Jottings on Beowulf and fragmentation of the body/nation

As I've not posted anything in a while, here's a note-form version of something I'm working on at the moment. This is the seminar paper I delivered a couple of weeks ago, and which I am currently working on expanding into a full-length paper (c. 20-22 pages, if I can keep it down to that length!). I'm keeping it in note form, because I am, sadly, beginning to get a little chary of copyright on the internet.

Not that I expect to publish this. I am not going to make my first major analytical publication on Beowulf.

A - General outline: Fragmentation or unity of the body as reflective of (and a site for exploring anxieties about) that of the nation.

- Lerer calls beowulf ‘a poem of the body’ (723). [1] Poem’s focus on the physical deeds and prowess of the warrior body often excludes the use of ornamentation, weaponry or armour. Every conflict with a monstrous opponent results in not merely the death of one party but in the fragmentation or destruction of their body: Grendel rends and eats his victims, Beowulf relies on muscle rather than weapon and tears off Grendel’s arm, Grendel’s mother tears off Aeschere’s head and discards it far from civilisation, Beowulf kills Grendel’s mother and cuts off Grendel’s head then displays head and arm as tokens of his victory. He cleaves the dragon in two; the sea monsters try to make a feast of him, but he scatters their bodies on the shore. All of the most dramatic moments of conflict with an outside force, Lerer concludes, draw attention to the maintenance of the intact body of the victor over the broken body of the defeated.

B - ‘Nation’ (for this purpose) as defined not by maps or land but as the people and culture.

- Spatial imaginaire, but not the physical boundaries on which Michelet[2] focusses. Not particularly useful for Beowulf (partly for reasons Hiatt points out, but also simply because the rest of the land is not very interesting, with the partial exception of its coast-boundaries).

- Instead, nation is centred on / symbolised by the vivid image of the hall and the bodies within - as Michelet does point out, it is the hall in each instance (whether human or monstrous) that is under the threat of invasion. The invasions into the hall (by Grendel or the dragon) lead to a breakdown in unified social function (Michelet 79).

- Within the hall, imagery is centred on the body and the cultural actions of the body, esp. re. gift-giving (and the throne, the centred position of the leader, is a particular point of threat from both Grendel and dragon). Proximity to the central figure as crucial element in ordered and functioning social space - cf movements of queen within hall bearing cup to guests, etc. (May not be spatial centre if one were to draw a floor plan, but is imagined/conceptual centre.) The absent leader provides space for his replacement with Grendel (Hroðgar leaves the hall in the night, Michelet 92). (note that the den of dragon and Grendel provide a negative image of this)

- Image of nation therefore as the body (esp. that of the leader) within the communal space.

- But centre and boundaries are defined against each other: centre implies boundaries, boundaries necessitate centre (Michelet 10, then 24). Anxiety about definition and establishment of secure boundaries, the point where in becomes out, us becomes them, at which they touch by necessity, the point farthest from centre. How do we define the boundaries? ... monsters!

C - Jeffrey Cohen’s work on the idea of the giant in Anglo-Saxon literature/mythology[3] as a starting point from which to examine the nature of the threat presented by Grendel and his mother. [Firstly: giant tears and eats, is a threat to the body, but also, in its violent exaggerated human form, a threat to unified society] Especially:

- The giant as inhabiter / transgressor of boundaries, of both society and human bodies. Cohen 1-2 re. giant as psychological and cultural delineator of boundaries - extend this to spatially, to the temporal boundaries of beginnings and endings, and also culturally taboo-boundaries like cannibalism: in each instance the physical body and its physical effects are important.

- The giant as originary or causative, particularly in their body, inhabiting some distant past on which the present is built. The broken body of the giant provides origins (cf Gog/Magog, who are thrown into the sea as the dragon is) (p. 9 for Ymir). The giants’ violent acts and boundary-breaking, the damage they visit on bodies and landscape (17), form the origin both of cultures (imaged in the body) and cultural space.

D - Fragmentation of that body

- By consumption or mutilation.

- Maintenance of the intact body = success, vs. consequences of defeat = dismembered body (Grendel, Aescere’s head, etc) - see Seth Lerer. What is at stake in the conflicts, then, is unity vs fragmentation, as conceived in terms of the body.

- He does not point out, however, that each conflict (even Beowulf vs. sea monsters) has one party transgressing the boundaries of the other’s space - one enters to the other and the result is a dismembered body within a violated space. The space itself often shows signs of this violence - the blood bubbling to the surface of the mere is an irrefutable sign of the violence within, and is read as such, although Hrodhgar’s men misread the results of that violence. Crossing the boundary is a defining moment that, like the passage of the Rubicon, commits the intruder to a battle for control of the integrity of the space and the body. Attention is thus drawn to the boundaries and the moment of breaking them.

- Therefore the body (society or the body of its leader) defined / celebrated by challenge to it.

E. Grendel and his mother inhabit and transgress the boundaries of body and nation and thus help to delineate them (Michelet 94-5). The image of the broken body of the giant + intact body of hero (alive or celebrated in his tomb) provides origin, projected back into the past?

