PicoBlog

During Christian Late Antiquity, there was a systematic draining away of horror narratives about female monsters, furies, Bacchae, or witch-bitches. Sure, empousai and lilin were going strong, but no one in the Christian west was really reading The Bacchae; no one was really thinking about how Athenian patriarchal democracy sat on the backs of suppressed, chthonic Furies. As a result, by the so-called Dark Ages, monstrous femaleness has been tamed by a Christian religion that centered on the idea of women as passive vessels, rather than as active and potentially threatening agents with their own volition and their own power.

Or maybe I should say mostly tamed.

That deep-seated cultural awareness of a deadly tension between a chthonic, underground, vicious, vengeful female energy and a patriarchy that relies on the suppression of that femaleness persists in some places. For example, 10th century England.

My all-time favorite medieval horror poem presents a hard-charging vision of the terror of female power and its desire to avenge itself on an encroaching patriarchal and patrilinear order. That poem is Beowulf.

If you have been told that Beowulf is an epic—the first one in English—you’ve been told right. But here’s the fun thing about literary genres: they’re plastic and elastic, ecstatic and promiscuous, and I’m here to tell you that Beowulf, while definitely an epic, is also the earliest surviving English work of horror. Let me lay out the plot for you in overview, and we’ll get into the weeds a little later.

Late one night, out of nowhere, a quasihuman monster hears the sounds of warriors reveling in King Hrothgar’s Great Hall and decides to silence them. Creeping out of the marshes, swamps, fens, and other wet, partially submerged, loamy places where he dwells, this monster sneaks into the Great Hall and slaughters the warriors in their sleep. The monster develops a taste for blood, so these murders become habitual. Quickly, the monster’s attacks on the Great Hall bring the patriarchy to its knees, its king converted into a sniveling shell of a ruler.

But help arrives, in the form of Beowulf, a warrior from a neighboring country. Beowulf handily dispatches the monster the first night he’s at Hrothgar’s hall. Everyone celebrates! The patriarchy is restored! Hrothgar is beside himself with relief that regular life under his kingship can resume.

The trick is, though, that fen-stomping, marsh-sodden, cannibalistic monsters don’t truly come “out of nowhere.” They have mothers. So when the monster is at last maimed and slain by Beowulf, his semihuman monster mother creeps out of the fetid pond they live in to come take his place as the scourge of Hrothgar’s hall.

So let’s zero in more closely on this bad mother.

Now. the monster’s mother is what we’d now call a “single mom” of an only child, the now-dead monster Grendel. Grendel is violent, horrifying, uncanny and cannibalistic, and he gets maimed by Beowulf, coming home to die in mommy’s lap. So when Grendel’s mother comes to wreak hell on the High Hall, her story is revenge horror. The poem registers that explicitly, calling her a “wrecend”—an avenger.

Her revenge targets the patriarchy of Hrothgar’s hall not because of the racket they produce in their merriment, which had so annoyed her now-dead son, but because that patriarchal world destroyed her child. Deep underneath the feculent waters of the fen, Grendel’s mother is the matriarch; when her child is slain, she is the one to take vengeance. And who can blame her, really? Not even the poem does: instead it emphasizes her pain, loss, and rage.

Nevertheless, when we meet her, the poem takes great pains to convey her appearance as unwomanly, unmatronly, and unkempt—very similar to the Roman witch-bitches, and very similar to the Furies, or to the Bacchae. She is called the “ides aglaecwif,” a vile crone of a woman. We learn about her that she was forced down into the depths of the water after Cain had killed his own brother. The poem makes very clear that the curse of Cain is all about violation of the patriarchy—Cain slew “his father’s son” and as a result was “outlawed.” Grendel’s mother seems guilty of anti-patriarchal conduct by association with Cain.

Augmenting the threat to the patriarchy that she seems to embody, Grendel’s mother didn’t know her own father, nor did Grendel know his (she and Grendel “no hie faeder cunnon”). Their patrlinear ancestry is therefore unclear (“hwaether him aenig waes aer acenned/ dyrnra gasta.”) To sum up: we are learning that Grendel’s mother is probably a thousand years old, that she is explicitly associated with the bad guys from the Hebrew Bible, that she has God’s wrath upon her, which has banished her into an abyss, and that she has no natural place in the patrilineal order of descent. Grendel’s monstrosity, in fact, lies in his being alien to the patrilineal geneaologies of Genesis, instead brought to birth and raised solely by his mother. Grendel’s mother thus embodies the anti-patriarchal violence that heroic, patriarchal societies from the Babylonians to the Greeks to the Romans have sought literally to banish to the depths. And the Israelites

After all, we’ve got a cannibalistic female monster who lies outside and athwart the main line of Genesis’ patriarchy… A female monster who lives near or in an abyss, and who gives birth to demonic, cannibalistic offspring? Where have we heard that before? Sound like Lilith? It should. The only real difference is that Lilith is sexy, where Grendel’s mother is “aglaec,” which is usually translated as “fearsome,” but is not just coincidentally cognate with “ugly.”

