Literature Resource Center - Print
Title:
Author(s):
Publication Details:
Source:
Document Type:
http://go.galegroup.com/ps/printdoc.do?sgHitCountType=Non...
Beowulf: The Fight at the Center
Jacqueline Vaught
Allegorica 5.2 (Winter 1980): p125-137.
Poetry Criticism. Ed. Carol T. Gaffke and Anna J. Sheets. Vol. 22. Detroit: Gale Research, 1999.
From Literature Resource Center.
Critical essay, Excerpt
Full Text: COPYRIGHT 1999 Gale Research, COPYRIGHT 2007 Gale, Cengage Learning
Full Text:
[(essay date 1980) In the following excerpt, Vaught argues that Beowulf's battle with Grendel's mother is more exciting than
is his earlier battle with Grendel and that it is also more important to the poem's focus on heroism.]
Among the most helpful of recent approaches to Beowulf are those that have increased our understanding of the rise of the
hero in the first part of the poem—in Tolkien's terms, the first of “two great moments in a great life . . . first achievement and
final death.” In showing how the poem attains that first “moment,” the best of recent studies have drawn out implications that
illuminate not only the social import of Beowulf's heroism, but the psychological and cosmological import as well. Until
recently, that first moment of heroic achievement has been located in the fight with Grendel; correspondingly, the “entire
episode . . . involving Grendel's mother has been viewed as largely extraneous, a blot upon the thematic and structural unity
of the poem” [according to Jane C. Nitzsche, Tennessee Studies in Literature and Language, Vol. 22 (1980)]. The effect of
this critical consensus has been to raise many unanswered questions about the poem, including several that specifically
involve Grendel's mother.
In the past year, however, both Michael N. Nagler and Jane C. Nitzsche, from different perspectives, have attempted to shift
the weight of critical emphasis to the second fight. Nagler, working on ”Beowulf in the Context of Myth,” has located that
particularly “climactic moment” at the bottom of the mere rather than in Heorot; and Nitzsche has addressed herself to
proving that the dam, far from being an extraneous extension of Grendel, is “more important socially and symbolically” than
her son.
I wish to affirm the essential rightness of these views and to explore further the importance of Grendel's mother, the mere,
and Beowulf's heroic victory there. The subsequent discussion will summarize Beowulf's heroic achievement, consider
several ways in which the poem itself signals the importance of the fight in the mere, and suggest what is most important
there—socially, cosmologically, and psychologically—to the hero. In doing so, I hope to show some of the advantages of the
specific shift in critical emphasis from the first part of the narrative to the second.
In the most elementary sense, Beowulf does not conquer the forces threatening Heorot until he kills the dam and decapitates
Grendel in the mere. As Klaeber says, “The fight with Grendel is rather monotonous and seems altogether too short and easy
to give much opportunity for excitement.” [Fr. Klaeber, ed., Beowulf and The Fight at Finnsburg, 3rd ed. (Lexington, Mass.:
Heath, 1950), p lii. All references to the Old English text of Beowulf are from this edition.]
Nevertheless, the critics of Beowulf have usually joined the Geats and Danes in proclaiming Beowulf the hero after his fight
in Heorot. We should remember, however, that the festivities prove ironically premature—the celebration being destroyed
when Grendel's mother seeks vengeance for her son. Far from completing his quest, Beowulf's so-called victory in Heorot
serves as a prelude that will amplify his fight against Grendel's mother, much as his verbal exchange with the coastguard
prefigures his successful introduction to the king. It is not until the fight in the mere that Beowulf fulfills his development as
the hero.
