Past and Future Lives of Grendel (presentation)
Good afternoon. This talk is something that grew out of the fourth chapter of my dissertation,
which I’m still writing, so your feedback will be a lot of help. As a way of briefly framing my argument, the
basic premise of my dissertation is that if we look at the way texts are produced and reproduced on the
internet, that that serves as a useful model for looking at the way texts were produced and reproduced in
the middle ages. Until now, for the most part, we’ve been looking at medieval textual culture through the
lens of print culture.
I’m focusing on three processes that together shape textual production on the internet and in the
middle ages -- aggregation, renarration, and curation -- and today I’ll be primarily focusing on curation:
effectively the choices made in both physically and mentally grouping texts together, and how they can be
used to read Grendel’s monstrosity.
First I’m going to talk about Grendel as a monster in his manuscript context, how he looks when
we contextualize him as part of the set of monsters in the Nowell Codex. Then I’m going to look at
Grendel and the way he appears in three recent films -- Robert Zemeckis’s ​
Beowulf​
, Sturla Gunnarsson’s
Beowulf and Grendel​
, and Howard McCain’s science-fiction remix, ​
Outlander​
. Both of these
contextualizations -- manuscript and film -- create a set of generic conventions that we can use to build up
the idea of what it means to be a Grendel. Once I’ve done that (and time permitting), I’ll use those analyses
to give a little insight into how these curated monsters can help us to generate new readings of the
Grendel of the Old English poem.
Beowulf, the poem, sits second to last in a manuscript called the Nowell Codex. While the dating
of the poem is a subject of unending debate, the paleographical evidence strongly suggests that the
manuscript​
dates from around the turn of the eleventh century. There are five texts in the Codex: The
Passion of Saint Christopher, The Wonders of the East, The Letter from Alexander to Aristotle, Beowulf,
and Judith. All of these deal, if not with monsters specifically, then at least with monstrosity. The Passion
of Saint Christopher tells of the martyrdom of the cynocephalic (that is, dog-headed) Saint Christopher,
and his death at the hands of the pagan king Dagnus. The Wonders of the East and The Letter from
Alexander to Aristotle both talk about the strange sights you might see should you travel east, and Judith is
a retelling of the Biblical narrative, in which the titular hero uses her feminine wiles to get close to
Holofernes, the head of an invading army, and behead him in a drunken stupor, ensuring victory for the
Hebrews. While Judith may not contain any obvious monsters, Andy Orchard has admirably
demonstrated that Holofernes’s actions -- and, indeed, the text’s descriptions of him -- make him the
monster of the text.
Now, I mentioned that I would be building up a set of monsters in each case, and the way I’m
going to do it is actually following JJ Cohen’s “Monster Culture (Seven Theses),” in which he writes a
series of hypotheses about all monsters, and uses them to create a picture of what it means when we say
“monster.” In my case, though, I’ll be picking out the similarities within a smaller group, in this case asking
the question “what do the monsters in the Nowell Codex have in common?” This should tell us a little bit
about what monstrosity means in one context, through identifying the Codex’s generic conventions. To
make things a little easier to say, I’ll be calling “Monsters of the Nowell Codex” “N-monsters” -- N for
Nowell -- from now on.
The first rule of N-monsters is that N-monsters are hybrids. Everything about Saint Christopher
is, in a sense, “half.” Named in Old English as “healf-hundinga,” the other half must be understood to be
human. His language is human, but his appearance is monstrous; his faith is saintly, but his power appears
-- at least to Dagnus -- to be inhuman. According to Joyce Tally Lionarons, Christopher sends the reader
(and Dagnus) into what Marjorie Garber has termed “category crisis”: “a failure of definitional distinction,
a borderline that becomes permeable, that permits of border crossings from one (apparently distinct)
category to another: black/white, Jew/Christian, noble/bourgeois, master/servant, master/slave…”1 to
which Lionarons might well add monster/human when speaking of Christopher.2 In fact, according to JJ
Cohen, “the cynocephalus is monstrous because of its hybridity… Miscegenation made corporeal, he has
no secure place in a Christian identity structure generated around a technology of exclusion.”3
Christopher, as a go-between, halfway between human and animal, is monstrous; but it is not, as Dagnus
thinks, on account of his height or his death-defying power. Christopher is monstrous because his
hybridity either knocks down the walls that generate the identity of the almost certainly Christian
audience, or else because it reveals those supposed walls to have been absent from the start. The same can
be said for other N-monsters.
