Monstrous Landscape in Beowulf

Abstract

A considerable proportion of Grendel scholarship to date is concerned either with the creature's Cainite identity or with the quest for narrative analogues to the section of Beowulf that concerns him. The subject matter of the former branch builds on the highly deliberative tradition of written exegesis, while sources of the latter kind are mostly narratives of a folk-traditional character which could be argued to have absorbed social concerns in a more organic fashion. This paper analyzes the tensions between Cainite identity and folktale features through a study of the environmental associations of Grendel and his mother. It is demonstrated that their association with wet landscapes, which is explicitly given a theological background, may equally well be explained with reference to socio-economic considerations implicit in folk tradition. At the same time, the geographical mapping of the poem's antagonists constitutes one of few differences between its humans and monsters. This suggests that the poem's geographical distancing functions alongside its religious distancing as a psychological demarcation of human identity.