fact that Grendels mother operates outside of the linguistic economy that
underwrites social organization within the poem. As such, she is categorically
different from the other women of the poem. Numerous critics, prominently
Overing and Clare A. Lees, have succeeded in demonstrating that Beowulf is an
essentially masculinist poem whose tightly proscribed agenda has little or no room
for female agency. They argue that although women are excluded from the power
structures of the society they live in, they remain active, if generally unsuccessful,
members of that society.12 Yet Grendels mother is, by both origin and gender, cut
off from the social and linguistic communities that proscribe the agency of the
poems other female characters. In this sense, it might be more productive to think
about Grendels mother in conjunction with Kristevas notion of the semiotic, the
feminine chora that precedes and exceeds representation, especially as it relates
to the structuring of the (inherently masculinist) symbolic order.13 The dialectical
relation between the semiotic and the symbolic conditions the possibility of the

12 See Overing, Language, Sign, and Gender; and Lees, Men and Beowulf, in Medieval
Masculinities: Regarding Men in the Middle Ages, ed. Clare A. Lees (Minneapolis: University
of Minnesota Press, 1994), pp. 12948. The role of women in Anglo-Saxon literature and
society continues to be debated, however; for a contrasting argument and an overview of
scholarship, see Olsen, Gender Roles, pp. 31124.
13 Kristeva, Revolution in Poetic Language, trans. Margaret Waller (New York: Columbia
University Press, 1984), esp. pp. 57106.

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Beyond Abjection: The Problem with Grendels Mother Again 

signifying process: without the unrepresentable, there can be no representation.14

Most importantly, it is constantly in process, and that continuous movement may
serve as a more useful model for understanding Grendels mother in her constantly
shifting signification than Ackers use of the abject as a static category. Spelling
out the implications of that connection, and determining what Grendels mother
offers to Beowulf and its readers, demands careful and prolonged consideration.
Most urgently, it demands a re-examination of the poem itself, to look closely at
its portrayal of the monstrous feminine figure and to consider the significance of
that portrayal for questions of literary artifice, social cohesion, and the function
of language itself. All of the poems monsters both threaten and sustain social
order, but Grendels mother is different. Abject from human culture, acting outside
of human language, Grendels mother is the figure who grounds the possibility
of the symbolic order itself, as well as the society that it helps to uphold. Of all
the poems characters, she is the most difficult to pin down. Aligning Grendels
mother with the semiotic may help us to better understand her difference from
potentially disruptive women like Wealhtheow or Modthryth, as well as from the
other monsters, Grendel and the dragon.
The ambiguity of Grendels mother, and the difficulty critics have in
distinguishing between what is monstrous about her and what is simply female,
are due in part to the fact that much of her supposed monstrosity is the result
of how the poem has been translated. Christine Alfano has demonstrated that
Grendels mothers monstrosity is often attributed by the lexical choices of
modern translators rather than necessarily inherent in the Anglo-Saxon text: the
semantic ranges of many words, such as ides [lady] and aglcwif [warrior-woman]
take on shades of monstrosity when referring to Grendels mother that they do not
necessarily bear in other contexts.15 Such revelations about lexical bias offer strong
evidence for traditional feminist arguments about the masculine bias in language
itself.16 As Alfanos work shows, linguistic bias can give rise to critical bias, and
scholars approach Grendels mother through inherited critical paradigms that arise

14 Kristeva, Revolution in Poetic Language, pp. 2137.

15 The Issue of Feminine Monstrosity: A Reevaluation of Grendels Mother, Comitatus, 23
(1992), 116 (p. 2). Sherman M. Kuhn similarly finds linguistic bias in dictionary definitions
of aglca more generally; see Old English aglca Middle Irish oclach, in Linguistic
Method: Essays in Honor of Herbert Penzl, ed. Irmengard Rauch and Gerald F. Carr (The
Hague: Mouton Publishers, 1979), pp. 21330.
16 Luce Irigaray, This Sex Which is not One, trans. Catharine Porter (Ithaca: Cornell University
Press, 1985), pp. 6885.

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 Rene R. Trilling

from an oversimplified understanding of her character. In most cases, her actions,