Stanley Kahrl's discussion of the word “feud” (f\??\hð) offers useful insights into Beowulf's role as hero. Comparing two
lines that describe Beowulf in the second fight (l. 1534b and l. 1537b) with two lines describing Grendel earlier in the poem
(ll. 135-7), Kahrl concludes that the passages suggest a similarity between Beowulf and Grendel since neither cares about the
consequences of a feud. But, as Kahrl argues, the “normative maxim” (sw_ sceal man dôn) [So should a man act] applied to
Beowulf in the mere shows that
Beowulf's attitude is praiseworthy, whereas Grendel's is not. . . . The distinction is that which we regularly
1 of 6
11/16/11 12:09 PM
Literature Resource Center - Print
http://go.galegroup.com/ps/printdoc.do?sgHitCountType=Non...
make between the reckless courage of the criminal who has abandoned all hope and whose actions are purely
selfish and the selfless courage of the hero who places the good he is defending before his instinct for
self-preservation.
It is true that the selfish criminal is subtly contrasted with the selfless hero. Yet throughout the poem, similar contrasts are
made between the kings and monsters who are destructive through greed and selfishness and the kings and heroes who
exhibit generosity and selflessness. The importance of the lines describing Beowulf lies less in the concept of f\??\hð than in
the context of the immediately ensuing defeat of Grendel's mother. As much as they stress Beowulf's selflessness, they signal
the moment in the poem when he attains his selfhood and gains victory over Grendel and his mother.
Still, we can take a cue from the “normative maxim” that distinguishes the heroic Beowulf from the monstrous Grendel. That
expression, sw_ sceal man dôn, calls attention to the fact that Beowulf fights in the mere, not with animalistic instincts of
rage or fear, but with something potentially heroic and particularly human. That something is precisely the “unyielding will”
(that, if realized, defines the hero) which Tolkien and others since him have claimed for Beowulf in the first fight.
That Beowulf is capable of an heroic exertion of will has been anticipated in the poem by his eagerness to fight for the Danes
and by his initial power to overwhelm Grendel with fierce determination:
Forð n_ar atst_p
nam þ_ mid handa higeþihtigne
rinc on raste, r\??\hte ong_an
f_ond mid folme; h_ onf_ng hraþe
inwitþancum ond wið earm gesat.
Sona þat onfunde fyrena hyrde,
þat h_ ne m_tte middangeardes,
eorþan sc_ata on elran men
mundgripe m_ran: h_ on m_de wear_
forht on ferhðe; n_ þ\d?\y \??\r fram meahte.
Hyge was him hinf_s, wolde on heolster fl_on . . .
(ll. 745b-55b).
[Grendel stepped nearer and with his hands seized the strong-hearted warrior in bed, reached toward him, the
fiend with his hands. Beowulf quickly took on the hostile purposes and with his arm sat up. Instantly, the
keeper of crimes found that he had never met on middle-earth, from the corners of the earth, in any other man
a greater grip. In his heart he became frightened in spirit; nor might he leave there for all that. His heart was
eager to get away, wished to flee into his hiding-place.]
Yet in Heorot Beowulf's will is not taxed to the point of having to stand with unflinching resolve in the face of inevitable
death. The ordeals he endures in the mere, however, test the full strength of his will. With no retainers to aid him and no
weapon to protect him after Hrunting fails, Beowulf's will remains firm in his resolve to fight—despite the fact that the dam
has overpowered him and that he despairs of his life. Instead of recoiling in fear as Grendel did in Heorot, Beowulf faces his
opponent and proves himself the hero, defeating Grendel's mother in an act of pure will. As only a man can do, Beowulf
stands firm against the powers of destruction at the moment he physically stands against the dam:
Him on eaxle lag
br_ostnet br_den; þat gebearh f_ore,
wið ord ond wið ecge ingang forst_d.
Hafde ð_ fors_ðod sunu Ecgþ_owes
under gynne grund, G_ata cempa,
nemne him heaðobyrne helpe gefremede,
herenet hearde,— ond h_lig God
gew_old w_gsigor; w_tig Drihten,
rodera R\??\dend hit on ryht gesc_d
\d?\yðel_ce, syþðan h_ eft _st_d
(ll. 1547b-56b).
