Cain's monstrous progeny in Beowulf: part II, post-diluvian survival

Abstract

In part I of this study I concluded that some of the most unusual characteristics of Grendel and his mother (and their ambience) bear a striking likeness to, and may derive from, concepts of a race of cannibalistic giants descended from Cain in an ancient Jewish pseudepigraphical Noah book or (if, as some think, there was no Noah book) pseudepigraphical traditions designated as Noachic. I now take up the second question posed at the beginning of my part I, namely, what knowledge that such a race (or races) survived the Flood is the poet likely to have had? It is a real question, for, after all, if all mankind and all living creatures – except the prescribed Noah contingent – were destroyed by the Flood (Genesis vi and vii), without some authority the Beowulf poet would not have come to the belief that some of Cain's evil progeny had survived. We should not doubt the reality of that belief. For one thing, we can be confident that he believed in the physical actuality of monsters. They formed part of the repertoire of medieval belief, especially evident (though not exclusively so) when mystical–popular–folkloristic impulses asserted themselves. In the Middle Ages monsters were not regarded as imagined fictions, nor understood as spiritual–metaphorical symbols. Secondly, to suggest that in deriving his monsters from Cain the Beowulf poet was ‘merely employing a metaphor for the society of reprobates’ and that ‘it is unlikely that Grendel was identified with the race of Cain with any save figurative intent’ is surely inadequate. The narrator's two statements about the line of descent from Cain to Grendel and his mother are neither vague nor obliquely hinted; on the contrary, they are markedly definite.