like her titles, are similarly devoid of inherent monstrosity; as most of the critics
acknowledge, and as even the Danes admit, she attacks Heorot only to perform
the necessary act of vengeance for her kinsmans death. Since both the men in the
poem and the critics who read it are able to identify with her motives, the extent of
her monstrosity is necessarily questionable. The dramatic tension between fearing
something as monster and understanding it as human has been explored in some
detail in relation to Grendel himself, but Grendels mother has yet to receive such
extensive personal treatment.17 In many ways, such as her desire for vengeance
rather than random killing, she is far more human than Grendel is.18
In comparison to her son, Grendels mother is a vague figure indeed. Grendels
role in the text is never in question. His appearance and genealogy might be
uncertain, but he is plainly monstrous, a night-stepper who roams the wastelands,
haunted by the joys of men.19 His behaviour sets him in opposition to humanity;
he attacks the Danes for twelve years through jealousy and hatred, and he has no
interest in or desire for any civilized means of feud settlement.20 He meets his
end not in battle, as a man should, but in retribution; Beowulf waits to catch him
in the act of committing his crime, and Grendels death is clearly a punishment.
17 The problem of monsters who seem strangely human has fascinated critics throughout the
history of Beowulf studies. The bibliography of criticism dealing with the monster/human
dichotomy in Beowulf is enormous; a few of the more influential studies include Kenneth
Sisam, Beowulfs Fight with the Dragon, Review of English Studies, n.s. 9 (1958), 12940;
Doreen M. E. Gilliam, The Use of the Term glca in Beowulf at Lines 813 and 2592,
Studia Germanica Gandensia, 3 (1961), 14569; Joseph L. Baird, Grendel the Exile,
Neuphilologische Mitteilungen, 67 (1966), 37581; Stanley B. Greenfield, A Touch of
the Monstrous in the Hero, or Beowulf Re-Marvellized, English Studies, 63 (1982), 294
300; Raymond P. Tripp, More About the Fight with the Dragon: Beowulf 2208b3182,
Commentary, Edition, and Translation (Lanham, MD: University Press of America, 1983);
and Andy Orchard, Pride and Prodigies: Studies in the Monsters of the Beowulf-Manuscript
(Cambridge: D.S. Brewer, 1995).
18 Several critics, like Alfano, have argued for a more humanized reading of Grendels
mother; see, for example, Keith P. Taylor, Beowulf 1259a: The Inherent Nobility of
Grendels Mother, English Language Notes, 31.3 (1994), 1325; and Melinda Menzer,
Aglcwif (Beowulf 1259a): Implications for -wif Compounds, Grendels Mother, and Other
Aglcan, English Language Notes, 34.1 (1996), 16.
19 Beowulf, 8690a. Beowulf, ed. Friedrich Klaeber, 3rd ed. (Boston: Heath, 1950). All
quotations are taken from this edition and are denoted by line number. All translations are
my own.
20 Beowulf, 154b158.

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Beyond Abjection: The Problem with Grendels Mother Again 

The men in the hall rejoice in his death, and peace and order are restored to the
realm (for the time being). Grendels mother, on the other hand, does not fit so
easily into the role of monster/outsider. Her actions, unlike Grendels, align her
with human heroic values. Her attack on the Danes is not monstrous in the same
way that Grendels is, but rather motivated by sadness and anger at the murder of
her son. Danes and readers alike understand that her purpose is vengeance: her
only kinsman has been killed, and there is no one else to avenge his death. The
text states explicitly that she gegan wolde / sorhfulne si, sunu deo wrecan
[wished to accomplish the sorrowful undertaking, to avenge the death of her son].21
Hrothgar himself is aware of this detail, for he too points out that she wolde hyre
mg wrecan, / ge feor hafa fhe gestled [wished to avenge her kinsman, and
has by far avenged the feud].22 Named by the text only as a modor, her identity is
bound up in the existence of her child; without a son, she is no longer a mother,
and Grendels death leaves her without identity, without a role to play she
signifies nothing. Unlike Hildeburh, she has no men to do the job of vengeance for
her; it is up to her alone to seek compensation for the loss of her kinsman. There
is no possibility of a settlement; she is an outsider to the social group, and as a
woman, she is doubly outside.23 So she proceeds to their hall, takes one of their
number a life for a life and returns quickly, and not altogether bravely, to her
home beneath the mere. The attack is far from unmotivated and quite unlike the
massive, repeated depredations suffered under Grendels reign of terror. To judge
from actions alone, Grendels mother has far more in common with the men of
Heorot than she does with her son.24
If the poem is clear about what Grendel and his mother do, it is considerably
less so about how to describe or define them. The true nature of the Grendelkin
is never quite clear, and it is this very uncertainty that makes both Grendel and

21 Beowulf, 1277b1278.
22 Beowulf, 1339b1340.
23 As Harry Berger, Jr. and H. Marshall Leicester, Jr. point out, heroic society prefers feud to
monetary settlements anyway; see Berger and Leicester, Social Structure As Doom: The
Limits of Heroism in Beowulf, in Old English Studies in Honour of John C. Pope, ed.
Robert B. Burlin, Edward B. Irving, Jr., and Marie Borroff (Toronto: University of Toronto
Press, 1974), pp. 3779.
24 Kevin Kiernan suggests that Grendels mother accepted and adhered to the heroic ethic of
the blood feud . Her grief seems as real as Hrothgars, and her response, swift life-for-life
vengeance, is (mutatis mutandis) at least as heroic as Beowulfs. See Grendels Heroic
Mother, In Geardagum, 6 (1984), 1333 (pp. 2527).