[On his shoulders lay the woven breast-net; that protected his life, withstood the entry of point and edge. The
son of Edgetheow, champion of the Geats, would have perished then under the wide ground had not his battleshirt, his hard war-net, brought him aid.—And the holy God granted victory; the wise Lord, the Ruler of the
heavens, decided it rightly, easily, as soon as Beowulf stood up again.]
2 of 6
11/16/11 12:09 PM
Literature Resource Center - Print
http://go.galegroup.com/ps/printdoc.do?sgHitCountType=Non...
Nagler, while agreeing that the mere is the central scene in Beowulf, argues that the “climactic moment” of the poem occurs a
few lines later, in the ten lines (ll. 1563-72a) that describe Beowulf's seizing the Giants' Sword, his decapitating Grendel, and
the light's shining through the mere. Although I think it right to regard these ten lines as the climax of a basic Indo-European
myth that Nagler reconstitutes, I think it wrong to accept them as the climax of the poem as we have it. In Beowulf that
decisive moment occurs when Beowulf stands against the dam, and it is marked at that moment by God's assurance of
victory.
It is because Beowulf has already completed his development as the hero that God so easily (l. 1556a) grants him the victory.
And it is because Beowulf has already defeated the monsters with the strength of his will that he then has the power to raise
the Giants' Sword (a sword no other man could lift) with which he will physically conquer them.
The achievements and miracles that follow Beowulf's heroic stance—the seizure of the sword, the killing of the dam, the
light's shining, the decapitation of Grendel, the melting of the blade, and the cleansing of the mere—all constitute the
denouement, poetically reiterating and amplifying Beowulf's original heroic achievement. Thus, it is not his success in
Heorot, but his stance in the mere that is the decisive victory socially, cosmologically, and psychologically toward which the
first half of the poem has led. In the most literal reading of the poem, Beowulf accomplishes in the mere what he had
originally intended when he came to Heorot. The hall is safe, and all is cleansed.
Long before Beowulf kills Grendel's mother in the mere, the poem indicates, chiefly through surprise and dramatic suspense,
that the victory there is the climactic achievement that completes the rising movement of the first part of the poem.
Whereas there is never any doubt about whether Beowulf will overwhelm Grendel in Heorot, the audience remains as
ignorant as Beowulf about the outcome of the second fight—that is, until the moment he regains his feet. R. M. Lumiansky
finds no essential difference between the predictions of victory which occur before the fight with Grendel and the assurance
granted in the fight with the dam. But as Richard Ringler notes [in Speculum 41 (1966)], the fight in the mere is “fraught with
uncertainty, suspense and alarm in a way that the Grendel fight is not."
The intense uncertainty about the second fight is the culmination of dramatic suspense which arises from the moment
Grendel's mother abruptly appears in the poem:
Þat ges\d?\yne wearþ,
w_dc_þ werum, þatte wrecend þ_ g\d?\yt
lifde after l_þum, lange þr_ge,
after g_ðceare; Grendles m_dor . . .
(ll. 1255b-58b).
[Then it became evident, widely known to men that an avenger yet lived after the hostile one, for a long time
after the grievous strife—Grendel's mother.]
As Irving notes [in Introduction to Beowulf, 1969], “She breaks into the poem as she breaks into the hall, out of nowhere.”
Though long-abiding (l. 1257b), this menacing “wrecend” is as surprising to the Geats and Danes, and to Beowulf, as she is
to the audience.
After the dam's appearance, the marked increase in emotional tension continues to build through Hrothgar's description of the
mere, which contains the suggestion that the mere is fatally hostile to society, and through the long march there. The dramatic
technique of Beowulf is “cumulative, as when the poet first reveals Hrothgar's genuine fear of Grendel's lake . . . followed by
the difficult march, the finding of Aeschere's severed head on the brink, and the slaying of the 'nicor.'” As they march to this
d\d?\ygel lond, the men move increasingly away from the known into the unknown, leaving behind both the familiar lands
around the hall and society itself. The path becomes increasingly narrow until the men are forced to walk in single file; finally
they reach the mere that Beowulf will enter alone. The tension is “felt rather than seen” and “grows with each line."
