Horror and the Maternal in "Beowulf"

Author(s): Paul Acker

Source: PMLA, Vol. 121, No. 3 (May, 2006), pp. 702-716
Published by: Modern Language Association
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fPMLA

Horror and the Maternal

in Beowulf

PAUL ACKER

JR.

ANDTHECRITICS"
THEMONSTERS
R.TOLKIEN'S
ESSAY
"BEOWULF:
has formany readers achieved one of its stated intentions, that of
placing themonsters at the center of the poem rather than at the

periphery.1 And yet subsequent developments in literary hermeneu

tics and critical theorymake it clear that Tolkien also deflected cer
tain avenues of interpreting themonsters. He begins with a claim that

as history but not as a poem;

Beowulf has been studied, inconclusively,
he creates a dichotomy between the ephemeral nature of history and
the timelessness of art (14-16). Beowulf, insofar as it is a "fairy-story"
or "folk-tale," contains elements ofmyth, which like fantasy is appar
ently not susceptible to analysis. The mythic poet "feels rather than
makes explicit what his theme portends" and "presents it incarnate
in theworld of history and geography" (21).2The poet of Beowulf 'pre
sents us with real monsters

incarnate in a Active world, Tolkien

im

not being dragon enough,

plies, though later faulting the dragon "for
plain pure fairy-story dragon" (23). Eventually Tolkien agrees with
W. P. Ker that themonsters mythologically embody (not symbolize,

exactly) the forces of "Chaos" and "Unreason" eternally pitted against

the gods and men (25-26). And yet the poet "was not yet writing an
and eats the
allegorical homily"; Grendel "inhabits the visible world

PAUL ACKER, professor

of English at

Saint Louis University,

is the editor of

flesh and blood ofmen; he enters their houses by the doors" (27).
While we may admire the poet for such mimetic touches, we

so effectively
may also wonder ifhistory and social context have to be
monsters.
critics
other than
our
of
the
from
banished
Myth
reading
as
interrelat
Tolkien have been more willing to see myth and society

ANQ, the author of Revising Oral Theory:

Formulaic Composition inOld English and
Old Icelandic Verse (Garland, 1998), and
a coeditor (with Carolyne Larrington) of

even to see myths as "charters" for social action.3 Our difficulties

ing,
in finding historical and social contexts for Beowulf are notorious;
the poem (it appears) cannot be firmly dated4 or localized, and any

The Poetic Edda: Essays on Old Norse My

thology (Routledge, 2002). He iswriting
a book on the monsters inBeowulf.

702

2006

BY THE MODERN

LANGUAGE

ASSOCIATION

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OF AMERICA

121.3

interpretation
narrowly defined historical
will likely prove as ephemeral as Tolkien pre
dicted, mere "burbl[ing] in the tulgywood of

conjecture" ("Beowulf The Monsters" 17).We

may nonetheless seek traces of long-term (but
as ex
not timeless) cultural preoccupations
in
one
and
historical
sources;
pressed
literary

approach to the monsters would then be to

examine them as projections of Anglo-Saxon
cultural

monster

anxieties.5

I focus here on the one

oddly enough, ignores al

most completely: Grendel's dam, ormother.61
argue that through her is projected an anxiety
Tolkien,

over the failure of vengeance as a system of

justice and that her "powers of horror" (bor
rowing Julia Kristeva's phrase) partly reside
in (or are attributed to) her maternal nature.
In so doing, Imake use of contemporary psy

choanalytic theory even while questioning to

what extent such theory, based on a modern
construction of the personal subject, applies
to the processes of socialization and accultur
ation operative roughly a thousand years ago.7
Other questions can be raised about such ap
proaches: should they address authorial psy
chology (Harwood), the political unconscious
(Jameson), or a textual unconscious
(Strohm

Paul Acker

In Lacan's model

of psychological develop
ment, the acculturated,
"speaking subject"
has become a subject of desire, of a displaced
desire for the former unity with themother.10
How, then, do we account for our simultane
ous feelings of attraction to and repulsion
from the horrific, our desire for that which

not an object of desire? As

elsewhere in her work, Kristeva finds her so
is demonstrably

lution in the semiotic phase of psychological

development, when before its inscription in
language the subject (or rather subject-to-be)
begins to separate from the mother. Enter
ing into the symbolic phase will require ab
the clear
jection of anything that muddies

distinction

between the subject and its pre

but forKristeva the abject is
desires;
oedipal
not repressed into the unconscious (as it is for
Freud and Lacan) but rather is excluded im
perfectly, such that its effects always hover at
the border of consciousness

(7).
The abject is thus aligned with margin
... with those
ality; it "confronts us
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

165)? Given the lack of any life records for the

Beowulf poet and of a specific political milieu,

threatening world of animals or animalism,

which were imagined as representatives of sex
and murder" (Kristeva 12-13). To connect this
aspect of abjection with the powers of horror

to attention ("Hwaet!") the heroic legends that

"we" (the poet and the poet's Anglo-Saxon

Grendel and his mother

the area of socialization

theorists have begun to reinvestigate an area

that Freud touched on in his essay on the un

(Heorot), beyond themarches and in a mere

at the margin of which even a hunted
stag
(heorot) must recoil in horror (1345-76).11
Even more interesting is the relation

I have settled on "cultural preoccupations" as

the element most likely to be discernible in a
traditional work, one that begins by calling

audience) have heard of (1-3).