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 Rene R. Trilling

his mother frightening figures to begin with.25 The poem may refer to them at
times as wer or wif respectively, but it displays considerable confusion about
whether the Grendelkin are actually human.26 Grendel is described as being on
weres wstmum [in the form of a man],27 and as J. R. R. Tolkien points out, he is
called not only by all names applicable to ordinary men, as wer, rinc, guma, maga,
but he is conceived as having a spirit, other than his body, that will be punished.28
Yet he also receives the epithets of demon, devil, and spirit, and his hostility to
men makes him something other than human. It seems reasonable to infer, then,
that Grendels mother would be equally indistinct, and indeed Tolkien finds that
Grendels mother is naturally described, when separately treated, in precisely
similar terms: she is wif, ides, aglc wif ... ; and rising to the inhuman: merewif,
brimwylf, grundwyrgen.29 Her humanity seems similarly unclear; like Grendel,
she also has a soul, and the two occupy a liminal space between the human and
the demonic.30 As Melinda Menzer points out, on the other hand, the many wif
compounds used to describe Grendels mother clearly denote a woman, not just
a female creature.31 The poems imprecision about Grendels mother blurs the
clearly drawn boundaries between humans and monsters, us and them the very
boundaries that abjection works to create and sustain. Perhaps most importantly,
25 Grendels indistinct nature is precisely what makes him a terrifying figure, and the poems
shadowy descriptions of the Grendelkin are fundamental to the readers perception of fear;
see Michael Lapidge, Beowulf and the Psychology of Terror, in Heroic Poetry in the Anglo-
Saxon Period: Studies in Honor of Jess B. Bessinger, Jr., ed. Helen Damico and John Leyerle
(Kalamazoo: Medieval Institute Publications, 1993), pp. 373402.
26 Hrothgar can refer only to vague reports about mysterious figures prowling the moors,
one of whom is known as Grendel (Beowulf, 1347b1355a). Nora Chadwick surveyed the
question What is the nature of the monsters? with reference to the Norse tradition in The
Monsters and Beowulf, in The Anglo-Saxons: Studies in Some Aspects of their History and
Culture Presented to Bruce Dickins, ed. Peter Clemoes (London: Bowes and Bowes, 1959),
pp. 171203
27 Beowulf, 1352a.
28 Tolkien, Beowulf, p. 279.
29 Tolkien, Beowulf, p. 280.
30 Frank Battaglia suggests that Grendels mother stands in for the Germanic Earth Goddess,
which the pseudo-Christian Beowulf defeats; see The Germanic Earth Goddess in Beowulf?
The Mankind Quarterly, 35 (1995), 3969. Thomas D. Hill has also connected Grendels
mother to a tradition of helrunan, or giantesses (Haliurunnas, Helrunan, and the History
of Grendels Mother [paper, annual meeting of the Modern Language Association, New
Orleans, 29 December 2001]).
31 Menzer concludes that whatever else she may be, she is a woman (Aglcwif, p. 5).

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Beyond Abjection: The Problem with Grendels Mother Again 

however, there is something about her that exceeds representation; the process of
signification leaves something behind when it grapples with her, making her the
dialectical obverse of the clearly defined social hierarchies that structure the heroic
world.32 The language of the poem is thus uncertain about how to contain Grendels
mother, and the breakdown in linguistic designation becomes increasingly more
pronounced as her agency manifests in action.33
If the titles applied to Grendels mother render her humanity questionable,
however, they leave little doubt as to her gender. She is named specifically and
repeatedly as modor [mother] and mg [kinswoman], and the repeated use of these
epithets would seem to indicate that the relation holds some meaning within the
poem; why, for example, is she not an avenging brother or uncle? Her primary title,
naming as it does the uniquely female capacity to give birth, genders her beyond
question; the poem makes her his mother, not just any avenging relative, and it
does so for a variety of reasons. The horror of the maternal and its relation to the
abject is certainly chief among them; yet, at the same time, the poem assumes
the same kind of affective bond between Grendel and his mother as that between
a human mother and child, and this bond provides the motivation for Grendels
mothers attack on Heorot. Additionally, maternity is nothing if not a physical,
bodily state; to be a mother is to fulfil the functional destiny of the female body.
Her role as mother forces us to focus on her femininity, but not in the abstract; she
is a concrete, material, bodily representation. This emphasis on bodily materiality,
then, reminds us that Grendels mother operates in the realm of physical agency.
Grendels mother is a woman of action, and her actions respond forcefully to a
maternal problem the loss of a child that Wealhtheow can only forestall with
words, and to which Hildeburh cannot even give voice in mourning. As Helen
Bennett notes, Absent from the field of action [in Beowulf], women surround
the action with their words: urging before and officially mourning after.34 The
words of women Wealhtheows attempt to protect her sons with well-spoken

32 Kristeva writes: Ultimately, such a dialectic lets us view signifying practices as

asymmetrically divided neither absolutizing the thetic into a possible theological
prohibition, nor negating the thetic in the fantasy of a pulverizing irrationalism . Instead
we see the condition of the subject of significance as a heterogeneous contradiction between
two irreconcilable elements separate but inseparable from the process in which they assume
asymmetrical functions (Revolution in Poetic Language, p. 82; emphasis in original).
33 See below, pp. 1416.
34 Helen Bennett, The Female Mourner at Beowulfs Funeral, Exemplaria, 4 (1992), 3550
(p. 42).