The cause of this tension is certainly felt, if not seen, by Beowulf when Grendel's mother seizes him in the mere and proves to
be stronger than she had appeared on land. Then, in “almost total ignorance of what to expect,” Beowulf is left in a state of
extreme uncertainty that does more than simply sustain dramatic suspense. It is a state of uncertainty thematically equivalent
to the Unknown—that which Beowulf must enter willingly and alone if he is to become the victor.
In a poem so obviously concerned with social loyalty (and the difficulty and transience of that), the fact that Beowulf is alone
when he enters the mere is one of the largest signals that his experiences there are central to the meaning of the poem. As
Nitzsche points out, isolation in Beowulf is a characteristic of the monsters, those alienated from and opposed to society: and
the dam's isolation is one of the many manifestations of her perversity that comment ironically on the maintenance and ethics
of the comitatus. Yet in the fight in the mere and during the Breca swimming match—the two episodes in the poem in which
3 of 6
11/16/11 12:09 PM
Literature Resource Center - Print
http://go.galegroup.com/ps/printdoc.do?sgHitCountType=Non...
Beowulf is successful in slaying monsters—Beowulf shares this “monstrous” characteristic of solitude.
The Breca episode has several parallels with the fight against the dam. As in the mere, Beowulf, alone, conquers the monsters
with a sword; light shines and the waterways are cleared:
. . . on mergenne m_cum wunde
be \d?\yðl_fe uppe l\??\gon,
sweo [r] dum _swefede, þat syðþan n_
ymb brontne ford briml_ðende
l_de ne letton. L_oht _astan c_m,
beorht b_acen Godes, brimu swaþredon . . .
(ll. 565a-70b).
[ . . . the morning found them (the sea-monsters) lying in the leavings of the waves, dead from the swordwounds, killed with the sword, so that thereafter nothing around the deep waterways hindered the passage of
the seafarers. Light came from the east, the bright beacon of God; the sea became still.]
Much as he does in the mere when careless of his life (l. 1536b), Beowulf gains the reward that can be attained only by an
“immersion of the individual in the sea of experience . . . ready to risk all in the meeting."
Yet Beowulf has not become the hero in the Breca episode. His “heroic” actions there are more accidental than willed.
Meeting a boyhood challenge, Beowulf and Breca face the sea together to test their powers, not to use them for the benefit of
society. Only accidentally does Beowulf become separated from his friend; and while fighting to stay alive, he inadvertently
serves society by clearing the waterways of the sea monsters.
In the fight with Grendel, the more experienced Beowulf is prepared to endure the ordeal in order to help society. And
although he attempts to fight Grendel alone and without arms (an attempt that marks him as the potential hero), Beowulf does
not fulfill his quest as the hero—precisely because he is still within society, literally inside the walls of Heorot and the circle
of his men. As the poem makes clear, no hand, however powerful, that is still connected to the hands of society is free to
wield the blow that would conquer the forces threatening that society. It is thus particularly ironic that Grendel's arm is raised
to the roof of Heorot as a sign of victory:
Þat was t_cen sweotol,
syþðan hilded_or hond _legde,
earm ond eaxle —þ\??\r was eal geador
Grendles gr_pe— under g_apne hr (_f)
(ll. 833b-36b).
[It was a clear sign when the brave in battle set the hand, arm, and shoulder—there was all together, Grendel's
grasp—under the vaulted roof.]
Although closely aligned to an entire set of hand imagery representing the interdependence of society, the arm and hand of
Grendel are actually signs of mockery rather than of victory. As the Geats and Danes discover after Beowulf's first fight,
chaos still reigns over Heorot.
In order to save society, the potential hero must leave the necessarily restrictive bounds of society and confront, as Beowulf
did only accidentally in his youth, the destructive force directly. He must, paradoxically, become like the monsters, alienated
from society—become the wracca (meaning “wretch, miserable outcast, outlaw”) in order to be the wracca (also meaning
“hero, avenger, champion”). Beowulf must symbolically leave his own country, then the familiar walls of Heorot—the
“civilized world” that is “distinctly inside“—and follow the wraclastas [exile tracks] of Grendel's mother into the alien
waters of the mere.