In the past few decades, psychoanalytic

canny (das Unheimliche), on feelings of dread

and horror, in psychology as well as in litera
ture.8 For Kristeva, this investigation takes
the form of a book entitled Powers ofHorror:
An Essay on Abjection. She creates a category
called

the "abject" for that which we feel

compelled to cast away from ourselves, that
which arouses horror, loathing, and
disgust.9

in

Beowulf,

we may

recall

how

the murderous

reside at the edges of

centered in the hall

Kristeva finds between the abject and the

maternal.12 She writes, "The abject confronts
us ... with our earliest attempts to release the
hold ofmaternal identity even before ex-isting
outside of her-It
is a violent, clumsy break
ing away, with the constant risk of falling
back under the sway of a power as securing as
it is stifling" (13). Such
contradictory feelings

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704

Horror and the Maternal

in Beowulf

PMLA

attributed to the infant are apparently echoed

by a paradoxical maternal
image Kristeva
sees in the work of Louis-Ferdinand

Celine:

gives us life, but since she does

not give us immortality, she gives us death
as well (159). Within such areas of paradox,
the mother

horror exerts a perverse fascination. We find

a similarly complex and evocative moment in

Beowulf when the fightwith Grendel's mother

takes place in her den, a place devoted to se

curity for the monstrous pair but death and

cannibalization
for human prey.131 will re

I regard as in a
sense the central mystery of the poem, after a
consideration of events that lead up to it.
The reader of Beowulf may be struck
turn to this moment, which

by how Grendel and his mother are not in

troduced into the narrative so much as they
suddenly materialize within it.Grendel first

appears after the description of the building of

Heorot and the subsequent forecast of its de
struction by fire once sword-hate ("ecghete";
84) has been awakened. It is as if the prospect

of feud and violence also awakens Grendel; he

emerges from the shadows ("J^ystrum"; 87) as

if stepping out of the smoke thatwill envelop

Heorot; he materializes from the prospects of
failure that haunt all human endeavors, all
attempts to build a stronghold of socializa
tion in thewilderness. Subsequently Grendel
will be associated with the shadows of night.
His famous approach to Heorot can be said

to begin not with what Alain Renoir calls the

cinematic "long exterior shot" of him gliding

on wanre niht /
(161)?"Com
'The
shadow-walker
sceadugenga"

in the darkness

scriSan
came

gliding in the dark night' (702-03)?but

rather in the gliding approach of night itself,
out of which Grendel materializes:
"scadu
scri5an cwoman /wan under

helma gesceapu
wolcnum"

'shapes

of

the

shadow-cover

[i.e.,

night] came gliding dark under the clouds'

(650-51). The appearance ofGrendel's mother
is themore marked for the fact that she is in
troduced in the narrative action only after she
already intruded upon it; that is, only after

she has attacked Heorot does Hrothgar hap

pen tomention that, oh yes, by the way, we
have heard tell that there were two monsters
from themere, not just one (1345-61).
The sudden appearance ofGrendel's mother
ispreceded by the narrative presentation of two
other maternal figures, Hildeburh andWealh
theow. JaneChance describes themovement in
this section of the poem as follows:
The past helplessness of the first
mother,Hilde
to requite

burh,
points

the death

the anxiously

of her

maternal

son counter

Wealhtheow's

attempt toweave the ties of kinship and obli

gation, thereby forestallingfuture danger to

her

sons.

Later

that night, Grendel's

the loss of her

intent on avenging
present,

attacks Heorot,

her masculine

mother,
son

in the
aggres

sion contrastingwith the feminine passivity

of both Hildeburh andWealhtheow.
(IOO)14

Grendel's mother thus appears on the scene as

a kind of feminine antitype, but we may also
notice themore immediate context forher ap
pearance. Wealhtheow observes optimistically
toward the end of her remarks, "Her is aegh
wylc eorl oJ>rum getrywe" 'Here each noble is
true to the other' (1228), echoing her earlier
thatHrothgar and Hrothulf were

observation

"aeghwylc o3rum trywe" in the present (1165),

which hints perhaps at future discord.15Weal

htheow's vision of unanimity contrasts sharply

with the narrator's comment that themen were
sleeping with their armor and weapons close
by. Itwas their custom to be thus prepared to
a
fight for their lord, custom given the familiar
seal of approval in the line "waes seo Ipeod tilu"

'thatwas a good people' (1250).16 The need to

be ever in a state of readiness against attack
was surely something of a drawback to the sys
tem of feuding warrior bands, but fromwithin
this system, codified in traditional formulas,
the text can only voice approval.17

At this point Grendel's mother appears,

materializing out of an atmosphere of potential
out of the
strife just as Grendel materialized
future ashes ofHeorot. Through the irruption

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121.3

of a monster, the text projects the anxieties

it

cannot otherwise adequately voice concerning

the inherentweaknesses in the system of feud

ing and revenge. Killing off one opponent will

only trigger the appearance of another as long
as the system of revenge
by kin is in place.18
That a female creature and more partic

ularly a maternal
have highlighted

one takes this revenge may

itsmonstrousness.
Unlike

Hildeburh

andWealhtheow, Grendel's mother

acts aggressively, arguably in a fashion re
served formen. The similarity of her actions to

that of her son, the fact that she is following in

her son's (bloody) footsteps, is emphasized. We
are told that one of thewarriors will die "swa
him ful oft gelamp, / sij>5an goldsele Grendel
'just as had often happened before
when Grendel preyed upon the hall' (1252
53). Her approach is signaled in lines closely

warode"

echoing the approach of her son: "Com J)a to

Heorote"
'She came then to Heorot'
(1279).
The poet feels compelled to add that her hor
ror ("gryre" [1282], also translated as "force of

attack") is the less even as the "war-horror of a

woman" is less than that of a "weaponed man"
'wiggryrewifes be waepnedmen' (1284).While
is used literally here, itmay
"waepnedmen"

also connote the standard legal formula "waep

man

and

wifman"

'male

and

female.'19

And

since wcepen is also a word for the phallus, the

poet says in effect that Grendel's mother was

the less horrible simply by virtue (so to speak)
of lacking a phallus. This authorial intrusion

strikes a rationalizing or overdetermined note.

