Poems about Grendel's Mother

In the interest of sharing things that other people have written (see previous post), here are three poems about/called "Grendel's Mother." The first--in my opinion--is the best.There are links beneath each poem that will take you to their respective sites.

Grendel’s Mother
Dorothy Barresi

Every mother is a monster.
If you don’t know that,
you don’t know anything about love.

And what did you think she would do—the great
mere-woman under heavy-booted oceans
when the deathcry of the boy she made
in her own body

reached her,
and she went marauding
along the wolf-slopes,
the dangerous fen-paths, because she could not

not kill somebody now?

A grieving mother is a walker in the wasteland.
Mindful of misery,
wilder than the sea.
In her arms, howling,

she cradles the ringbones and sprung gore
of her son’s severed arm
until it is Mercy
that cuts her throat,
as we knew, finally, it must be,

by some blonde prince
incidental to this story.

Her blood melts the prince’s sword:
that drowned lullaby
keeps us burning.

Ever good mother is terrible
and God loves a good story.
A woman must learn this
at her own risk.
There is a disturbance under the sea.

http://www.poetrynet.org/month/archive/barresi/grendel.html

Grendel's Mother

Pete Crowther

We never should have let her in,
Grendel’s mum, you said that we’d be sorry
If we did, but I was feeling generous
After several double gins
And when she knocked at six o’clock
Quick up I jumped and called “Come in”.
A thundercloud stood on the step!
It wasn’t just that she was big,
She was obese, with eyes the size of saucers
And hot breath enough to burn the curtains
When she coughed. Like some enormous
Tyrannosaurus Rex she lurched
Into the room sending all the ornaments
Flying from the mantelpiece,
Splintering the floorboards, frightening the cat.
Then she started getting nasty
When I asked her to refrain
From chewing up the tablecloth
And spitting out the bits.
The telephone was still intact
So I dialled nine-nine-nine.
When the operator asked me
What service I required
I didn’t want an ambulance,
I didn’t want the police
I didn’t want a fire engine,
Not one of them could cope,
So I screamed into the mouthpiece
As the monster ran amok:
“I need someone to slay a beast,
Please send St. George or Beowulf”.

http://www.poemhunter.com/poem/grendel-s-mother/

Grendel’s Mother

Heidy Steidlmayer

When the moon’s worn scutcheon

touches the flint-gray flood,

I will lave him in foxglove

and vetch until the blood

of his wretched heart heals.

Without a scar, he stood—

as the men make their way

into the quaking wood.

http://www.poetryfoundation.org/poetrymagazine/poem/242854

Fate in Beowulf

One of your classmates wrote her blog about the role of fate ("wyrd" in Old English) in Beowulf, something we didn't look at very closely in class, so I wanted to share a bit of what I know. Fate, as Beowulf understood it, was different from our understanding of the word as meaning one's destiny or ending. Instead, its meaning was closer to "happening." Below, I've pasted in the definition and etymology of the word, along with a more academic discussion. If you have any thoughts or opinions, please leave comments!
 
From Wikipedia: 

The Old English term wyrd derives from a Common Germanic term *wurđíz. Wyrd has cognates in Old Saxon wurd, Old High German wurt, Old Norse urðr, Dutch worden (to become) and German werden. The Proto-Indo-European root is *wert- "to turn, rotate", in Common Germanic *wirþ- with a meaning "to come to pass, to become, to be due" (also in weorþ, the notion of "worth" both in the sense of "price, value, amount due" and "honour, dignity, due esteem").

Old English wyrd is a verbal noun formed from the verb weorþan, meaning "to come to pass, to become". The term developed into the modern English adjective weird. Adjectival use develops in the 15th century, in the sense "having the power to control fate", originally in the name of the Weird Sisters, i.e. the classical Fates, in the Elizabethan period detached from their classical background as fays, and most notably appearing as the Three Witches in Shakespeare's Macbeth. 

From the 14th century, to weird was also used as a verb in Scots, in the sense of "to preordain by decree of fate".

The modern spelling weird first appears in Scottish and Northern English dialects in the 16th century and is taken up in standard literary English from the 17th century. The regular modern English form would have been wird, from Early Modern English werd. The substitution of werd by weird in the northern dialects is "difficult to account for".^[1]

The now most common meaning of weird, "odd, strange", is first attested in 1815, originally with a connotation of the supernatural or portentuous (especially in the collocation weird and wonderful), but by the early 20th century increasingly applied to everyday situations.^[2]

From  Wyrd: The Role of Fate: 

“Wyrd is an Old English noun, a feminine one, from the verb weorthan "to become".  It is related to the Old Saxon wurd, Old High German wurt, Old Norse urür.  Wyrd is the ancestor of the more modern weird, which before it meant odd or unusual in the pejorative sense carried connotations of the supernatural, as in Shakespeare's weird sisters, the trio of witches in MacBeth. The original Wyrd Sisters were of course, the three Norns, the Norse Goddesses of destiny. 