This motif is continued in the battle with Grendel's mother when Beowulf discovers that Hrunting, the chief protecting
weapon of society that “nafre hit at helde ne sw_c / manna \??\ngum” (ll. 1460b-61a) [never had it in battle failed any man],
is ineffective in subduing the dam. As Nagler points out, some scholars have thought that “the failure of Hrunting when
Beowulf seems to need it most is part of Unferth's plot against Beowulf.” Others, such as Thomas A. Shippey, have argued
that Hrunting fails only because its conquering function in a core tale has been transferred in Beowulf to the Giants' Sword.
Yet as Nagler convincingly argues, the two swords serve significantly different functions: the hero must learn that “whatever
(relatively) ordinary, earthly weapons he brings with him are of no avail” in battling his opponent: he “must have recourse to
the demon's own weapon” or to “a weapon that is in the demon's possession."
4 of 6
11/16/11 12:09 PM
Literature Resource Center - Print
http://go.galegroup.com/ps/printdoc.do?sgHitCountType=Non...
Although Nagler concentrates on the mythic and psychological levels of Beowulf, his point about the swords has social
import. In order to defeat the force threatening society, it is necessary for Beowulf to learn that he cannot defeat it with
Hrunting which, representing the “order and degree in human society” that weapons in Beowulf usually mean, is as incapable
of defeating that force as Beowulf is within the civilized world of Heorot. When he stands alone in the face of impending
death and, consequently, proves stronger than the threatening power of the mere, Beowulf makes manifest the heroic inner
strength that then enables him to execute that strength in physical action. Only then is he able to lift the Giants' Sword,
associated with “primordial conflict,” and complete his quest as the savior of society.
That Beowulf's heroic quest has cosmological as well as social significance has been recognized by several readers. It is not
surprising that most of them have, until recently, concluded that it is in the fight at Heorot, the symbolic “center of the
universe,” that Beowulf acts in a god-like manner by repeating the original act of creation. Nor is it surprising to find that
Grendel's mother, who seeks to avenge her son (l. 1278b), is generally considered to be a humanized extension of Grendel's
chaotic energy. Similarly, the mere is considered to have only human, rather than cosmological, proportions.
Certainly, Grendel assumes cosmological significance in the poem, hating (as both Bernard F. Huppé and Raymond J. S.
Grant note) not only the men in the hall and the joy there, but the Song of Creation in particular. When Grendel hears the
song (ll. 86a-92b), his fury and pain establish him as a force of destruction, utterly opposed to the force of creation. But just
as the fight in Heorot only anticipates Beowulf's victory for society in the mere, the cosmological import of the first fight only
anticipates that of the second.
Heorot has been recognized as being, symbolically, the “center of the universe, i.e., the place from which creation . . . was
begun”: and if the mere-hall is accepted as an inversion of Heorot, then it may also be recognized as the symbolic “center” of
chaos, the place from which destruction springs. The mere, itself, with waters indistinguishable from the clouds (ll.
1373a-76a), suggests uncreated, unformed chaos. Almost exclusively identified with the mere and the mere-hall, Grendel's
mother is more of an extension of primal, chaotic energy than a humanized extension of Grendel. She is, notably, Grendel's
mother—the source from which he and his destructive powers spring. This is one of the reasons that the dam, at home in the
symbolic center of chaos, proves stronger there than she had appeared to be on land and why her fury is characteristically
irrational and instinctive, whereas Grendel, if not exactly rational, approaches Heorot with premeditated cruelty (ll.
710a-34b). It is the dam who is most nearly identified with the cosmological force of chaos and Grendel who, to some degree,
represents the humanized extension of that destructive power.