Given that Grendel's mother will carry off a
warrior just as effectively as her son did, does
it really matter that her strength may be a bit
less or that (as the poet also feels compelled to
remark in line 1292) she is in rather more of
a hurry to leave Heorot? Furthermore, it can
be argued that Beowulf's confrontation with

is every bit as
horrifying, as
as
his
life-threatening,
comparatively easy dis
of
not more so.20
if
Grendel,
patching
A comparative look into Old Norse lit

Grendel's mother

erature and itspreoccupation with feuds may

Paul Acker

prove instructive. In the Old Icelandic fam

ily sagas, the rolemost often taken by women
in feuds is that of an inciter to revenge, what

Rolf Heller calls a Hetzerin

(98-122). Women
spur various kinsmen to avenge other kins
men. InHeidarviga
saga, for example, Hallr
is slain as part of a developing
GuSmundsson
feud, and his mother, I>uri3r, serves each of
her other sons a stone for dinner, saying they
have already managed
to digest their broth
er's death. They take the hint and ride off to
avenge Hallr. When ?uridr rides after them,
her son Bardi sends men to undo her saddle
girths surreptitiously so that she falls into a

stream and then has to return home,

"eigi
orendi fegin" 'anything but pleased with the

outcome of her journey' (Nordal and Jonsson

279; Kunz 105). The point of this little epi
sode is that inciting iswomen's business, but
revenge

is men's

business.

such urging by women has

to
relation
historical reality is another
any
question. William Miller has compared the
Whether

"shaming rituals" of various cultures, in

which weaker members of a clan group goad

strongermembers into taking action on their

behalf (Bloodtaking 212). Jenny Jochens has
argued, however, that the role of theHetzerin
is largely the product of male fiction, a mi
rage ofmale fantasies and fears ("Heroine").
Jochens bases her conclusions largely on the
fact thatwomen play a less important role in

Sturlunga saga, which reflects contemporary

events and so is thought to be more histori
cally reliable than the family sagas. Her point

is probably not subject to proof,

although
it seems likely that the role of the Hetzerin
was to some extent a
literary stereotype and

in part a projection ofmasculine

feelings of
shame onto a feminine figure. By the time
the family sagas were written down, the role
doubtless had, as Jochens says, a "resonance

with the long-established ecclesiastical view

of Eve" (49). But, as she also notes, the
figure
predates Christian views ofwomen since itap
pears prominently in Eddie poetry. Further,

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Horrorand theMaternal inBeowulf

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Jochens does find a few instances of theHet

zerin figure in Sturlunga saga, including one
that is particularly explicit about the expected

I>6rdVswounds heal, but he never

recovers full use of his arm. Besides Breeches
AucSr, the other well-known
exception to a

ing her brother in a quest for revenge, saying,

"I will take up weapons and see whether men

in the family sagas occurs in chapter 37 of

Gisla saga (!>6r61fsson and Jonsson; Johnston),
inwhich Cordis "thrusts a sword up under a

and female roles in a feud. Steinvor Sig

hvatsdottir shames her husband into support

male

to follow me, although it goes

and Iwould give you the
character,
against my
to
the
pantry" ("Heroine" 46; also Old
keys
Norse Images 195). Returning to Beowulf, we
would want

find the role ofHetzerin

scarcely represented,
unless we consider that, as Helen Damico has
argued,Wealhtheow's presenting a cup to Beo
wulf (620-30) is a symbolic incitement and a
reflex of typical Valkyrie behavior.21
Miller has isolated examples inOld Norse
literature of women

into
taking vengeance
their own hands and has observed that these

women

distinctly deviant"
In
chapter 35 of Laxdcela
("Choosing" 185).22
(Breeches
saga, for instance, Broka-Au9r
AucSr) avenges her divorce by wounding her
"are considered

and
former husband (Sveinsson; Magnusson
was
as
name
Audr
her
Palsson). But,
implies,
known to be a cross-dresser and by impli
cation was viewed as abnormal,23 a man in
a woman's

in a man's

body

clothes.

Cross

and reversed gender expectations

figure predominantly in this entire episode in
Laxdcela saga. The heroine of the saga, Gu5
dressing

run, was married

to t>orvaldr Halldorsson,
she
preferred I>6r5r Ingunnarson.
although
When I>orvaldr slaps her, I>6r9r suggests Gu3
runmake torvaldr a low-cut, effeminate shirt,
one thatwill reveal his nipples; ifhe wears it,
shewill have grounds to divorce him for cross
so. Next she suggests Eordr
dressing. She does
for cross
divorce his wife, Breeches-Audr,
so and marries Gudriin.
dressing; he does

Au9r hears that Eordr is sleeping alone

one night, she rides furiously in her breeches
and enters I>6r3r's bed closet; he ignores her,
man. She then stabs him in
thinking she is a
the arm and across the nipples with a short

When

sword, so fiercely that the sword sticks in the

bed boards.

strict gender-based division of avenging labor

table at her brother's slayer but catches the hilt

against the edge of the table and succeeds only

in inflicting a severe wound" (Andersson 20).

As Miller observes, the attempt's failure may
indicate an implicit judgment on the impro

priety of the action ("Choosing" 186).

It is interesting to note, however, that ?6r
dis's act of vengeance is taken on behalf of a

brother rather than a son or husband. When

we turn to theworld of Eddie poetry and the

related legendary or fornaldar sagas, we find
among others thewell-known case ofGuQnin,
who avenged her brothers by feeding her sons
to her husband, Atli, and then burning him

in his drunken bed.24 Clearly her attachment

to her brothers was her strongest kinship tie.
Or we may consider Hervarar saga, inwhich
on which
Angantyr inherits a powerful sword
has been laid a curse that whoever bears it

is
shall be killed. Subsequently Angantyr
killed, together with his eleven brothers, who
might have been expected to avenge him. In
their stead his posthumously born daughter,

Hervor, comes to his burial mound and takes

up the sword (C. Tolkien, chs. 3-4).25 She does
not seek to avenge him but uses the sword to
carry on the family Viking tradition, having
adopted theman's name Hervar8r. When she

kills a courtier who dares

to unsheathe

the

tells his men not to

sword, King GuSmundr
"mun y9r J>ykkja imanni
seek vengeance,
en J>eraetlid, \>vikvenn
J>essumminni hefnd,
mann aetla ek hann vera" 'foryour vengeance
on this man ... will seem smaller than you
now think, because it ismy guess that he is
son
a woman'
(C. Tolkien 20). GuQmundr's
latermarries Hervor, afterwhich her Viking

a
days are over. The legend reflects fascination
with the anomaly of the female warrior, who