Angry at the slaughter of her son and thereby of her own matrilinear line, she rips apart one man in revenge, an old friend and adviser to King Hrothgar. What’s more, she takes his corpse away with her, so that his friends cannot appropriately conduct his death rites. She refuses, that is, to allow this dead man’s body and soul to be protected by the beliefs and ways of the patriarchal culture he subscribes to. This cannot be tolerated, so King Hrothgar begs Beowulf to swim down into the dark waters—think of Tiamat here, and Beowulf a neo-Marduk—to fight the old bitch.

When the heroes, led by Beowulf, make their way down to the mucky, dark, revolting pond that Grendel’s mother lives in, they find the head of the man she kidnapped and killed at the shore. Decapitation: not the favorite death of ancient patriarchies. Making matters worse, the water is frothing and boiling with blood, seeming to indicate that Grendel’s mother made a snack of the Danish thane’s body on the way down. Worms and sea-dragons writhe along the water’s surface. Snakes and sea-dragons and cannibalism? Oh, my! Sounds again just like Lilith; also sounds like Allecto; sounds like Tiamat. Like all the pre-modern snaky witch-bitches.

Beowulf swims down—deep—for the better part of a day, fighting off disgusting beasts all the way, until he finds an underwater chamber, lit with firelight. He sees Grendel’s mother there, a “pond-hag” and “a wolf of the deep,” and he swings his battle-trusty sword at her. But his mighty metal blade cannot pierce into her flesh. That’s right: she is impenetrable to the phallic weapons of his above-ground patriarchal world. She fights him unarmed, and he finds her grip is the only one that ever drives him to the ground. She is simply too strong for him to overmaster. But Beowulf has a lucky break: he sees Grendel’s mother’s own treasured and talismanic sword on the wall. He grabs it and decapitates her, because her own sword can kill her. Then he finds Grendel’s own rotting body, and decapitates it, too. The sword then melts in Beowulf’s hands, as though he has taken the sting out of these pre-Christian, chthonic, cannibalistic, uncanny monsters. Reflecting that purgation, with the death of Grendel’s mother, the waters of the pond are uninfested, purified.

Seems like order is restored—the evil night-stalker Grendel and his even-more-terrifying pond-hag bitch-mother are both dead. The warriors rejoice. All bodes well for them, and for the Hrothgarean patriarchy. All also bodes well for Sweden, where Beowulf will return in glorious victory. Three cheers for the restoration of the patriarchy! Hooray, Beowulf! You’ve saved Hrothgar’s thanes from the evil monster and his even more evil mother. You’ve earned your place on the Swedish throne!

But oopsiedaisy: there’s a mean horror hangover waiting for Beowulf after he returns home.

Beowulf rules well as king for many decades, and then has his own lands attacked by a dragon when he is an old man. The dragon stalks his kingdom by night, burning up villages and looting. Beowulf decides to don his battlegear one last time, and go fight the beast himself, aided only by his friend and thane Wiglaf.

The reptilianness of his opponent is symbolically crucial here. Dragons and serpents are—and have always been—associated with the anti-patriarchal magical power of women. Remember from prior posts: in 3rd millennium BCE Mesopotamia, Enheduanna writes a hymn comparing the fearsome goddess Inana to a dragon or basilisk. Centuries later, also in Mesopotamia, the Enuma Eilish envisions its own archvillain as Tiamat, the dragon mother of the sea, who must be destroyed by Marduk. In the Greek tradition, you’ve got snake-haired Gorgons; you’ve got Medea flying away on a chariot pulled by dragons; you’ve got Bacchae allowing snakes to nurse at their breasts. In Rome, Allecto and Erichtho used snakes as tools for their terrifying witchcraft. Lilith was a dragon, in some versions of her stories. Perhaps most famously to modern readers, Eve was corrupted by a snake. Grendel’s mother’s pond-pets were dragons, worms, and serpents. Women who fuck up the patriarchy have a transhistorical, natural bond with snakes, dragons, and other reptiles. So, even though the dragon that kills Beowulf isn’t female, the association is there nonetheless. Dragons are proxies for dysregulated, uncontrollable, vengeful, dangerous female ambition and power. Like Furies, like Gorgons, like Erichtho, like Grendel’s mother, dragons live underground, in caves; they are chthonic, ancient beings, out to take out patriarchal order and civilization by acts of terrorism. Dragons must be curbed and killed in order for the patriarchy to assert itself fully.

So, of course, Beowulf has to slay the dragon.

And Beowulf delivers: he deals a lethal blow to the dragon in battle, but the dragon also deals a lethal blow to him. King Beowulf, maimer of Grendel, decapitator of Grendel’s mother, guardian of the patriarchy, gets taken out by a seething reptile. And here’s where Beowulf leaves us with a horror hangover, a sense that worse may be yet to come. After Beowulf has died, the woman of his kingdom lament for him, saying that, even though he killed the dragon, Beowulf’s own death leaves them all open to attack and colonization by other patriarchal powers. The reason? Beowulf never married; he never produced an heir. The days of fear have only just begun for the good people of Dark Ages Sweden, because they cannot imagine a system of governance other than inherited patriarchy. The dragon has made its point, which was the same point Grendel and his mother made: the patriarchy is vulnerable to attacks from monstrous, chthonic, ancient forces of the night. And no hero—not even Beowulf himself—can keep the patriarchy safe forever.

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