The cosmological significance of Beowulf's victory in the mere is most clearly signaled by the two similes in that scene:
L_xte se l_oma, l_oht inne st_d.
efne sw_ of hefene h_dre sc_neð
rodores candel
(ll. 1570a-72a).
[The beam brightened, light shone within, just as the sky's candle from heaven clearly shines.]
Þ_ þat sweord ongan
after heaþosw_te hildegicelum,
w_gbil wanian: þat was wundra sum,
þat hit eal gemealt _se gel_cost,
ðonne forstes bend Fader onl\??\teð,
onwindeð w\??\lr_pas, s_ geweald hafað
s\??\la ond m\??\la: þat is s_ð Metod
(ll. 1605b-11a).
[Then, because of the battle-sweat, that sword began to diminish, war-sword into battle-icicles. That was a
wondrous thing—that it all melted, most like ice when the Father who watches over the times and seasons,
loosens the frost's bond, unwinds the water-fetters. That is the true God.]
Both similes make connections between events in the mere and ones that carry connotations of the divine. Furthermore, the
light's shining like heaven's candle suggests the first act of creation—a reading that follows not only from Nagler, but also
from Grant's suggestion [in Leeds Studies in English, Vol. 8, (1975)] that light in Beowulf is “an image of creation or fire
under control.” Being rare in Old English poetry, the similes call attention to this special moment of Beowulf's god-like
victory over chaos.
Yet the creative act on either the social or cosmological level is finally only a metaphor for the creative act potentially within
every man. As the similes make clear, Beowulf's actions are only like a god's; however heroic, they are fundamentally human.
5 of 6
11/16/11 12:09 PM
Literature Resource Center - Print
http://go.galegroup.com/ps/printdoc.do?sgHitCountType=Non...
The confrontation between Beowulf and Grendel's mother is, psychologically, a concrete form of the abstract “battle of the
inner self” [according to Jeffrey Helterman, ELH, Vol. 35, (1968)]. That battle may mean courage overcoming fear, will
overcoming instinct, the conscious overcoming the unconscious, or any process in which the uncontrolled, potentially
destructive energy of the psyche is conquered and converted into a constructive force. That process is the creation, or
re-creation, of the self. In the poem, that process is presented in the form of Beowulf's facing the female monster, the
antithesis of all his constructive, heroic qualities. That destructive force must be faced directly: avoiding it or repressing it
may cause it to become manifest in a new and more powerfully destructive form—much as driving Grendel from Heorot
leads to the mother's rising from the mere.
In order to earn the decisive victory, the hero must enter the unconscious, a symbolic landscape of the irrational and the
unknown that can be entered only willingly and alone. In a passage that well applies to the episode in the mere, Joseph
Campbell writes [in The Hero with a Thousand Faces, 1949] that the journey of the hero is
fundamentally . . . inward—into depths where obscure resistances are overcome, and long lost, forgotten
powers are revivified, to be made available for the transfiguration of the world. This deed accomplished . . .
life becomes penetrated by a knowledge of its own unconquered power. Something of the light that blazes
invisible within . . . breaks forth, with an increasing uproar.
As he enters the mere, Beowulf makes his journey inward. Rapidly he discovers that neither society nor even his own
physical strength can help him in this internal battle. But when he stands, he also finds the center of himself, the strength of
his unyielding will: the Giants' Sword is revivified; light breaks through the opaque mere as Beowulf discovers his own
power and emerges from the mere as the hero.
Source Citation
Vaught, Jacqueline. "Beowulf: The Fight at the Center." Allegorica 5.2 (Winter 1980): 125-137. Rpt. in Poetry Criticism. Ed.
Carol T. Gaffke and Anna J. Sheets. Vol. 22. Detroit: Gale Research, 1999. Literature Resource Center. Web. 16 Nov. 2011.
Document URL
http://go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?id=GALE%7CH1420025026&v=2.1&u=pl2634&it=r&p=LitRC&sw=w
Gale Document Number: GALE|H1420025026
6 of 6
11/16/11 12:09 PM