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10 Rene R. Trilling

words, and the keening of a woman beside a funeral pyre stir pathos with their
brave futility, but they are unable to turn the course of events away from tragedy,35
and Hildeburhs complete silence, lacking even the capacity to mourn her son
and brother, embodies the catastrophic destiny of the women of Beowulf.36 The
contrast between the active agency of Grendels mother and the passive agentic
capacities of other women, such as Wealhtheow, Hildeburh, and the female
mourner at Beowulfs funeral, sharpen the typical heroic dichotomy of words
and deeds. While the actions of Grendels mother underscore the limitations of
women interpellated by the symbolic order, however, they also stem, paradoxically,
from her own limitations. As perennial outsiders, without access to the symbolic
order, the Grendelkin seek solace because the cultural rituals of frie [peace] are
denied to them. In contrast to Wealhtheow, whose linguistic propriety dooms
her attempts at agency to failure, Grendels mother manifests not only as the
abject, transgressing boundaries of the social, but also as that which is outside the
boundaries of language the semiotic chora that both sustains and threatens the
symbolic order itself. Whether or not her agency can be counted as successful,
however, is a question to which we shall return in due course.
It is, finally, the very indeterminacy of Grendels mother, as a very material
female avenger, that makes her so threatening to the Danes, and the varying layers
of ambiguity monster or human, woman or warrior add up to a proportionally
more dangerous creature. To compensate, the texts language goes to great lengths
to reassure us that because she is female, her attack is less fearsome than Grendels
was. The poem asserts that, because of her gender, she could not be as strong as
her son:

Ws se gryre lssa
efne swa micle, swa bi mga crft,
wiggryre wifes be wpnedmen,
onne heoru bunden, hamere geruen,
sweord swate fah swin ofer helme
ecgum dyhtig andweard scire.37

35 As Overing argues in Language, Sign, and Gender, pp. 88101. But see also Helen
Damico, who ascribes significant agency to Wealhtheows social role as queen in Beowulfs
Wealhtheow and the Valkyrie Tradition (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1984).
36 Martin Camargo, The Finn Episode and the Tragedy of Revenge in Beowulf, Studies in
Philology, 78.5 (1981), 12034.
37 Beowulf, 1282b1287.

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Beyond Abjection: The Problem with Grendels Mother Again 11

[The terror was less by just as much as the strength of a female, the war-terror of a
woman, is less than that of a weaponed mans, when the ornamented sword, forged
by the hammer, the sword shining with blood, the doughty edge, cuts through the
boar-image adorning the helmet opposite.]

We now face an enemy whose weaknesses are repeatedly underscored in the text and
whose ferocity is always subordinated to that of her son. Yet the narrative action of
the poem belies this assertion, and her attack, though of less magnitude, is far more
disturbing to the Danes.38 While their response to Grendels attack was twelve years
of passive suffering, in this case they call for immediate action: Hrae ws to bure
Beowulf fetod, / sigoreadig secg [Beowulf was quickly fetched to the chamber, the
victorious man].39 Beowulf does not wait in the dark for her to attack the following night.
Rather, he replies to Hrothgars summons at first light, and encourages the old king:

Ne sorga, snotor guma! Selre bi ghwm,

t he his freond wrece, onne he fela murne.

Aris, rices weard, uton hrae feran,
Grendles magan gang sceawigan.
Ic hit e gehate: no he on helm losa,
ne on foldan fm, ne on fyrgenholt,
ne on gyfenes grund, ga r he wille!

a ws Hrogare hors gebted,
wicg wundenfeax. Wisa fengel
geatolic gende; gumfea stop
lindhbbendra.40

[Do not worry, wise man. It is better for a man to avenge his friend than to mourn
much ... . Arise, king of the realm, let us go quickly to follow the track of Grendels
kinswoman. I promise you this: he will not escape to his refuge, nor to the protection
of the field, nor to the mountain wood, nor to the bottom of the ocean, go where
he will! ... Then Hrothgars horse, the mount with braided mane, was bridled. The
wise, splendid prince advanced; the foot-troop of shield-bearers marched.]

38 Martin Puhvel suggests that Grendels mothers strength and fearsomeness place her in the
tradition of the demonic hag of early Irish legend; see The Might of Grendels Mother,
Folklore, 80 (1969), 8188.
39 Beowulf, 13101311a.
40 Beowulf, 138485; 139094; 13991402a.

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There is no mistaking the sense of urgency in this passage; Grendels mother is a

threat which must be eradicated immediately, and the text itself begins this eradication
through the use of masculine pronouns to describe the threat.41 There is no time for
Beowulfs usual heroics. While the attacks of the supposedly more terrifying Grendel
were borne for twelve years, Grendels mother, presumably less fearsome and therefore
less dangerous, stirs the Danes to immediate retaliation. Not only that, but it is a battle
to which Beowulf will not march alone. The brave warrior who faced Grendel alone
and without armour or weapons sets out accompanied not only by Hrothgar on his
noble horse, but by an entire troop of armed men, both his retainers and Hrothgars. A
whole army pursues this single female attacker in a martial display that underscores
both the masculinity and the propriety of their response. Though Beowulf will face the
enemy alone, his brothers-in-arms rally to support him, and this display of force works
to reassert masculine symbolic control over the business of feud and revenge.
The urgency of the Danes response becomes all the more evident as Beowulf
prepares for the fight at the mere. When he was making ready for his battle with
Grendel, he boasted