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i2i.3

adopts her role only in the absence of male

heirs and who receives the (ifyou will) phal
lic sword from a father who even when dead
is still reluctant to give it up. That Hervor/
career lasts only while she is a
Hervardr's
maiden, uncomplicated by adult sexuality, is
likewise worth noting. The prepubescent tom
to
boy figure was doubtless less threatening
the phallocentric power structure than was
the figure of an adult woman or a mother.
Examples inOld Norse literature inwhich
a female figure actively avenges her son are
few.None is to be found in theOld Norse Beo

wulfmn analogues collected and translated by

G. N. Garmonsway and Jacqueline Simpson or
those added by Peter Jorgensen ("Analogues"
and "Two-Troll Variant").26 Occasionally Old
trolls (towhom Grendel is sometimes

Norse

compared) are accompanied by wives, daugh

ters, and mothers (e.g., Bnisi and the "she-cat"

in Orms pdttr Storolfssonar

[Garmonsway
and Simpson 316-20]),27 but none avenges a
son. In chapter 18 of Gisla saga, aman named

ax.
Bergr hits Eorsteinn on the head with an
I>orsteinn goes home to his sorceress mother,

AuQbjorg, who nurses his wounds, walks with

ershins around the house, and changes the
falls on Bergr's
men
farm, killing him and his
(I>6rolfsson and
Jonsson; Johnston); such power was obviously

weather

so that an avalanche

to less exceptional mothers.

not available
Grendel's dam may have seemed monstrous
not only because she was a female exacting
she
revenge but more specifically because

was a mother. While

the virginal figure of a

sister or shield maiden was removed enough

from the world of sexual difference to exert

a kind of fascination, a mother, expected to

be empowered chiefly through her son,28was
too horrible to consider in the destructive role
of an avenger.29 Seen from within the social
ized world of the hall, such a figure could only
be a monster from the frontiers of the human
world, on the borders of the animal world, in
which for instance a mother bear might come
roaring from her den to protect her cub.

Pau' Acker

Writers of popular fiction and cinema have

long recognized the powers of horror resid

no
ing in subhuman creatures against whom
reason
creatures
of
blind
will
of
avail,
appeal
protective rage. In the 1981 film Quest for Fire,
three cavemen have almost

returned home

when one of them enters a cave and hears a

peculiar sound, which the camera next shows
to originate from an adorable bear cub. But as
soon as theman

reacts with relief, themother

onto
the scene and mauls him hor
bear erupts
ribly.One imagines that such encounters would

have been something of an occupational hazard

for cave-dwelling peoples. The audience of Beo

a re
wulf, while theymay have been rather at
move from cave-dwelling days (the "eor3scraef"
'cave' of The Wife's Lament notwithstanding
[line 28]), would have had a more vivid, ex
periential sense of mother animals protect

ing their young than most of us do today, and

that sense would have resonated in the setting
of Beowulf's second fight deep in the lair of a

half-humanoid, half-bearish creature.30

In the 1979 horror film Alien, themonster

further down the evolutionary

scale, embodying in its successive metamorpho
ses a range of crustacean and insectoid creatures

has descended

that seem evermore horrible in their relentless

pursuit of (chieflyhuman) prey. In the 1986 se

quel Aliens, the producers found an unusual so
lution to the problem of how to top themselves.

First they serve up a glut of creatures, a swarm

thatgets in everywhere like giant roaches. An or

phaned girl arouses thematernal feelings of the

female protagonist, Ripley (played by Sigour
neyWeaver), and we eventually encounter the
source of the horde?a

giant queen creature im

the
eggs of drone aliens. When
placably laying
Ripley, wearing hydraulic stilts,31threatens the
eggs, themother creature literally tears herself
away from her egg-laying sac and meets the hu

man mother in a titanic duel.Whatever one may

think of themovie's other features, itexploits in
a strikingly innovative fashion the powers of
horror and sentiment thatphallocentric culture

has paradoxically

located in themother.

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Innovative, that is, until we consider that

Beowulf tops itself in a similar way. The com
bat with Grendel

terms, with which

takes place in masculine

the tradition seems more

prevails until a hero

a
firmer handgrip comes along, like a
with
a
gunslinger ousted by faster gun. But Gren
comfortable.32 Grendel

del's mother does not play by these rules; she

absconds with her prey and forces Beowulf to

(138-43). At this pivotal moment in

the poem, Grendel's mother threatens not
just an individual man's dominance but the

shame

system ofmale dominance; like the ab

she
does not "respect borders, positions,
ject,
rules" (Kristeva 4). The system of feuding has

whole

produced a monstrous, avenging mother who

carries the hero to the threshold of a mystery
that cannot be assimilated, thatmust be cast
very birthplace of death.
away, abjected?the

a
fight on her home turf.33The episode is not
pale shadow of the combat with Grendel, and

And

of appendage to the Grendel episode.34 The

combat with Grendel's mother is central to

man might bear to the sport ofwar. Beowulf

swings, Grendel's mother falls to the floor, the

the critic cannot, like Tolkien, simply gloss

over it or, like Paul Taylor, treat it as a kind

the poem not just as the second of three com

bats but as arguably themost mysterious and
mere
compelling.35 The text is drawn to the
on several occasions: when Grendel's bloody

footsteps are tracked to its edge (839-56);

when Grendel's mother emerges from the
terrible waters, preys upon Heorot, and then
hastens back to the fen (1251-1304); inHroth
gar's famous and evocative description of the
hellish lake,36which not even a hard-pressed
and then again
hart will enter (1345-76);

when Beowulf's men

track Grendel's mother,

their arduous way to the bloody pool

making
where they find iEschere's head (1402-23).
Here at the edge one of theGeats can dispatch
a water monster safely at a distance with an

arrow (1432-36). But Beowulf plunges into the

mere,37

where

the monsters

tear

at his

chain

pins him
fast (1494-1512).38 Even his mighty sword fails
him, for the first time in its long life.Trusting

mail

and where Grendel's mother

then to his mighty handgrip, he takes down

his female wrestling opponent, but she effects
a quick reversal, sits on him,39 and draws a
knife, thinking now to avenge her son.
Some critics (e.g., Chance
102-04) have
detected undertones of an inverted and hor

rific sexuality in this scene, a sexuality that

has been effectively repressed from the poem

to the bowers outlying

thus far, banished
Heorot where Grendel exiles themen to their

the text does abject thismoment; a gla

appears on the cavern wall,
an old sword made by giants, larger than any

dius ex machina

sword sweats, theman rejoices in his work.40

As quickly as it appeared, this transcendently
large sword melts away. The hilt is given to