There are many strange and wonderful creatures in the ​
Wonders of the East, ​
but the vast majority
of them are described in terms of hybridization. There are animal-animal hybrids, human-animal hybrids,
and even male-female hybrids. The first, the animal-animal hybrids, are the most straightforward. The
next, the human-animal hybrids, include the cynocephali (called ​
conopenae​
) which are said to have horses’
manes, boars’ tusks, and dogs’ heads (horses manna ond eoferes tuxas ond hunda heafdu, 18-19, ll.~25).
There are others, but for the sake of time I won’t categorize all of them here.
Female hunters (hunticgean 26-27 ll.~85) who domesticate predatory cats represent the third kind
of transgression of boundaries, this one between male and female. While the fact that they are described as
donning horses’ hides (horsa hyda) for clothing might make them seem part-animal, it is the beards than
run down to their breasts (swa side oð hyra breost 26-27 ll.~85) -- likely coupled with their ‘masculine’
hunting ability -- that truly hybridizes them.
Garber, Marjorie. ​
Vested Interests: Cross­Dressing and Cultural Anxiety,​
New York: Routledge, 1992, 16­17. 2
Lionarons, Joyce Tally. “From Monster to Martyr: The Old English Legend of Saint Christopher.” in Timothy Jones and David Sprunger (eds.) ​
Marvels, Monsters, and Miracles: Studies in the Medieval and Early Modern Imaginations​
. Studies in Medieval Culture 42 (Kalamazoo: Medieval Institute Publications, 2002) 167. 3
Cohen, Jeffrey Jerome. ​
Of Giants: Sex, Monsters, and the Middle Ages.​
Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1999. 134. 1
But there are some monsters that just seem like humans with selective gigantism -- giant ears,
extra-long legs, and so forth. These, I argue, are actually human-giant hybrids.
In Genesis chapter six there are giants. These loomed large in the imagination of the
Anglo-Saxons, especially, one might argue, in that of the ​
Beowulf-​
poet, who traced the lineage of his
hall-wrecker back to Cain and Abel and the first fratricide.4 In two articles, both titled “Cain’s Monstrous
Progeny in Beowulf,” Ruth Mellinkoff convincingly argues for connections between the lineage of Cain,
gigantism, and the east.5 While the exact process by which the “giants [that] were on the Earth in those
days” (Gen. 6.4) came into existence sometimes varies, Cain’s descendants seem to remain the lone
constant: “no matter how the mating was construed, the genealogical descent of wicked progeny was
traced, on one side or another, to Cain.”6 This makes Grendel a hybrid as well.
The only text in which this hybridity trend becomes suspect is in the case of Holofernes. One
could argue, based on the poet’s description of the pagan king as ​
deofolcunda​
, that he is to be seen as a kind
of human-demon hybrid: the -​
cund​
suffix (like the modern “-kind”) denoting both likeness and
genealogical origin. This is something he would share with Grendel, if perhaps only spiritually or
metaphorically. Nevertheless, as we will see later in discussion of our third N-monster hypothesis,
Holofernes is not the only character whose nature dangerously crosses boundaries or, in a sense,
hybridizes.
For the sake of expediency, and also because they’re closely connected, I will describe the second
and third N-monster rules together. The second is that N-monsters are only found elsewhere in time and
place; the third is that this distancing allows them to more safely take the category confusion of hybridity a
4
Augustine, City of God 15.23 Mellinkoff, Ruth. “Cain’s Monstrous Progeny in ​
Beowulf,​
Part I: Noachic Tradition.” Anglo­Saxon England 8 (1979): 143­162; and “Cain’s Monstrous Progeny in ​
Beowulf,​
Part II: Post­Diluvian Survivial.” Anglo­Saxon England 9 (1980): 183­197. 6
Mellinkoff, “Cain’s Monstrous Progeny Part 1,” 148. 5
step further, by blurring the lines between the supposed heroes of the texts and their monstrous
counterparts.