[I]c t onne forhicge, swa me Higelac sie,

min mondrihten modes blie,
t ic sweord bere oe sidne scyld,
geolorand to gue, ac ic mid grape sceal
fon wi feonde ond ymb feorh sacan,
la wi laum; r gelyfan sceal
Dryhtnes dome se e hine dea nime.42

[I shall then disdain so that my liege lord Hygelac may be pleased with me in
spirit that I should carry a sword or a broad shield, a yellow shield boss to battle,
but with my grip I must grasp the enemy and struggle for life, foe against foe; there
he whom death takes must trust in the judgment of the Lord.]

The situation now is quite different. Beowulf might be expected to boast once
again that he can dispatch this monster with his bare hands; after all, her attack
was far less devastating than Grendels, and she is only a female. But he takes an
entirely different approach. In order to contend with the merewif, Beowulf straps
on the full protection of the battle-hardened warrior in an amazingly detailed
descriptive passage that is worth quoting in its entirety:
41 See below, pp. 1416.
42 Beowulf, 43541.

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Beyond Abjection: The Problem with Grendels Mother Again 13

Gyrede hine Beowulf

eorlgewdum, nalles for ealdre mearn;
scolde herebyrne hondum gebroden,
sid ond searofah sund cunnian,
seo e bancofan beorgan cue,
t him hildegrap hrere ne mihte,
eorres inwitfeng aldre gescean;
ac se hwita helm hafelan werede,
se e meregrundas mengan scolde,
secan sundgebland since geweorad,
befongen freawrasnum, swa hine fyrndagum
worhte wpna smi, wundrum teode,
besette swinlicum, t hine syan no
brond ne beadomecas bitan ne meahton.
Ns t onne mtost mgenfultuma,
t him on earfe lah yle Hrogares;
ws m hftmece Hrunting nama;
t ws an foran ealdgestreona;
ecg ws iren, atertanum fah,
ahyrded heaoswate; nfre hit t hilde ne swac
manna ngum ara e hit mid mundum bewand,
se e gryresias gegan dorste,
folcstede fara; ns t forma si,
t hit ellenweorc fnan scolde.43

[Beowulf prepared himself in a warriors trappings, he was not at all worried

about his life; the battle corselet woven by hand, broad and stained with battle,
had to try the waters, that corselet which knew how to protect the bone chamber
so that the battle-grip, the malicious grasp of the angry one, could not harm his
life, and the shining helmet protected his head, the helmet, made worthy with
treasure, surrounded by a mail net, which had to stir up the mere-bottom, to seek
the surging water; thus did the smith of weapons fashion it long ago, furnished it
with wonders, adorned it with boar-images so that afterwards no edge or battle-
sword would be able to cut it. That was not then the least of powerful aids that the
court spokesman of Hrothgar gave to him in his need; the battle-sword was called
Hrunting; that was the foremost of ancient treasures; the edge was iron, shining
with twisted lines, hardened with battle-blood; it had never failed at battle any
man of those who grasped it with his hands, he who dared to undertake the tide of
battle at the meeting place of the hostile ones; that was not the first time that it had
to perform courageous deeds.]

43 Beowulf, 1441b1464.

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14 Rene R. Trilling

We already know that Grendels mother is supposed to be less terrifying than

Grendel; for a man about to demean himself by fighting a female rather than a male,
Beowulf is surprisingly well outfitted. His sudden need for armour and weapons
indicates that he is about to face a greater enemy than Grendel, not a lesser one.
Moreover, his gear is described as the oldest, most battle-worn, and therefore most
reliable of warriors equipment. These are the specifically masculine symbolic
trappings of warrior culture, functioning even more powerfully as signs of heroic
ideology than they do as protection in battle. Perhaps we are simply meant to be
reassured by the statement that Hrunting nfre ... t hilde ne swac, but all of these
factors work rhetorically to indicate that Beowulf is rather more nervous about
this encounter than he was about his fight with Grendel. He certainly isnt taking
any chances. The conscious and deliberate display of masculinity counteracts
and works to overpower the feminine nature of the threat as do the masculine
pronouns used to refer to Grendels mother as ravager of Heorot. As female attacker
and semiotic chora, Grendels mother provokes a massive mobilization of the
symbolic system that upholds heroic values and social structure.
The extent to which the language of the poem itself works to cover up the
agency of her character is perhaps the most compelling evidence that Grendels
mother presents a greater threat even than Grendel, and a threat that strikes at the
most basic levels of social/linguistic organization from its semiotic outside. When
the entity about to attack Heorot is introduced, she is described first as the distinctly
feminine Grendles modor44 and then is masculinized two lines later as se e
wteregesan wunian scolde [he who had to dwell in the terrible waters].45 As the
poem prepares us for Grendels mother as an attacking monster, it masculinizes
her; similarly, as Beowulf promises to follow her, he turns her into a him:

no he on helm losa,
ne on foldan fm, ne on fyrgenholt,
ne on gyfenes grund, ga r he wille!46

[ ... he will not escape to his refuge, nor to the protection of the field, nor to the
mountain wood, nor to the bottom of the ocean, go where he will!]