- Cohen: fragments of Grendel’s body are elevated as symbols of “a public validation of the control and acceptance of structured society whose antitheses Grendel represents” (24). So the fragments are not only a result of victory, but a sign of it, signalling triumph over the other and a society (and heroic body) whose unity has been affirmed.

- Michelet points out that “The demon’s footsteps provide the spatial transition between the two places” (Heorot and the mere) (80) & treading the grounds defines the limited (107-08). He does not point out that Grendel’s footprints are not merely impressions in the dirt, but marked in blood, signs of the damage to his body and his consequent defeat. Cannot break the boundaries of his space until his body is broken - and once he does, Beowulf breaks his body again.

- Walkers in the wasteland: with their feet, especially the bloody footprints, they mark out and define the boundaries of civilisation.

In expanding this to a proper paper, I'd like to explore further the idea of temporal boundaries - the beginning and ending of nations / things / memory / knowledge. Beowulf and Wiglaf are the last of their people, Beowulf says, and this is signalled by the breakdown of society after Beowulf dies, as if his death and the sundering of social ties shown by the earls’ failure to help him signal the actual end of the Geats as a whole. Beowulf’s body, however, remains: he says that his cairn is to be a signal to later generations, or later ages, far into the future. But there is very little human history, only a few generations back, as if the past can only be accessed by the monsters.

Drawing again on Cohen: the hilt of the sword that Beowulf takes from the mere depicts the giants before the flood, which is where they’re usually found, in some legendary but foundational long-ago. They build, yes, and old stone ruins are often referred to semi-metaphorically in Anglo-Saxon poetry as ‘the work of giants’ (Cohen 11), but other landscape features are also attributed to them. They and their brute strength are used to explain the presence of mountains, lakes, ancient cities, broken rocks, changes wrought long ago before the human nation arrived. In Germanic cosmogonies they predate the material universe, which is fashioned from the corpse of one of them (7).

So giants are originary or causative, particularly in their body, inhabiting some distant past on which the present is built. The broken body of the giant provides origins - Gogmagog is dashed into a thousand pieces and thrown into the sea so that Brutus can found Britain. The dragon, incidentally, meets the same fate - but I don't think we can equate the dragon and the Grendelkin so easily. He seems to me to be a very different creature, especially in terms of how he relates to the beginnings and endings of human civilisations.

Grendel’s fragments possibly provide, for the poem’s audience, a similar imaginative origin in the defeat of the previous inhabitants of the land. The giants’ violent acts and boundary-breaking, the damage they visit on bodies and landscape (Cohen 17), form the origin both of cultures (imaged in the body) and cultural space, but they also demarcate a boundary in time that cannot be crossed by human knowledge: once again, they demarcate the unknowable.



[1] Seth Lerer, ‘Grendel’s Glove’, English Literary History 61 (1994): 721-751. (The glove Grendel wears – ie, the monster as symbolised by his hand and his mouth, Beowulf’s removal of these; Norse traditions of giants’ gloves; Beowulf is ‘a poem of the body’, and victory results in destruction of the body of the defeated.)
[2] Fabienne Michelet, Creation, Migration and Conquest: Imaginary Geography and Sense of Space in Old English Literature. Oxford: Oxford UP, 2006. (Anglo-Saxon conceptions of space; Grendel’s mere and the dragon’s den compared and contrasted to Heorot, Beowulf’s hall, Beowulf’s cairn; demarcations of land boundaries in Beowulf.)
[3] Jeffrey Jerome Cohen, ‘Old English Literature and the Work of Giants’, Comitatus 24 (1993): 1-32. (Figure of the giant in Old English literature; debts to Germanic and Latin/Old Testament traditions; psychological function of the monster; figure of Grendel within this tradition.)

Beowulf and the intimidated critic

I confess it: I have been avoiding Beowulf.

Now, of course, as soon as I confessed this to myself, I had to jump in and volunteer to present in the first of two classes in which we will discuss Beowulf in our 'Mediaeval (As) Epic' class - ie, in two weeks, which makes me the first seminar presentation overall.  Despite my rational mind saying 'oh, you should probably go for one of the later Anglo-Norman epics, 12th or maybe 13th century, that way you can double up your theory with your thesis, which, may I remind you, you are writing this semester'.  Because Beowulf is the behemoth, the Hamlet-scale terror, at the mention of which everything in me retreats to huddle behind a defensive barrier of 'oh, I work in the late Middle Ages, no, I have no opinion on Beowulf, that would require reading reams and reams of lifetimes' works of scholarship, also I do not speak Old English, no, please, do not get me fascinated by Old English, I don't have time'.

So of course I have now put myself in the position where I have to have an opinion by next week.  Oh well.