Hrothgar and power officially reverts to the

old patriarch, until the system of feuds inevita
no hero can
bly conjures up an opponent that
abject without abjecting the self in death?that
is, as Tolkien puts it,until the dragon comes.
In conclusion, I return to a few questions
of theory and method that I raised at the be

on
ginning of this essay. Kristeva's comments
the relation between horror and thematernal

develop

out of her revision of the Lacanian

explanation of ego formation. In applying

any of her perceptions, we must consider that
theway inwhich a subject will be constituted,
as well as our interpretation of that process
through a particular model of psychoanaly
sis, will be rooted in a particular historical

chil
and social moment.41 Did Anglo-Saxon
in
twentieth
those
(purportedly)

dren?like

a
before developing
century Paris?even
sense of their own psychic boundaries, be
was hovering nauseatingly
gin to reject what
nascent
boundaries
those
("sour milk,
along
excrement,

even

a mother's

engulfing

em

[McAfee 46])? Might they, inKristeva's

words, in her "imagining," sometimes feel "a
maternal hatred without a word for thewords
brace"

of the father" (6)?that is, a sense ofmaternal

mirror stage42
abjection that precedes Lacan's

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Pau' Acker

i2i.3

into language and pa

triarchal society, after which we experience
a new separation from the mother and be
and the acculturation

come "subjects of this loss and thus subjects

of language" (Lechte 159)? Of course, such a

narrative of selfwould not have been thus for

in any era prior to the development

of the discourse of psychoanalysis.43 And it

mulated
remains

just

that,

a narrative,

a construction,

"a story created in the course of the analyti

cal dialogue" between patient and analyst,
and
between literature and psychoanalysis,
between past and present (Moller 21).44 One
indication that Anglo-Saxon
psychodramas

to ours

might have been at least comparable

(as described by Kristeva), however, is the pre
occupation in Beowulf with primal loss?loss

of a golden age with Scyld, loss of Heorot to

Grendel and his mother and eventually to fire,
loss ultimately of the heroic age ofwhich the
is a nostalgic mirror.45 Itmight even be
argued that Beowulf and to a certain extent

poem

the Icelandic family sagas employ a narrative

of abjection, of attraction to and compulsive
violence?
separation from unassimilable

rather than a narrative of desire, of the quest

for the ever-receding object of desire.46

tried to show how abjection of

the mother in particular is operative in the
I have

cultural preoccupations oi Beowulf. Itmight

that patriarchal culture will have a

be added

stake in this form of abjection in its attempt

to control themeans of reproduction.47 The

line may be effaced in the system of

son of Ecgtheow?
patronymics48?Beowulf,

mother

but the abjected mother will return to haunt

the patriarchal stronghold, and in Beowulf
she will return with a vengeance.

I thank Allen

tion, Helen

Bennett

Frantzen

for discussing

for organizing
the original

the sec
idea with

Osborn for her helpful suggestions.

me, and Marijane
1. Such a focus on monsters reflects the essay's cultural
anxieties,

the wars,
writing between
follow him. For contemporary
readers, Cohen comments on "a society that

both

for Tolkien,

and for the readers who

American
has created

and commodified

'ambient

fear'?a

kind of

total fear that saturates day-to-day living, prodding and

but never speaking its own name.
silently antagonizing
as a cul
itself symptomatically
This anxiety manifests
tural fascination with monsters

..."

2. The earlier versions of Tolkien

("In a Time"

viii).

s essay depict the Beo

from the effects of cul

as even more insulated

wulfpoet
ture, as all agency and no subjectivity: the poet "feels" a
myth and then "presents it as a fact in time, and bolsters it
about with history" (Beowulf and the Critics 54; cf. 108).
3. Malinowski
89; see, e.g., Lonnroth on the Eddie
In Lacan's
terms, Tolkien
poem Voluspd.
mythological
subscribes here to the fallacy thatmyth is a "pre-discursive
reality" (qtd. in Lechte 55). In his own terms, Tolkien wor

ries that themyth critic will only "be leftwith a formal or

a concern that surfaces again
allegory" (22),
in his well-known distaste for reductively historical or al

mechanical

see Shippey,
legorical readings of The Lord of the Rings;
/. R. R. Tolkien, ch. 4. On myth criticism and Beowulf see
Niles, "Myth and History"; Howe; and Liuzza 13-19.
4. Taken

together, the essays collected in Colin Chase

that the earlier consensus
of an eighth-century
date was based on inconclusive
evidence
(but see more
show

sum
recently Newton; Clemoes).
Bjork and Obermeier
marize dating arguments through 1993.
5. Such an approach would not pretend to exhaust

the significance or function of the monsters or to deny

the author any agency in orchestrating or (conceivably)
critiquing the cultural anxieties expressed in the poem.
is in sympathy with that area of cultural
has recently named "monster theory": "A
and a projection, themonster exists only to be

My approach
studies Cohen
construct

read: the monstrum

'that which

warns,'

("Monster Culture"

is etymologically
a

glyph

'thatwhich

that seeks

reveals,'
a hierophant"

4).

the poem as consisting of two parts,

contrasting Beowulf's youth and age, and dominated by
two combats, against Grendel and the dragon. Grendel's
6. Tolkien

viewed

merits only a single mention,

in the appendix
"Grendel's Titles" (36-37), as Bennett (26) and Clark (10)
have noted. Subsequent
critics have urged a tripartite
structure and emphasized Grendel's mother accordingly

mother

(e.g., Bonjour; Rogers; Hume; Chance; and Vaught). For a

survey of critical ideas of structure in the poem, see Ship
pey, "Structure." The use in the critical literature of the

Notes
on a paper I delivered for the section
inAnglo-Saxon
and
Method
Studies: New Voices
"Theory
in the Text" at the International
on Medieval
Congress

This article is based

Studies.