Finally, Hrothgar himself refers to her as the sinnigne secg [sinful man] who

44 Beowulf, 1258b.
45 Beowulf, 1260; emphasis mine.
46 Beowulf, 1392b1394b; emphasis mine.

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Beyond Abjection: The Problem with Grendels Mother Again 15

lives in the terrifying mere.47 In all three cases, the active and powerful figure
is identified by the masculine pronoun, regardless of her biological gender or
even her primary identity as a mother. Neither the narrator nor the characters can
comfortably attach a feminine pronoun to the perpetrator of an attack on Heorot.
According to the text, then, the creature who attacks Heorot, and whom Beowulf
tracks to the mere, is not a female after all it has, on the literal level, become
male, because an active body in this cultural economy is, by definition, a masculine
one.48 This is a radical moment for the poem, and it is reductive to dismiss these
markings as scribal errors or to say simply, There are similar examples in other
OE texts.49 If anything, the four other instances of gender-switching pronouns in
Beowulf (lines 1344, 1887, 2421, and 2685) confirm suspicions that the poem has,
at best, a vexed relationship to notions of gender, agency, and power. The other
examples deal solely with shifts from grammatically feminine nouns to masculine
pronouns. In two cases, the grammatically feminine hand (seo hand) of a male
character is replaced by a masculine pronoun (schere at line 1344 and Beowulf at
line 2685). Masculine pronouns likewise replace the grammatically feminine old
age and fate (lines 1887 and 2421), both powerful forces which Bruce Mitchell
and Fred Robinson suggest probably shifted in the poets mind to a masculine
figure.50 Mitchell sees the substitution of a masculine pronoun for a grammatically
feminine hand as the triumph of sex over gender, thus arguing implicitly that the
natural gender of a man trumps the grammatical gender of his hand in the poets
mind.51 If we agree with Mitchells logic, then replacing Grendels mother with a
masculine pronoun that is, privileging grammatical gender over natural gender
47 Beowulf, 1379a.
48 Studies of females who become male are frequent in hagiographic literature, where the
actions performed by a female body reveal the existence of a male mind or soul; see, for
example, Gopa Roy, A Virgin Acts Manfully: lfrics Life of St Eugenia and the Latin
Versions, Leeds Studies in English, n.s. 23 (1992), 127; and Paul E. Szarmach, lfrics
Women Saints: Eugenia, in New Readings on Women in Old English Literature, ed. Helen
Damico and Alexandra Hennessey Olsen (Bloomington: University of Indiana Press, 1990),
pp. 14657, and St. Euphrosyne: Holy Transvestite, in Holy Men and Holy Women:
Old English Prose Saints Lives and their Contexts, ed. Paul E. Szarmach (Albany: State
University of New York Press, 1996), pp. 35365.
49 Beowulf: An Edition, ed. Bruce Mitchell and Fred C. Robinson (Oxford: Blackwell, 1998),
note to line 1260.
50 Mitchell and Robinson, Beowulf, note to line 1887.
51 See Bruce Mitchell, Old English Syntax, 2 vols (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1985), 2178 and
2358.

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16 Rene R. Trilling

is a particularly telling reversal of this logic. I would argue, analogously, that

the substitution of a masculine pronoun for a physically feminine body can be
understood as the triumph of gender over sex, and that when grammar replaces or
attempts to alter nature, something very significant is taking place.52
If, as the switching of pronouns seems to indicate, gender can be defined
by action rather than (or in spite of) biology, then Grendels mother is breaking
a linguistic boundary as well as a social boundary with her action. Her position
outside the cultural and even linguistic constraints of Danish society gives her more
scope for agency than any other female in the poem has and allows her body to
signify in ways for which the poem is not necessarily prepared. Grendels mother
has disrupted the poem at the level of language as well as plot; as semiotic chora,
she threatens the existence of the symbolic structures that uphold representation.
As a result, her action and its signification provoke immediate attempts, both by
Beowulf and by the language of the poem, to reabsorb her agency into the masculine
signifying economy. Even more disturbing than the thought that a female could
become aggressively active is the possibility that she could, indeed, become a
man, calling all the traditional definitions of masculinity into question. This is the
possibility extended, and quickly countered, in the brief narrative of Modthryth, the
only other woman in the text to act forcefully as her own avenger.53 Like Grendels
mother, Modthryth is an antitype of fitting queenly behaviour,54 and her improper
agency is hastily quelled by marriage and motherhood.55 Yet Modthryths retaliations,
which take the lives of innocent men, are motivated by her pride and vanity, not the
loss of a child that motivates (and to some extent humanizes) Grendels mother. If
it strikes readers as contradictory to have one womans agency contained by the
same condition maternity that gives rise to the horror of the avenging female,
such contradictions only underscore the unassailable complexity of gender and its
relation to the social and linguistic in Beowulf.56
52 For the theory of the performativity of gender, see Judith Butler, Gender Trouble: Feminism
and the Subversion of Identity (New York: Routledge, 1990), esp. pp. 134. Numerous texts,
such as Judith, Elene, and Juliana, suggest that Anglo-Saxon conceptions of gender might
have more to do with action than with biology, and the Lives of the transvestite saints,
Eugenia and Euphrosyne, explore this theme at great length. See above, n. 48.
53 Beowulf, 19311957a.
54 Chance, Woman as Hero, pp. 10506.
55 Overing, Language, Sign, and Gender, pp. 10107
56 Stacy S. Klein points out that the containment of retributive violence in Grendels mother
and Modthryth may, in fact, be the poets subtle indication that not all masculine behaviours
should necessarily be imitated; see Ruling Women: Queenship and Gender in Anglo-Saxon

