Grendel's glove.

Edda (Philadelphia: Univ. of Pennsylvania Press, 1990), 61.

36 Lokasenna, in Neckel (note 35), stanza 60. Translation from Terry (note 35), 82. I have altered Terry's translation of the last line of the Lokasenna stanza to make it echo precisely her translation of the third line of the Harbardzliod stanza, for the two lines in Old Norse are identical.

37 From Young (note 26), 73-74. The entire episode at Utgard summarized here can be found ou 73-78.

38 On the nature of Utgard, and in particular, on the figure of Utgarda-Loki as either the transformed Skrymir himself or as an antitype of Loki (who Returning from his exploits at the Danish court, Beowulf comes home to Hygelac to tell of his adventures. He recalls events at Heorot, digresses on the moral implications of heroic action, tells the story of the Heatho-Bard feud, and presents abbreviated versions of the fights with Grendel and his mother.(1) The sequence of events he offers will be familiar to the poem's audience, and Beowulf himself announces that the struggle with the monster is a story not unknown (undyrne, 2000) to many of his potential listeners. The poem's audience will hear again of the hospitality of Hrothgar, the voracity of the monsters, and the success in underwater combat. That he had fought beneath the mere, he states again, is now a fact well known ("pe is wide cud," 2135), and it would seem that Beowulf's own story offers little more than a review of what we, and his audience, already know.

But in the middle of the narrative, Beowulf proffers information neither we nor they have heard before. There is the naming of the first Gear killed, Hondscio (2076), and the description of Grendel's monstrous glove in which he was wont to put his victims (2085b-88). Moreover, in its protestations of excessive length and its self-consciousness of telling, Beowulf's story of the fight seems strikingly unlike anything he has performed before. Early-twentieth-century critics construed this episode as sharing in the legacy of Norse mythology, with Grendel's glove hearkening back to the troll gloves of folktale.(2) Tolkein glossed over many of the details of the passage, noting only that "without serious discrepancy, it retells rapidly the events in Heorot, and retouches the account."(3) More recently, James Rosier found in the passage a complex pattern of wordplay that apposed the Geat's name--a transparent appellation cognate with the modern German Handschuh, "glove"--and the monster's glof in a punning set of references to the "play of hands" within the poem. The "identity of the missing thane," Rosier argued, "became artistically relevant" to the Beowulf-poet's thematic concerns with repayment, guardianship, and political control.(4) Building on Rosier's arguments, I have suggested elsewhere that Beowulf's speech to Hygelac's court represents a species of social entertainment: an attempt to turn heroic action and horrific violence into humor and self-deprecation, much like the self-accounts presented by the heroes of romance who, in turning past actions into present words, transfer a physical ordeal into conventions of poetic eloquence and thereby signal their return to civilization from the wilderness.(5)

I would like to reconsider some of these arguments here to assess Grendel's glove and Beowulf's narration from a different critical perspective, one shaped by recent scholarly and theoretical preoccupations with the body in archaic and medieval cultures. Such meditations on the body, both as the figuration of an epistemic site and as the historically definable locus of the social status of the self, have long acknowledged the controlling tension between wholeness and dismemberment. The marked or mutilated corpus has been taken as the focus of cultural understanding, the place where social organizations represent themselves both to their controllers and their controlled.(6) In Beowulf, such mutilated or dismembered forms become the foci for reflections on the poet's craft and on the place of imaginative fiction in society. The hero's story of the monster's glove, and its analogues and sources in Scandinavian mythology, offer a specific case of such self-reflection. More than a relic of a Northern legend, and more than a piece of narrative exotica, Grendel's glove comes to symbolize the meaning of the monster and the very resources of literary making that articulate that meaning.(7) It represents, in frightening yet also playfully enigmatic ways, the union of hand and mouth that defines the rapacious creature. It distills Grendel's grasp and gape into a piece of artifice, a thing of craeft and ordonc, that stands as the otherworldly alternative to those works of human craft that guard the body and the body politic from a potentially chaotic nature.(8) Grendel's glove is thus a literary rather than an archeological phenomenon: an object crafted out of ancient myth, narrative archetype, and social ritual. Its recollection offers Beowulf a narrative theatrics, a way of locating himself as both a comic and heroic figure in his entertainment before Hygelac's court. It offers us a riddle of representation whose solution takes us to the very workings of Germanic figurative diction.

Beowulf is in many ways a poem of the body.(9) Its actions celebrate that strength of sinew, mastery of breath, or power of the grip that define Beowulf as the victor over social challenge or monstrous invasion. Elaborate armaments and ornaments, while dressing and protecting the heroic form, more often fade into the background, or even fail, before the prowess of the victor or the wiles of the vanquished. The fight with the sea monsters during the swimming match with Breca, the combat with Grendel in Heorot, and the vanquishing of Grendel's mother in her lair, all center on the hero's maintenance of the intact body. By contrast, the results of these victories, and indeed, the consequences of non-Beowulfian encounters with such creatures, leave dismembered bodies. The poem's landscape is littered with ripped trunks, severed heads, and fragmentary limbs. Grendel's arm, AEscere's head, and the decapitated forms of the monster and his mother become the landmarks along which the poem's characters and its readers mark their progress towards heroic victory. And at the poem's end, when Beowulf's blade fails and his mail cannot save him from the dragon's fiery breath, it is a war of body parts that he loses, as the dragon's head-bone breaks the sword Naegling and the hero's own hand fails.(10)