term "Grendel's dam," to suggest her animal aspect and a

connection with "the devil and his dam" of folklore, is not
strictly speaking supported by the poem's usage, which
calls her Grendel's
"modor"
'mother' (e.g., 1258) and

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709

710

Horrorand theMaternal inBeowulf

PMLA

(1391). Here and throughout, Beo

"mage" 'kinswoman'
wulf"line numbers refer to Klaeber's edition of the poem.
7. For archetypal and
to
approaches
psychoanalytic
John Hill,

into legend, female power is reduced further: "the

high
lighting and stereotyping of an idealized male heroism
has as its counterpart the highlighting and stereotyping
of female helplessness"
(240). Overing, however, argues
that this critical emphasis on female passivity
ignores

8. E. Wright
124-39, Cixous, and Lydenberg provide
further references. In book-length
studies of horror film

ch. 3). On antifeminism

ture, see Belanoff. For

see Helterman;

Foley; Earl, chs. 4-6; Canfield;

ch. 5; Overing,
Language;
Nagler;
Lapidge;
and Hala
Thormann; White;
(a Kristevan
reading).
Beowulf,

and literature, Prawer, Grixti,

and Carroll

each discuss

Freud's

uncanny and other psychoanalytic

approaches
to horror. McCaffrey,
interestingly, suggests that Freud
represses the figure of the uncanny woman.

see also Gross;

abjection,
Overing,
Lechte
Creed;
158-67;
Oliver, Reading
ing";
neke 21-22, 42-48; and McAfee 45-57.
9. On

10. Lechte
erence
neke

158-59;

to Kristeva's

"On Read
55-62;

for a review of Lacan's work

see Lechte,

response,

Rei
in ref

ch. 2; and Rei

18-27.

11. "[T]he hall symbolizes

cosmic and social order,
forces of chaos, identified to
holding off the opposing
some

(Earl 120). On the equation

degree with Nature"
of Heorot and the hart at bay and on the overall concern
see
liminality,
Higley.
12. On the abject and thematernal,
47-49. On the maternal
and McAfee

with

see Reineke,

ch. 4,

in Kristeva's

writ

113-81; Moi
167-68; Stanton; Cynthia
ings, see Gallop
and Hodges,
ch. 3; Oliver, Family
Chase; Lechte; Doane
112-14 and Reading; and Mazzoni
13. The collocation of nurture
we know that Grendel's
nibalism

139-53.

(or security, at least?do

mother was nurturing?) and can

has led some scholars

(e.g., Foley 151, Canfield 7,

and White 77) to compare Grendel's mother to the arche
(I will dis
typal Terrible Mother discussed by Neumann
cuss cannibalism

of Old English,
articles collected

flushed with
narrator's

tend not to lead to violence

appear less frequently

litigation and consequently
in the literature than manifestations
of hostility" (114).
asserts that Anglo-Saxon
mothers "pro
Dockray-Miller

and Olsen.
she paints?
'the retainers

drink do as I bid'

comment

belied by the
(1231)?is
that one of the beer drinkers was
summations

in

"J>aetwaes god cyning" 'that was a good king' (11)

and "J>aetwaes geomuru ides" 'thatwas a sad lady' (1075).
See also the gnome inMaxims
I: "A scyle J>a rincas ge
raedan laedan /ond him aetsomne

swefan"

'The warriors

should always carry their equipment with them, and all

172-73; C.41-42).
sleep in a body' (Shippey, Maxims
17. The text voices reservations
about some aspects
of the system of revenge, chiefly in the area of conflict
ing loyalties (as in the Finnsburh episode), but not about
the entire system. John Hill prefers to follow the text's
surface claims about the successful settlements of feuds
(ch. 1). Earl, however, sees Grendel's mother as reveal
relation of the warrior class ... to
ing "the antagonistic
and its system of revenge" (123). Thormann
suggests that feud in Beowulf'"is a system of justice based
on revenge that finds its transcendent, primal sanction in
an originary act of divine revenge. That founding act [the
the kindred

sword
flood] is inscribed in runes on a magical
retrieves from his battle with Grendel's

monstrous

ers and their adult children

in Damico

clude

in the
(including Wealhtheow)
to add,
record but feels compelled
of loving relationships between moth

and

{Language,
in Old English litera
of feminist studies
bibliographies
see A. Olsen, "Gender"; Bennett; and the

fated to die that night (1240-41).

16. Similarly constructed
gnomic

biblical

written

otherness

elsewhere

15. Similarly, the beer-cheery

picture
"druncne dryhtguman
dob swa ic bidde"

further in an essay on Grendel). With

a few instances
Smith mentions

regard to nurturing,
of solicitous mothers
Anglo-Saxon
"Demonstrations

the "trace" of their unassimilated

hilt Beowulf

mother"

(69).

is re
18. The text states clearly that her motivation
venge; she is called a surviving avenger ("wrecend"; 1256)
and is said to undertake her "sorhfulne si(5" 'sorrowful
adventure'
1278

to avenge her son's death

is Klaeber's

["deod"

("sunu deo5 wrecan";

emendation
from the manu

and taught" their children, with refer

ence to the "abbess-mothers
of Kent, the queen-mothers

script's "l>eod"]). Hrothgar says she avenged the feud Beo

to avenge her
wulf started (1333-34), coming to Heorot
kinsman (1339). In retelling his exploits toHygelac, Beo

ofWessex

wulf

tected, nurtured

and Mercia,

and the fictional mothers

of Beo

likewise

emphasizes

(117); see also Lees and Overing, ch. 1.Aries and his
wulf
followers argued thatmedieval mothers were reluctant to

vengeance

grow attached to their infants because of the high mortal

ity rate among the young, but the claim has been disputed

roles of warrior

(Huneycutt; Nelson

82, 94; and Crawford

115-17).

on fe
14. Joyce Hill relates this literary emphasis
to
delimited
first
of
all
the
passivity
historically
(but nonetheless
significant) sphere of activity of Anglo

male

on behalf
"operating through and
royal women,
of the royal men, whose power is initially won and then
sustained on the battlefield." As history is transformed
Saxon

that Grendel's

mother

sought

(2117-21).