Wyrd is Fate or Destiny, but not the "inexorable fate" of the ancient Greeks. "A happening, event, or occurrence", found deeper in the Oxford English Dictionary listing is closer to the way our Anglo-Saxon and Norse forbears considered this term. In other words, Wyrd is not an end-point, but something continually happening around us at all times. One of the phrases used to describe this difficult term is "that which happens". 

A Concise Anglo-Saxon Dictionary, compiled by J.R. Clark Hall (University of Toronto Press, fourth ed, 1996) lists variously "fate, chance, fortune, destiny, the Fates, Providence, event, phenomenon, transaction, fact, condition" depending on the literary reference of the Old English work that mentions wyrd. Note "transaction" and "condition", as they point to both the idea of active Fate and the environment in which life is played out.

Anglo-Saxon scholar Stephen Pollington describes it thus:

"...It is worth stressing that the modern notion of linear time was still something of a scientific abstraction among even the Christian Anglo-Saxons, whose attitudes to life and death seem to have been governed by the world-view of their heathen forbears. They believed that at a given time some men...were doomed to die - a reaction to the uncertainties of warfare and accidents not unlike that of many modern soldiers who have faith in the idea that "if it's got your name on it, there's nothing you can do"...Tied in with this idea is the concept of wyrd 'the course of events' which is the underlying structure of time; it is this pattern which the Anglo-Saxons tried to read in the world about them....As the Beowulf poet observed:

Wyrd often saves 
an undoomed hero as long as his courage is good

(lines 572-3)

The implication is that while a man's courage holds out, he has a hope of winning through since wyrd 'the way things happen' will often work to help such a man, as long as he is not doomed; conversely if a man is doomed then not even his courage can help him stand against 'the course of events'." (The English Warrior from Earliest Times to 1066, pp166-167)

If time is not considered or experienced in a linear fashion but instead regarded as an interconnected series of events, each affecting the other, 'that which happens' or wyrd becomes not a destination but a sign post, or even a crossroads. Just as the traveller affects the outcome of his journey by the path he chooses, so do we play an active role in facing what wyrd metes out to us. Wyrd can be "worked". What you do as an individual can bend or change wyrd. 

Consider Time not as a swiftly flowing river, constantly rushing us father away from our births to our deaths, but instead as a lake or pool of infinite size. A handful of pebbles tossed unto the surface of a still pool creates simultaneous, rippling impressions on the water that spreading, touch each other and overlap. Each pebble is distinct from the other. They may be larger or smaller and create a splash of greater or lesser size, but the path of each creates an impression on the watery impression of every other pebble. These pebbles represent wyrd, but ours are the hands that cast them.

Even when a man was doomed by wyrd, there were always consolations, even if it was simply accepting an unpleasant fate with courage. The last line of the poem known as Resignation, a meditation on the Day of Judgment, sums this up well:

It is still the best thing, since a man may not himself avert his destiny, that he should therefore suffer it well. (translated by S.A.J. Bradley in Anglo-Saxon Poetry, David Campbell Publishers, 1982) 

This is from The Exeter Book, written c 950 to 1000 CE, and though strongly Christian in nature reflects the importance of Fate in human striving.”

Interpolated Tales and Inset Stories in Beowulf

If you haven’t read Beowulf before, it can be tempting to ignore the inset stories and songs told at various points in the narrative. But, of course, they’re important, particularly for what they suggest about the future for the Danes, Geats, Heathobards, and Swedes as their kinship-based cultures start to evolve into “kingdoms” as we know them in the more modern sense. For this post, I’d like to look more closely at the passages we discussed in class on Monday. All foreshadow the future in some way or another, and what they foreshadow suggests a dark and uncertain future for the great (and pagan) tribes of Scandinavia as Europe adopts Christianity and tribal cultures begin to cohere and develop national identities.  

The first is the Sigemund episode that begins on line 874. The story comes from the Icelandic sagas that were popular during the middle ages and foreshadows, in part, Beowulf’s battle with the dragon in the final section of the book (Sigemund was a dragon-slayer as well).  The episode speaks of Heremod, a legendary Danish king:

                                                                                The king was betrayed,

                ambushed in Jutland,                    overpowered

                and done away with.                     The waves of his grief

                had beaten him down,                  made him a burden,

                a source of anxiety                         to his own nobles:

                that expedition                                                was often condemned

                in those earlier times                     by experienced men,

                men who relied                                on his Lordship for redress,

                who presumed that the part      of a prince was to thrive

                on his father’s throne                    and defend the nation...

