Annotation: Signe Carlson - "The Monsters of Beowulf: Creations of Literary Scholars"

One of the things that got me interested in Old English was studying Middle English. I wanted to see what came before, to go back to the beginning, so to speak. It's always worth going back to the beginning, back to the sources when doing research. When I teach, I try to tell my students when warning them off using Wikipedia as a source that instead they should examine the sources listed there. And I think when doing research about how a character has been perceived and represented, the same principle applies: go back to the beginning.

So this annotation is going to the beginning of a rethinking of Grendel's Mother. Carlson's article is about how the monsters of Beowulf have come to be seen as monsters. She is of her time in that she sees Christianity as separable from the poem, and so her goal is to try and peel that back to try and see if there's anything behind the accretion of Christian-influenced negative terminology that warrants calling Grendel, his mother, and the dragon monsters. She finds the evidence wanting. Obviously, scholarship marches on and Carlson's approach of trying to strip out the Christianity isn't something that would work today. That's not going back to the beginning, as she felt she was doing, but rather trying to create a beginning. Yet her analysis is still worthwhile, as it paves the way for other studies in the future where the monstrosity of at least Grendel's Mother is called into question. Alfano and Hennequin build splendidly from this foundation, and some of the film and literary adaptations that follow the publication of this essay also seem to take some cues (Eaters of the Dead seems almost to be attempting the same kind of work of stripping the poem of its mythopoetic elements in order to get at the "real" story, for instance).

It's also readable for free on JSTOR without institutional access.

Carlson, Signe M. “The Monsters of Beowulf: Creations of Literary Scholars,” The Journal of American Folklore 80.318 (Oct.-Dec. 1967): 357-64.

Carlson’s essay needs some sifting out of the truly salient from the material that feels very much of its time. Setting aside the implicit assumption that the poet is interpolating Christianity into the story and there exists some kind of “factual basis” behind the monsters (357), Carlson makes an important observation: there is no firm textual basis for the reading of the Grendels (or the dragon) as monsters. She singles out words like gæst, aglæca, ides, feond, fifelcyn, and others for analysis, finding little warrant in the Old English for them to be colored with monstrous connotation, or finding alternate readings that accord equally well with the rest of the poem. Her reading of aglæca in particular is persuasive that the word need not mean anything more than “formidable (one)” in Old English, despite attempts by scholars and translators to distinguish between its uses to describe Beowulf and his enemies (359). She also goes into how several translations handle these words, showing that the translators add monstrosity which is not present in the text. An interesting observation about Grendel’s head and its size (that there may be an inconsistency, and that the men carrying his head back on spears may be traceable back to Neanderthal caves where bear heads had been carried on poles) perhaps indicates a point where her writing may link with Michael Crichton’s Eaters of the Dead and its project (362-63). Regardless of that potential connection, Carlson’s essay is valuable for opening the door to the idea that the monsters need not be monstrous, a key factor in the way filmmakers have approached the text, and in opening the door for scholars like Hennequin to question the monstrosity of Grendel’s Mother. Her writing also offers a potential example of how to juggle comparison of several translations in analysis.