19. Fell discusses

the underlying
sexually defined
and weaver
suggested by the colloca
and gender roles,
regard to aggression

tion (40). With

the interesting point about the Anglo-Saxon
that while the scanty historical record
queen Cynedryd
seems only to indicate she was a woman of considerable
Fell makes

his
power, "the only queen in the whole of Anglo-Saxon
tory to have had coins struck in her name," in later legend
and
"a stereotype figure of the evil woman
she became
... of
was accused
instigating themurder of iEdelbert of

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i2i.3

East Anglia, king and saint." Fell sums up this develop

"it is a common folk-tale pattern that women of

ment:

it either directly
secular power are held to have misused
or by influence" (90-91).
20. On the poet's systematic "discrediting"
of Gren
del's mother, see Irving, Rereading 70-73.
21. Miller

discusses

in which

literature

ritualized

perhaps
or its blood-stained
cusses

a number

of cases

in Old Norse

female goading is intensified by the

of the head of a corpse
presentation
clothes ("Choosing").
He also dis

two remotely comparable

instances in Beowulf (in
the Finnsburh episode, lines 1142-45, and the digression
on
in which men (not
armor, lines 2616-25),
Wiglaf's
women) present inflammatory swords (agents, not relics,
of destruction).
On a female inciter in the fragmentary
see JoyceHill 243-44.
Old English poem Waldere,
22. See also Miller, Bloodtaking 354-55, and A. Olsen,
153-54.

"Women"

23. Clover
"her actions
transvestism

that
disagrees, claiming of Breeches-Audr
are approved of,
against
legal injunctions
In Clover's analysis of
notwithstanding."

society as seen primarily through the

a plus value, even
family sagas, "'masculinity'
always has
(or perhaps especially) when it is enacted by a woman"

gender

in Norse

372). Any authorial critiques of such role

("Regardless"
reversals she blames on the influence of Christianity; but

she glosses
occurrences

over the way

in which

as anomalous,

her texts mark

and I am more

analysis. In a footnote Clover

ret Clunies Ross's statement that in the
fornaldarsogur,
dominant woman was more to be feared than a man,

with Miller's

such

in sympathy
cites Marga
"a
for

she was

able to strengthen herself magically

in order to
usurp male roles" (qtd. in Clover, "Regardless"
381n64).
24. See
(Dronke

the Eddie

and Atlamdl
poems Atlakvida
and chapter 40 of Volsunga
saga
The Eddie GucJrun is usually consid

1-12; 75-98)

(M. Olsen; Byock).

ered to have been themodel

for the Gu5riin

in Laxdcela

66-71).
saga (e.g., Andersson
25. For an interpretation ofHervor, see Clover, "Maiden
Warriors."
On warrior women
in Anglo-Saxon,
Viking,
and Celtic culture, see Hollis
(86-91), who concludes that
"the warrior woman

can never have been other than a rar

ity,always liable to be construed as uncanny" (91).

26. See Fjalldal for a (polemically)
skeptical view of
these analogues.
27. Chadwick

feels that the similarities

in Grettis saga
t>6rhallssta<5ir (chs. 32-35),
and the troll woman who attacks the hall at
Sandhaugar
(ch. 65) imply "a unity in the original tradition" (190),
inwhich presumably
(but unverifiably) the troll woman
would have avenged Glamr.
In the absence of a clear
between Glamr, who haunts

tradition of a "demonic hag more

dangerous
in fight than her similarly evil son or sons," Puhvel has
suggested the influence on Beowulf of Celtic motifs (85).
For a putative Indo-European
origin of themotif, see Fon
tenrose 525-28.

Germanic

Paul Acker

28. Cf. Hrothgar's

comment, after Beowulf has just
defeated Grendel, that the God of old was gracious to Be
owulf's mother
as noted

above,

in her childbearing (945-46). Wealhtheow,

seeks to ensure that the power she now

enjoys through her husband will transfer to her sons, her

blood kin. On kinship, mothers, and revenge in the poem,
see JohnHill: "What iswanted in
feuds, appar
malignant
ently, is dark joywith themother at the expense of all rivals
when the loaned energies from the father weaken"
(128).
29. Schrader
the other hand,

notes that Anglo-Saxon

on
hagiography,
could allow for female saints who took

up masculine,
aggressive roles, including thewrestling of
demons (ch. 1). Such saints were considered to act werlice
(Lat. viriliter, "in a manly fashion"), spiritually fulfilling
themasculine
role of Christ's champion even as they ful
fill the feminine role of Christ's bride. The Christian spir

itual gender roles are so clearly hierarchical

(masculine
reason, feminine passion, etc.) that exceptional women
can act "like a man" and pose no threat to the
system. See

also Overing, Language,

ch. 3.
30. Irving ("Heroic Experience")
and Osborn ("Vixen")
discuss Exeter Book riddle 13 (sometimes numbered
15),
portrays an animal mother
(badger? vixen?) de
fending her children. I assume there is some zoological
basis for such observations,
although they may quickly
give way to a "fiction ofmaternal ferocity" (Freccero 118,
compares Beowulf's
writing of the film Aliens). Wachsler
which

fight with Grendel to Grettir's fight with a bear in chap

ter 21 of Grettis saga; the motif of the bearish hero who
defeats a bearish monster helps define a cluster of tales

known as "The Bear's

Son" (Stitt).

31. The device Ripley wears, called a loader, also has

hydraulic arms that act as a forklift. The whole apparatus

that puts Ripley

suggests a kind of mechanical
carapace
on an equal
with
the
insectoid
monster,
footing
pitting
technology against nature. For more on gender in the
Aliens trilogy (now tetralogy), see Doherty.
32. On masculinism
in Beowulf (and its critics, in
cluding Tolkien), see Lees; inOld English
heroic poetry more generally, see Harris.

and Old Norse

33. As
heroes,

JoyceHill notes (244, 247), Beowulf, like other

lets his enemies dictate some of the terms of the

to fight Grendel
encounter; he travels to Denmark
(but
so in
to
and
the dragon's
lair (or
hall)
Hrothgar's
rather just outside it) to fight the
dragon. Nonetheless,
the mere of Grendel's dam seems a more treacherous lo

does

cale than the other battle sites, as I argue below.

