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COPYRIGHT 1994 Johns Hopkins University Press
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)
To call Beowulf a poem of the body is, of course, to affiliate it with those traditions of the corporealized self that distinguish European heroic poetry from the Homeric epics to the Song of Roland. Indeed, many of the features I will attend to in the Old English poem--mutilation and dismemberment, the social expectations of physical violence, the cultural importance placed on eating, drinking, and their rituals--have long been seen as central to an epic world in which the hero and his victims share in the rites of self-display and bodily purification.(11) Part of my purpose in this essay, then, will be to locate Beowulf and Grendel in this world: to find in figurations of repast and sacrifice the legacy of Indo-European ritual and, furthermore, to locate in the hand and head, the mouth and belly, the emblems of what Pietro Pucci has called, writing on the Iliad and Odyssey, "heroic etiquette."(12) Such etiquette looks back to stories of the hunt and kill, and to the complex social legends that domesticated ancient violence into public ritual and shared religious action. Walter Burkert has detailed the manner in which each part of a sacrificial creature took on special meanings in these rituals: blood, flesh, viscera, bone, and skin all played a role in the propitiation of the gods and the feeding of their human subjects.(13) In the activities of offering and eating, and the myths which grew up to explain and to maintain them, Burkert finds models of society itself. Taboos of social interaction, hierarchies of class or function, and notions of the human interrelationship with the natural world are all encoded in the sacrifice. In tandem with this work, the group of researchers clustering around Jean-Pierre Vernant and Marcel Detienne in Paris have sought to understand "relationships between religion and society through inquiry focused on the phenomenon of sacrifice."(14) In the great myths of Dionysus and his slaughter, of Orpheus and his beheading, or of Thyestes and his dismemberment, as well as in the archetypal Homeric accounts of dining, these scholars have found tales both cosmogonic and sociogonic.(15) So, too, has Georges Dumezil and his later Indo-Europeanist heirs and critics.(16) The "general narrative" of creation, in which "a primordial being is killed and dismembered," comes to share in the accounts of social organization, as the body bears a broad relationship to both the structure of the universe and that of human society.(17) Analogies between, for example, the head and the heavens, the flesh and the earth, blood and water, are embedded in the myths of Indic, Iranian, Germanic, and the Greek and Latin peoples. Such stories as the killing, dismemberment, and burial of Romulus constitute veiled retellings of the story of creation while at the same time they domesticate, by rendering in literary form, the old brute practices of cultic sacrifice or social hunt.(18)
These narratives have, in addition to their cosmogonic and sociogonic purposes, a literary one as well, for bodies whole and broken lie at the center of many myths of poetry's own origins. The Old Norse legends of the mead of Odinn and the ritual dismemberment of Kvasir share a common Indo-European ancestry with the great myths of Sanskrit, Avestan, and Old Irish cultures.(19) Read together, they define what might be thought of as a bodily poetics: a conception of the birth of literary form out of the same shared ritual conventions as the birth of cosmic structure or of social life. The human body--marked and dismembered, reduced to its constituent elements or its disassembled limbs--is often taken as the site of allegory in the ancient traditions of literary speculation.(20) Metonymically or synechdochically, the body locates and explains phenomena of social life. It makes the processes of literary understanding part and parcel of the public apprehension of the self. To see the body as a world and the world as a body is not simply to metaphorize experience in corporeal terms (to live, say, in a body politic), but to experience the metaphorical as fundamentally corporeal. Poetic making is a matter of the body, as its parts and processes provide a visible, if not palpable, basis for figurative expression.(21)
This basis had, in fact, long been recognized by practitioners and theorists of the Germanic poetic tradition. The workings of the kenning, that distinctive marker of the figural and figurative, often hinge on bodily possession or adornment. So, too, does the Anglo-Saxon riddle with its predilection for rephrasing works of human artifice or natural creation as the objects of corporeal, if not sexual, human function.(22) The Old Norse skalds traditionally placed the body at the center of poetic imagination, as much of their metaphorics hearkened back to stories of the death of Kvasir and the genesis of poetry out of the liquid distilled from his broken form. As Carol Clover's reconstruction of the "skaldic sensibility" of medieval Scandinavian court poetry shows, the Old Norse skalds had generated their poetic lexicon and imagery out of the cosmogonic legends of corporeal dismemberment. To locate poetic performance in the breast and mouth, to find its inspiration in the figurative ingestion of Odinn's mead, is to link the body with the word.(23) So, too, Snorri Sturluson (1179-1241),...
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