The course is on the concept of epic, and we seem so far to be leaning towards discussion of the later appropriation of that concept, particularly for nationalistic purposes, which accords with the secondary reading for that week (largely nation and romanticism in the 19th and early 20th centuries).  And there I can double up on theory with my thesis, in terms of the opportunistic (re)construction of 'history'. I much suspect that my key terms will be not only 'nationalism' and 'alterity' but also 'borders' and 'fragmentation' - as that will be a topic of discussion later when we reach Raoul de Cambrai - and thus - Grendel!  March-reaver and literal object of fragmentation!

And this, of course, means that I have an excuse to read J. J. Cohen.  This is always a treat.

Merry Christmas from the Kilpatrick household!

Every family has Christmas traditions, right? Each has something unique that they do that they can be fairly sure no one else is doing right at that moment. For example, two years ago as we hung our newly iced gingerbread men on the christmas tree, we could be fairly sure that no other family in Australia had a gingerbread Lucia di Lammermoor, swaying sensuously in her blood-spattered white nightdress. I think I even managed to make a dagger for her, possibly out of slivered almonds.

This Christmas, gingerbread forms were dictated rather by chance. For example, someone lost his head accidentally. So of course, he had to be consoled by translation into an approprate semi-Christmas figure:


He isn't wearing a dress. The Green Knight is far too manly to wear a dress. It is an embroidered robe. With almond embroidery on the belt.

His flashing red eyes did run a little, though.

Unfortunately, we didn't have any horse-shaped cutters, so his colour-coordinated steed lacks a little grandeur:


But his friend/adversary is very pretty, in appropriately Christmassy colours, and with an almost-pentangle on his shield.

I'm not sure why Gawain has no eyes. Either there was some solemn symbolism about his inability to see truly due to being distracted by earthly beauty, or I had used all the cashous by this time.

In any case, he probably got the better deal:
Poor Grendel is not only missing an arm, and some claws from his remaining hand, but he was strung up to the tree upside down - and as a result, an enterprising beagle has nibbled his head.

In fact, limblessness and missing bits seemed to be a theme this year, right down to the story my younger sister told with some of the old Christmas tree ornaments:



From left to right, Mrs Dobbins (missing her legs, an arm and the loop of string on top of her head due to her enthusiastic habit of rolling down the street), Clive the Headless Rocking Horse (ran afoul of a beer company for criticising its objectification of women, a subject about which he feels very strongly despite the fact that he is neither female or human), various soldiers who lost their bits in battling the evil chicken minions of the Easter Bunny, and another horse who's quite literally gone off his rocker and also has to wear his head slung over the left side of his rump for fear of over-balancing. I don't remember his story, except that he now runs a bicycle shop.

A slightly more serious attempt at decoration (I disapprove of Yule logs that involve feral plants like holly):


... and my two dogs worn out after a long morning beach walk.


Not that Snowy went on the walk. He was worn out by all his quiet sleeping while the rest of the family (including both beagles) was on a morning beach walk. He's seventeen, blind, deaf and doddery, lives with my parents because he'd be far too disoriented if I took him with me to Melbourne, and we've been expected him to die suddenly for about three years.

He quite likes Oliver, though I don't think Oliver really notices him.

I also think it's fair to say that we were the only family in Adelaide or farther playing the dictionary game from the Oxford Latin Dictionary (we found it's easier than the English, because it's much easier to find a word that no one knows), and making up family line-by-line stories involving Chrétien de Troyes, Cleopatra and Amanda Vanstone.

It works like this. Everyone in the circle has a piece of paper. They write a man's name up the top, followed by the word 'met'. They fold the top down to hide the name from the next person, then pass the paper on. On the next paper, they write a woman's name, then fold it down and pass it on. Everyone contributes a sentence to each story, following a consistent pattern to preserve some coherence. In this case, the pattern was:
[man's name] met [woman's name] at [place]. He [said/did something]. She [ditto]. [repeat actions, alternating he/she, a certain number of times agreed in the group]. The upshot was that... [something happened].

For example:

David John Kilpatrick [my father] met
Cleopatra at
Windsor Castle.
She raised one finely plucked golden eyebrow at his choice of garter.
He tickled her tummy.
She rose onto her tiptoes and wiggled her ears conspiratorially.
The consequence was they got married and had lots and lots of babies and two rather scrawny cockatoos.

Or:

Margaret Thatcher met
Kevin Rudd [our Prime Minister] at
the Chelsea Flower Show, where he was judging the cyclads and she was dressed as one.
He remembered that he'd always had a phobia about that kind of female and began to run around in circles, squawking and flapping his arms about.
She replied, "But sir, where do you put your Grumpy Old Mysterious Stranger Who Holds The Information Necessary For The Quest, But Who Talks Only In Cryptic Epigrams?"
He rabbited on a bit longer, but finally shut up when they started playing some of his favourite music.
She raced after him, intending to catch him by train, but then remembered that she'd previously rigged all the points.
The upshot was that he joined the Australian Labour Party and developed a terrible phobia of floral print.

I don't know how we got such an appropriate final line, given whoever wrote it can't have known that the story had previously contained either a Labour PM or flowers.

Merry Christmas and New Year, and may you lose no limbs, or even claws!