                But evil entered                               into Heremod (lines 901-914)

Heremod, in this passage, is a “burden” and “source of anxiety” to his nobles, exactly the opposite of what a king should be. The righteous king is a ring-giver, a leader to his people and their protector. If he fails, he is no good king. Heremod’s men “presume” that he will play his part—“thrive on his father’s throne and defend the nation”—because there is only one part for a king of this time to play. Heremod’s fate as king is intrinsically bound up with the fate of his people; when he refuses to accept his own fate, his “evil” actions threaten his people and their way of life as well.

Starting in line 1700, Hrothgar picks up the story again and relates a cautionary tale to Beowulf as he congratulates him on killing Grendel’s mother. Whereas the Sigemund episode was told as part of the larger celebration of Grendel’s defeat, this time Hrothgar relates the tale as a direct warning to Beowulf about leadership.

We learn that Heremod “was different” from heroes like Beowulf, and that his rise “brought little joy” but instead “death and destruction” to the Danes (lines 1711-1712).  Hrothgar catalogs this death and destruction when he tells Beowulf that Heremod “vented his rage on…[and] killed his own comrades”; he was a “pariah king” who “grew bloodthirsty [and] gave no more rings to honour the Danes” (lines 1713-1719).

There’s an interesting—and significant—difference in the focus of the two episodes. Whereas the first is more concerned with Heremod’s failure to uphold the heroic code of honor that marked medieval Danish societies, the second ties Heremod’s downfall more directly to his failure to be a Christian king:

                                                                It is a great wonder

                how Almighty God in His Magnificence

                favours our race with rank and scope

                and the gift of wisdom; His sway is wide.

                Sometimes, He allows the mind of a man

                of distinguished birth to follow its bent,

                grants him fulfillment and felicity on earth

                and forts to command in his own county.

                He permits him to lord it in many lands

                until the man in his unthinkingness

                forgets that it will ever end for him (lines 1725-1734)

This is Heremod’s flaw, according to Hrothgar. He forgets that his good fortune is a gift from God and forgets that he himself is mortal. He becomes selfish—he “covets and resents’’—and his pride leads him to believe that he is somehow immortal, that he will be able to hold onto his hoard of possessions even after death (line1749). In this, he is both a failed Christian and a failed kinsman and king. Hrothgar ends his cautionary tale by exhorting Beowulf to “beware of that trap”: “Choose, dear Beowulf, the better part,/ eternal rewards. Do not give way to pride./ For a brief while your strength is in  bloom/ but it fades quickly” (1758-1762).

In the past, the king’s job was to safeguard his people and his land, both during his life and afterward, by ties of kinship and loyalty. The unity of the kingdom lay in the reciprocal relationship between the king and his people; as long as he was a good king who gave gifts, they would be faithful retainers who would defend the kingdom and their ruler. In Hrothgar’s telling of Heremod’s story, though, the king’s role has shifted. His riches come to him not because his actions have made him deserving, but rather because God favors him. His larger responsibility is to “eternal rewards,” and it is only by keeping those in mind that he can hope to pass his kingdom and riches on peacefully to his successor. Heremod fails in this; he leaves behind a torn kingdom, and the future of his immortal soul is in question. In other words, he finds peace neither in life nor in the afterlife.

Although Beowulf’s days as king are still well in the future, Hrothgar’s telling of Heremod’s story reads as a warning: if Beowulf hopes to one day be a good king to his people, he must never forget that he owes his good fortune to God.

It’s taken quite a bit longer than I expected to get through the Heremod scenes, so I’ll try to keep my discussion of the Finnsburg and Freawaru episodes short. What these dark episodes have in common is the failure of custom and tradition to bring peace to the Scandinavians. In the Finnsburg episode, both marriage—between the Frisian Finn and the Danish Hildebuhr—and a negotiated truce fail to preserve order. Later, when Beowulf talks about Hrothgar’s daughter Freawaru, betrothed to a Heathobard in the hopes that the marriage “will heal old wounds and grievous fueds,” he predicts that the truce will fail when just one “old spearman” is able to “stir up trouble” (lines 2028-2046). The result will be that “on both sides the oath-bound lords will break the peace” (2063-2064).

Taken together, these scenes all point to some sort of failure of the “old” ways to effectively deal with the “new” world that is developing in the middle ages. It’s curious to find so much foreshadowing in a text about the great hero Beowulf, the only one able to slay Grendel, his mother, and the dragon. And I think it’s important to consider Beowulf’s reign as king and his battle with the dragon in light of these things. Is he a flawed hero? Is he a hero because he’s a great warrior or because he’s a great king? Both? What does the future look like for the Geats? What responsibility does Beowulf bear for that future?

 Beowulf