34. Taylor claims that the sole function of the Gren
del's dam episode is to allow Beowulf to obtain the head
of Grendel as a trophy. Irving sees such a
reading as dis
and un
torted, attending only to the poet's "[ejngrained
conscious

of male superiority" and not the

assumptions
"demonstrated
and
energy
power" of Grendel's mother
{Rereading 73).
35. Referring
ter," Vaught

to this combat

argues

that Beowulf

as "the
fight at the cen
only here achieves his

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711

712

Horror and

the Maternal

stated goal,

to cleanse Hrothgar's
court of (both) its de
in themere does the heroism of Beowulf at

mons.

Only

in Beowulf

PMLA

tain cosmological
status, when he confronts the forces
of chaos by entering "willingly and alone" the "symbolic
of the irrational"
(134). Nagler
landscape
regards the
as
with
mother
central
Grendel's
fight
mythically, in that
Beowulf

uses

the weapon

of God

God's

enemy, and psychologically,

triumphs over the enemy within.
36. On

e.g., Niles

the hellish qualities

16-19 and C. Wright

(for a time)
in that Beowulf's will

to destroy

of Grendel's

mere,

see,

117-31.

rior'; 1494-95); on the play of grammatically

roles in this passage, see Huisman.

active and

passive

rendered

of Beowulf

illustrator

(Charles Keeping)

has

this moment

(with "Grendel's Ma"

see pi. 13 inOsborn,

terms
in unmistakably
phallic
as the Jungian
devouring mother?);
"Translations"
(372).

39. Robinson
argues that "ofsaet" in line 1545 means
not "sat on" but "attacked." This gloss (if correct) would
one aspect of the putative sexual inversion dis
modify
cussed below.
40. Itmight be argued that at this point Beowulf has
in fact solved the feud against the Grendel kin; Beowulf
But he has done
that claim to Hygelac
(2005-07).
so by wiping out their entire race, a final solution that is
not ordinarily available.

makes

narrative of
41. In her focus on the (transhistorical?)
Kristeva does not always keep
early child development,
questions of historical and cultural specificity at the fore,
as Doane

have complained
(76-77, 80, 89).
and his
however, she sees psychodrama
Occasionally,
In
of bibli
the
"semiotics
tory interacting.
discussing
and Hodges

Kristeva
asks
(a form of abjection),
there are "subjective structurations that, within

cal abomination"
whether

to
of each speaking being, correspond
the organization
this or that symbolic-social
system" (92), thereby making
a
slight nod toward what Cole calls "cultural psychology."

specifically rejects "any normative claims" made

for "structures of identity based on abjection. Theories of
some of the oppressive
abjection are useful in describing

Oliver

logics of patriarchy but abjection

theory of liberation" (Family 99).

cannot

be a part of a

begins in the semiotic realm

but is known through irruptions into the symbolic, after
the mirror phase. Itwould be interesting to investigate,
42. Lacan

1-7. Abjection

a
societies,
perhaps on comparative basis with modern-day
much
what influence wet nurses and foster parents?both
have
in evidence during the Anglo-Saxon
period?would
on themirror stage (Crawford 70-71, ch. 9). With regard
toOld Norse literary examples, Jochens argues that "affec
tivemotherhood"
(such as figures prominently in Grettis
saga) was introduced by Christianity ("Old Norse Mother
hood" 201), and Grundy finds examples of close mother
and

son relationships

"especially

when

after the death of his wife, ismiraculously

able to nurse his
the child later dies, fcorgils says that he
infant son. When
would no longer blame women "J>6tt J>aerynni brjostbor
nunum meira en odrum monnum"
'for loving the chil

dren they had suckled at the breast more than anybody

else' (Vilmundarson
and Vilhjalmsson
312; Acker 299).
43. For E. Wright,
Foucault's
notion of history as a
discourse

37. The mere actively seizes or receives Beowulf ("brim

'the sea surge received thewar
wylm onfeng /hilderince"

38. An

pears as a witch who protects or promotes her son" (223).

A little-known example of parental gender switching oc
curs in chapter 23 of Floamanna
saga, in which I>orgils,

the mother

ap

disposes of the problem of situating "psycho

analysis in the domain of cultural history" (143).
44. Moller's first chapter (3-27) negotiates well the op
positions of "narrative truth" versus "historical truth" in

the analytic construction of psychoanalysis.

She critiques
as a "discourse of
psychoanalytic
literary interpretation
and proposes
instead a "discourse
of mutual
mastery"
(26).

entanglement"

45. "The abjection of self would be the culminating

form of that experience of the subject towhich it is revealed
that all its objects are based merely on the inaugural loss
that laid the foundations of its own being" (Kristeva 5).
46. Desire
in narrative and narrative as desire are
to literature and
frequent topics in semiotic approaches
to Beowulf, see
and application
film; for a discussion
a narrative of desire
to
3.
The
ch.
shift
Overing, Language,
may have resulted along with other changes or emphases
sometimes

characterized

ery of the individual?or,

occurred
subject"?that
the Anglo-Saxon
47. On

as the discov
(hyperbolically)
as Bond prefers, of the "loving
(so the argument runs) just after

period.
queens in the attempt
as
Wealhtheow
and Hygd
(much
see Joyce Hill 236-40
(who references

the role of Anglo-Saxon

to determine

succession

in Beowulf),
Stafford) and Dockray-Miller
48. Overing
{Language)

do

74-76,

102-15.

note that many

in the poem are nameless,
including Beowulf's
mother
(we are told a daughter of Hrethel married Beo
wulf's father). Grendel's mother is also nameless, but his
and Kliman

women

father is utterly unknown

("no hie faeder cunnon"
'They
na
do not know of a father'; 1355); Grendel's monstrous
ture may be underscored
(Canfield
Beowulf,

by his apparent matrilinearity

in
7-8). On putative vestiges of matrilinearity
see Bohrer; Luecke; but see also Bremmer, who

relationship is often fore

suggests that the uncle-nephew
texts
at
the expense of naming
in
Old
English
grounded
themother (see Thormann 68 as well).

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