All of the texts take place elsewhere in time and space -- from the vagueries of “the east” to the
temporal distancing of Biblical narrative or the heroic germanic past of Beowulf. In doing so they create a
situation in which the intended audience will never encounter these creatures in real life. This is
important, because each of the narratives demonstrates that not only does monstrosity create category
confusion, but that even being in the same ​
text​
as monstrosity does too.
Katherine O’Brien O’Keeffe has shown that, as Grendel approaches the hall to fight Beowulf, his
description changes from more monstrous to more human, using words like ​
gast ​
and ​
deaþscua​
(shade) at a
distance, but words like ​
rinc ​
(man) close up. Meanwhile Beowulf himself tosses aside his weapons and
armour, in his rejection of human technology coming closer to Grendel’s monstrosity. The staging of both
his fight with Grendel and later that with Grendel’s mother are also so mirrored that it’s at times hard to
know which of them is which, and his beheading of the dead Grendel in the mere after the second fight is
unsettling to say the least.
In the Letter from Alexander to Aristotle, Orchard has demonstrated that Alexander’s pride is in
itself monstrous, and Christopher’s monstrosity in the Passion is plain to see, even while king Dagnus’s
humanity is questionable.
Even Judith’s heroism seems to raise uncomfortable questions for medieval exegesis. Exegetical
readings from Jerome to Hrabanus Maurus to Ælfric display a kind of distancing allegorization of Judith,
making her a typological representation of, for instance, chastity beheading lust (​
castitas truncat
libidinem​
),7 or the Church cutting off the head of the devil (​
þæt is Cristes cyrce… þe mid cenum geleafan
Jerome, “Epistulam ad Furiam,” in ​
Hieronymus: Epistolae​
, (CPL 0620) epist. 54, vol. 54, par. 16, pag. 483; accessed online via Brepols ​
Latin of LIbrary Texts ­ Series A <​
http://clt.brepolis.net/LLTA/pages/TextSearch.aspx?key=PHIER0620_​
>, 3 March 2016. 7
þam ealdum deofle of forcearf þæt heafod ​
414-416).8 Just as Jane Chance points out about Juliana, another
“violent woman” in Christian literature, Judith is made into an allegory or a symbol as a way of negotiating
the transgression -- one might even call it category confusion -- of her female violence.9 This is not to say
that Judith’s virtue and heroism are not noted by the poem: it is abundantly clear that Judith, despite her
violence, is quite literally “doing god’s work.” Nevertheless, the violence in the Old English can only be
described as extreme: not content to simply strike twice (​
percussit bis​
) as in the Vulgate (13:10), the Old
English deliberately spaces out the two fatal strokes over eight lines (103b-111a), leaving Holofernes
severely wounded​
but not yet dead (​
​
næs ða dead þa gyt​
107) before the eponymous hero slices again from
the other side of his neck, completing the deed and sending the head rolling on the floor (​
þæt heafod wand
/ forðon ða flore​
110-111). If we add to this that the violence is being performed by Judith as a woman in
the context of a pre-Christian narrative, then it must at least been seen to narrow the moral gap between
her heroism and Holofernes’s monstrosity, at least until some manner of distancing is performed.
So with these three rules, we can see how the N-monster might be perceived to create in the
audience a kind of unsettling space for contemplation: even though the monsters themselves are safely
distant, it forces the reader to determine what the local boundary is between human and monster, and to
wrestle with it internally. This is the opposite of the way a Grendel works in the modern filmic versions.
There, Grendel takes on the role of retributive justice and allows the viewer to externalize the offending
action.