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Beyond Abjection: The Problem with Grendels Mother Again 17

Grendels mother eventually reverts to femininity, but not without effecting a

critique of the social structures that underwrite the poem and its heroic action.57 She
has exacted the right of the kinsman of the slain, who is not offered compensation
in the form of wergild, to avenge that loss with a death of her own, and this action
is, after all, what allows us to perceive her humanity more easily than we perceive
Grendels. With this act and the heroic and linguistic responses it occasions,
however, she introduces a revolutionary possibility: that the categories of identity
which uphold the structures of heroic culture are not, in fact, iron-clad, but are
socially constructed and therefore subject to change. If women can sometimes be
men, and monsters can sometimes be human, then others, outsiders, can become
like us, and the foundational oppositions that ground heroic identity break down
in consequence of one beings action. With Grendels mothers forceful assertion
of an identity that is indeterminate by conventional standards, heroic society itself
comes under attack. Grendels mother signifies the threat of alterity to a closed
system, and she becomes a nexus for the representation of the many dialectical
tensions male/female, human/monster, hall/wilderness, feud/peace, symbolic/
semiotic that underwrite the system. She reminds society of the parts of itself
that it attempts to expunge through abjection, and she represents the continual
presence of that alterity, despite its abjection, in an explicitly gendered way. She
exposes the inability of language, at its most fundamental levels, to proscribe the
limits of gender and agency. The warriors respond with a conspicuous performance
of masculinity the mustering of troops, the donning of armour and weapons, the
manly boasting that precedes heroic deeds which allows patriarchy to reassert
itself with an overwhelming and completely unnecessary display of force, in
the hopes that this demonstration will patch over the tear in the social/linguistic
fabric caused by a womans manly vengeance and prevent it from unravelling
any further.
This is why Beowulf does need the armour: as the hero, he is responsible for
repairing that breach. The danger he faces is not just from the fangs and claws of a
monster; he must also uphold the unity and stability of society as a whole, and he

England (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 2006), pp. 10811.
57 That the poem itself is at best ambivalent about heroic virtue was established by John
Leyerle in Beowulf the Hero and the King, Medium vum, 34 (1965), 89102. Kiernan
and James W. Earl both view Grendels mother as a particularly feminine critique of heroic
society; see Kiernan, Grendels Heroic Mother; and Earl, The Role of the Mens Hall
in the Development of the Anglo-Saxon Superego, Psychiatry, 46 (1983), 13960, and
Thinking About Beowulf (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1994).

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18 Rene R. Trilling

will accomplish this by maintaining his own physical integrity.58 Unlike Grendels
mother, however, he needs to create a martial, masculine body to take on a feminine
adversary. His masculinity was not in doubt when he fought Grendel, but his new
adversarys very existence qua adversary brings categories of identity into question,
and the masculine performance of donning armour reassures us as much as it does
Beowulf and the Danes. He needs the weapons as well. He cannot afford to take any
chances with Grendels mother he must make sure that she is dead, severing her
head as proof positive that she cannot return to further disrupt the groups stability.
And yet, in what is perhaps the most telling erasure in the poem, he does not bring
that head back as a trophy for the Danes; rather, he boldly chops the head off of
the dead body of her son, which has lain at the bottom of the mere for over a day.
The event is quite literally at the centre of the poem (line 1590 out of 3182 lines),
and its centrality underscores the extent to which Grendels mother has threatened
social order. War trophies and booty play a vital role in the memorialization of
heroic deeds; when Grendels arm is displayed on the wall of Heorot, it functions
as a representation of the victorious hero by metonymically evoking the strength
and terror of his defeated adversary.59 Were the head of Grendels mother to adorn
the walls of Heorot, the Danes would face a daily reminder of her disruptive power;
the trophy would signify, not Beowulfs victory, but the terrifying agency of the
semiotic, the horrible Other of social cohesion. The possibility of signification
outside the symbolic order, of agency beyond masculinity, threatens the very
structures of meaning on which Hrothgars kingdom, Beowulfs fame, and the
poem itself depend. Leaving Grendels mothers head behind consigns her to
infamy rather than legend, denying her status as adversary and replacing the
memory of her attack with the more acceptable reminder of Grendels. Given
the importance of trophies and booty throughout the poem, Beowulfs seemingly
inconsistent act becomes not only understandable but extremely significant. Like
the conspicuous display of arms and armour and the masculine pronouns, this act
functions to cover up Grendels mothers activity and forestall representation of

58 Seth Lerer introduces the notion that the heros body can symbolize society as a whole;
when that body is dismembered, social instability follows. The heros responsibility, then, is
to keep his body intact as a sign of the unified community. See Grendels Glove, ELH, 61
(1994), 72151 (p. 742).
59 See Leslie Lockett, The Role of Grendels Arm in Feud, Law, and the Narrative Strategy
of Beowulf, in Latin Learning and English Lore: Studies in Anglo-Saxon Literature for
Michael Lapidge, ed. Katherine OBrien OKeeffe and Andy Orchard, 2 vols (Toronto:
University of Toronto Press, 2005), I, pp. 36888.

