Grendel: A New Aspect

Abstract

have hesitated before accepting this extension in meaning, perhaps because in thirty in Beowulf, maere and its various forms modify royal persons or highly esteemed objects with formulaic consistency.2 Taken alone, without further evidence, this preponderance of usage in the complimentary sense would hardly warrant the suggestion that the poet had in mind an entirely different word than maere, famous, in the two passages. The word aeglaeca, for instance, is used both in a favorable and an unfavorable sense, referring to the dragon and Grendel as well as to and Sigemund.3 Yet in the case of maere, evidence found in the glossaries and in folklore and overlooked in the past strongly suggests that the author of in the lines 103 and 762 was actually using a word which, though similar in form, was quite different in meaning. It is my contention that this word was not maere, famous, with a long diphthong but maer with a short diphthong, meaning incubus, night monster; that in the course of the two or so centuries generally thought to have intervened between the composition of the poem and the copying of the oldest manuscript extant,4 the meaning of the original term had become more specialized, being applied then only to the kind of night spirits which predominated in the folklore of the later Middle Ages; and that, 1 All line references and quotations from are based on and the Fight at Finnsburg, ed. Frederick Klaeber (3d ed.; Boston, 1950). At this point I would like to thank Professor F. G. Cassidy for his constructive criticism and his numerous suggestions. 2 Klaeber gives the regular definition of maere as famous glorious, illustrious. For lines 103 and 762, he suggests wellknown, notorious. A. J. Wyatt and R. W. Chambers, in with the Finnsburg Fragment (Cambridge, 1952), suggest notorious, for 762. Burton Raffel, in his recent translation (New York, 1963), uses infamous in 762 and skips the word in 103. Indications of hesitancy appear in An Anglo-Saxon Dictionary, ed. J. B. Bosworth and T. N. Toller (Oxford, 1954), where the editors place a question mark after 762; and in the Wyatt-Chambers edition of Beowulf, where a note to maera, 762, refers the readeI to Bosworth-Toller for other instances of uses in a bad sense (cf. text below). 3 The meaning of aeglaeca seems to have been in a transitional stage, which would explain the peculiar usage in Beowulf. In Andreas, it is used both for the protagonist and the antagonist, while in later literature, it has only favorable connotations. In the Phoenix, it refers to the bird himself (442). In Byrthferth's Manual, it refers to the Venerable Bede. By Middle English times, as an adjective, it can modify the Virgin (cf. Stanley M. Wiersma, A Linguistic Analysis of Words Referring to Monsters in Beowulf [unpublished dissertation, University of Wisconsin, 1961], pp. 351, 443). 4 This is the approximate date most seem to agree on (see Klaeber, pp. cvii-cviii).