Ælfric, ​
Judith.​
ed. Bruno Assmann, in “Abt Ælfric’s Angelsachsische Homilie Uber Das Buch Judith,” ​
Anglia 10 (1888): [76­104]: 103. Accessed online via DigiZeitschriften <​
http://www.digizeitschriften.de/dms/resolveppn/?PID=PPN338212566_0010|log6​
>; for more on allegorical readings of ​
Judith​
in exegesis, see Huppé, Bernard, ​
The Web of Words​
, Albany: SUNY Press, 1970, pp.138­146. 9
Chance, Jane. Woman as Hero in Old English Literature. Syracuse: Syracuse University Press, 1986. 40­46. 8
The three films were released within a period of three years: ​
Beowulf and Grendel​
in September
2005, ​
Beowulf ​
in November 2007, and ​
Outlander​
in July 2008.10
The first rule of filmic Grendels is this: Grendels always attacks halls. Regardless of the reason
behind it the very point of a Grendel is to attack a human settlement. The immediate reason often varies:
in the Zemeckis ​
Beowulf​
, for example, the reason seems to be that Grendel has very sensitive hearing and
doesn’t like the singing in Heorot. In the other two films, there does not at first appear to be a proximate
cause for the attacks. In ​
Beowulf and Grendel​
, the monster -- there called a “troll” -- attacks shortly after
the opening of the new mead hall. In contrast to ​
Beowulf​
, the audience is not treated to any gratuitous
scenes of carnage, but is merely left to examine the bloody aftermath of the attack (0:10). This
troll-Grendel refuses, for the majority of the film, to even fight Beowulf: the hero’s first night in the hall,
Grendel does little more than urinate on the door and run off into the night. The Grendel of ​
Outlander ​
is
stranger still: from a species called the Moorwen, and resembling an enormous bioluminescent cross
between a lion, a dragon, and an anglerfish, it is the least humanoid of the Grendels. It attacks in the night,
scaling the walls, killing indiscriminately and stealing the bodies away with it.
There are, however, reasons for their actions, because, as a rule, Grendels are never without their
reasons. This brings us to our second thesis concerning Grendels: you always get the Grendel you deserve.
In the Zemeckis Beowulf, Heorot is a place of debauchery, licentiousness, and general moral
failure, especially sexually. A minute and a half into the first scene, a visibly drunk and half-naked
Hrothgar is carried into the hall on a throne like a caricature of Bacchus (0:01). Over the next minute the
audience is treated to overtly sexualized scenes such as a drunken man licking mead off a woman’s cleavage
(0:02); a woman being chased and caught while her skirt is flipped up (and his head goes underneath)
(0:02); and a rather unimpressed Wealhtheow catching a naked couple through a slightly-ajar door (0:02).
IMDB, “Beowulf & Grendel” <​
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0402057/​
>; “Beowulf” <​
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0442933/​
>; “Outlander” <​
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0462465/​
> accessed 8 March 2016. 10
When Hrothgar declares the hall open for business, he calls it a place for “merriment, joy, and [specifically]
fornication​
” (0:03). So it should be of surprise to ​
no one​
to learn that in this version Grendel is Hrothgar’s
misbegotten son, the product of misused or perhaps misdirected sexuality.
The Grendel in ​
Outlander​
, the Moorwen, attacks for an altogether different set of reasons, though
ones no less reflective of the protagonist’s sins. In this guise, Grendel takes on an eco-critical mantle. The
Moorwen, we are told, is very likely the last of its species. The movie’s Beowulf-analogue is a spaceman
named Kainan. In a five minute conversation with the film’s love interest, Freya, Kainan narrates his guilty
past. In clearing a planet for human habitation, his people have killed the whole race of Moorwens. Only
one has survived and, as one might expect, it has come for revenge. Accompanied by scenes of apocalyptic
aerial bombardment and ashen Moorwen corpses being bulldozed into massive pits, all to be replaced by
cookie-cutter (if futuristic) suburban grid-plan housing, the metaphor is fairly plain to see.
Reinforcing the environmental message further, it becomes clear that the killing spree the the
Moorwen has embarked upon is to collect food for its young. The Moorwen has attacked, and continues
to do so, because it follows the logic of nature -- a logic which Kainan and his people defied.
