Re-reading Grendel’s Mother: Beowulf and the Anglo-Saxon Metrical Charms

Abstract

Traditionally, critical assessments of Grendel’s mother tend to be overly reductive, focusing primarily, if not exclusively, on her gender and her relationship with her son—when she is even considered independently at all. This essay suggests that a more nuanced understanding of her significance in the poem, especially as it could have registered with contemporary audiences, might come from recognition of the parallels between Beowulf and the Anglo-Saxon metrical charm tradition. Specifically, reading Grendel’s mother in terms of such parallels provides a contemporary interpretive paradigm that not only incorporates the facts of her gender and maternity while avoiding common lexical and critical concepts of anti-type or assumptions of monstrosity, but also gives insights into the ways that original audiences might have processed the more peculiar textual details associated with her into a cohesive whole, with her as an irreducibly complex figure at its center.

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