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Beyond Abjection: The Problem with Grendels Mother Again 19

an outside agency. In like manner, the hero does not regale the hall with his own
account of the fearsome battle. Abjecting Grendels mother once more through his
refusal to acknowledge her actions by traditional forms of representation, Beowulf
re-establishes the boundary between culture and chaos.
Just as masculine pronouns obscure female agency, the characters performance
of denial buries the troubling implications of her actions. The men return home with
Grendels head as a trophy, re-inscribing Beowulfs victory over a more appropriate
foe and refusing to commemorate his female adversary. In this, perhaps, Grendels
mother displays her greatest power: the power to uphold the boundary that separates
civilization from its terrifying outside a boundary that is established, in the first
instance, through the recognition and subsequent abjection of those parts of itself
which it cannot, or will not, accept as its own. She is visible, tangible proof that
the heroic world has a hidden inverse. It is possible, then, that instead of being
simply a reprise of the horrifying Grendel, Grendels mother is intended to be
something even more terrifying. Grendel himself is a fearsome threat to the life
and well-being of Heorots inhabitants, but his mother represents something far
worse. Grendel, at least, is a clear adversary. His mother, on the other hand, is
ambiguity incarnate; her indeterminate nature wreaks havoc with representation,
and her attack threatens not the life and well-being of the Danes and Geats she
only kills one of them before she makes her exit but the very structure of the
society Heorot is founded on: she calls into question the legitimacy of the heroic
order, of a feud-oriented and exchange-based culture that excludes certain people
(namely women and outsiders) from meaningful action.60 In this way, the character
of Grendels mother functions as a critique, not only of the world of Beowulf, but
of Anglo-Saxon society more generally; she stands as evidence of the many, many
subjects whose positions outside social power structures both maintain and menace
the foundations of culture. The threats of war, feud, and internecine struggle so
common to early medieval political life are stock tropes of the heroic world, and
Beowulf abounds with them. But the poem also offers, at the centre of the narrative,
a threat that cannot be classified according to the terms of heroic understanding. In
this character, Beowulf recognizes the inherent complexity of social and political
life, and it challenges those who would seek easy answers and solid structures
60 Gayle Rubin discusses how women function according to a logic of exchange in establishing
social networks in the now-classic essay The Traffic in Women, in Toward an Anthropology
of Women, ed. Rayna R. Reiter (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1975), pp. 157210, and
Irigaray explores the implications of exchangeability for womens signifying potential in
This Sex Which is Not One, pp. 17091).

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20 Rene R. Trilling

by which to understand the world. The poem, of course, ultimately manages to

repress her it cloaks her in masculine pronouns and finally kills her off. With her
destruction, and with Beowulfs refusal to commemorate her demise, Grendels
mother functions to reaffirm the boundaries between monsters and men, feminine
and masculine, words and deeds. But the 400-odd lines detailing her actions are
not similarly repressed, and they leave us to grapple with the complexity of the
character and her role in constructing meaning in the poem. In the minds of readers
and in her critical afterlife, Grendels mother returns, again and again.
Grendels mother is far from the only ambiguous figure in Beowulf; one need
only scratch the surface of Beowulf, Hrothgar, Unferth, Wealhtheow, Hildeburh,
Grendel, or many others to reveal the tensions and anxieties about heroism,
kingship, queenship, feud, gender, and alterity that the poem explores. Yet
Grendels mother is unique in that the poem embodies so many of these tensions
in one character, and she is defined by her ability to transgress the boundaries that
ultimately limit the agency of other characters. As maternal abject or as semiotic
chora, Grendels mother stands in for that which exceeds representation and
hence exceeds the totalizing grasp of criticism as well. The strict categories we have
created for understanding Anglo-Saxon literature result from criticisms tendency
to privilege coherence and unity, but they fail to account fully for Grendels
mother, and in this way she threatens readers as well as the Danes by exposing
the ideologically conditioned bases of literary evaluation. She has the power to
horrify modern readers because she reminds us that there is no such thing as a
unified, coherent identity, effecting a critique of culture that bridges the historical
divide between the Anglo-Saxon text and its modern audiences.61
Department of English
University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign

61 I would like to thank Jim Hansen, Maura Nolan, Katherine OBrien OKeeffe, Rebecca L.
Stephenson, Charles D. Wright, and the anonymous Parergon readers for their helpful and
insightful comments on this article at various stages in its development.

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