Lastly we have the quiet Scandinavian film ​
Beowulf and Grendel​
, in which the troll Grendel is
targeting Hrothgar’s people because they were the ones who killed his father twenty years earlier. He has
strict rules of engagement -- only killing men of fighting age, no women, children, or old men -- and
refuses to even fight Beowulf’s men until one of them destroys something precious to him (the dessicated
head of his father that he’s been treating like family). If his killing spree seems excessive, it’s only because
he’s following the logic of the attack on his father. In a conversation after Grendel is killed, Hrothgar
admits that the only reason they hunted down the elder troll was because it had crossed their path and
taken a fish. When ​
escalation​
becomes the logic of feud, it makes perfect sense to have an ​
escalated
reprisal​
. All three films demonstrate an interest in their Grendel merely paying back what it was given.
The final rule of filmic Grendels sits almost as uncomfortably as the hybridity and category crisis
of the N-monsters. Because of the retributive nature of a Grendel’s violence, there is an ever-present
threat of that violence becoming cyclical. In a sense, Cohen’s second thesis, “the monster always escapes,”
can be expanded upon for our purposes: while a Grendel itself never escapes -- there is only ever one
Grendel, and he is always killed by a Beowulf -- the threat a Grendel represents is never fully allayed by the
monster’s death.11 This, then, is our third and final thesis concerning Grendels: that while a Grendel is
always killed, it leaves behind it the threat of cyclical violence, and is therefore best avoided entirely.
This is most obvious in the Zemeckis ​
Beowulf​
, in which Beowulf himself quite literally does the
same thing as Hrothgar did, sleeping with Grendel’s mother and producing a child that would later come
to attack his people. In ​
Beowulf and Grendel​
the threat is more subdued: though the threat of monstrous
reprisal is gone, Grendel has left behind a half-human son, who lives on to perhaps continue the feud at a
human scale -- “just” eye for an eye. In ​
Outlander, ​
while it’s true that the Moorwens are defeated at the
end, the relationship the villagers have with nature is stereotypically human. We, being in the film’s
future, know where human advancement will lead, and therefore take home with us the threat of a natural
reprisal for our own treatment of nature.
But where the category confusion of the N-monster can only be dealt with through internal
contemplation of the intertwined natures of humanity and monstrosity, the retributive nature of the filmic
Grendel’s violence grants it a kind of externalizability: because a Grendel only acts in response to an action,
and because that response may breed a cycle of violence, it is not only possible but necessary to avoid the
kinds of actions that incur a Grendel attack. A filmic Grendel contains within itself the key to its own
prevention, a kind of pedagogy of avoidance that teaches the viewer how she should act.
So how do these two contextualizations -- Grendel as “N-monster” and Grendel as Grendel -- help
us to read the poetic monster? As an N-monster, Grendel invites the monstrous into the audience, creating
11
Cohen, “Monster Culture (Seven Theses),” 4. an inescapable category confusion, but as a part of the modern Grendel typology, Grendel drives the
audience to look for something to externalize and exorcise, in order to prevent a Grendel attack. Put
together, that is, they drive a reader to seek a not-obvious pedagogy for defeating (or at least preventing)
the poetic Grendel.
One of the primary occupations of Christianity is reminding its followers that the human race has
fallen from God’s good graces, and that it is only through repentance that they can be saved. By
introducing a monster descended from some of the earliest, most notorious fallen humans, and then by
having it overlap uncomfortably with a protagonist of such moral ambivalence as Beowulf, the poem may
therefore be read as leveraging the instilled category crisis to a specific, pedagogical end: if the audience
must identify and exorcise the parts of themselves that mirror these discomfiting monstrosities, they must
in the process move farther from fallen man and closer to God’s grace. Reading Grendel as an N-monster
in the pedagogical light of the filmic Grendel thus highlights this potential function of the poetic Grendel,
and paradoxically brings us closer to the text even as it introduces new curated mediators of our
experience.