Abstract
This article argues that the figure of Grendel in the heroic poem Beowulf can be read through theories of biopolitics in order to understand the concept of sovereignty and ‘ancestral homelands’ as it has been presented in the poem. I argue that we must regard the poem as presenting a particular biopolitics of the homeland and sovereign power, specifically in how Grendel and his kin are represented as a kind of ‘proto’-Indigenous people that unsettle the Danes’ territorial and political stability. In this way, Grendel and his mother trouble the kingship of Hrothgar and the Danish territorial sovereignty, portrayed as violent and as both inside and outside of the political order. I conclude by examining the term eþel [‘ancestral homeland’] which crystallizes in a single linguistic and orthographic unit the relationship between kin/genealogy and territory/property.
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Notes
‘As a monstrous exception to the human norm, Caliban’s creatureliness propels him into the conceptual space occupied by ideas of national and racial difference, eliciting a long line of culturalist readings of his oppression’ (Lupton, 2000, 1).
All in-text citations of the poem follow Klaeber’s edition (Beowulf, 1950) by line number except where noted. All Old English and Latin translations are my own, except where noted.
The Cain genealogy for Grendel is tenuous: although Klaeber opts for ‘Cain’ (Beowulf, 1950, 1261b), the manuscript reads ‘camp.’ Similarly, as Waterhouse has observed, ‘Beowulf includes a palimpsest of Grendel, in that in 107a, Scribe A originally wrote that Grendel was proscribed “in chames [sic] cynne [because of Ham’s kin]”’ (1996, 26). The manuscript reads (contrary to Waterhouse’s spelling) ‘in cames cynne,’ with the erasure of a ligature between the first two minims in ‘cames.’ The confusion between Cain and Ham is telling. Klaeber notes that Irish interpretations have understood that Ham, one of Noah’s three sons, inherits the curse of Cain after the deluge (Beowulf, 1950). The Ham/Cain misunderstanding ‘occurred widely in English, French, and Latin spellings’ and ‘it provided the biblical underpinnings for the enslavement of African peoples’ (Friedman, 1981, 101).
I work with a late dating of the manuscript, rather than a supposed date of composition. Klaeber’s date for the Nowell codex is the end of the tenth century (1950, xcvi), while more recently Kiernan (1981) and Dumville (1988) argue for an early eleventh-century date (according to Dumville, between 997–1016, and Kiernan, sometime after 1016).
Senra Silva and Fleming have both analyzed this runic character and contextualize it among other uses of runic characters in Anglo-Saxon manuscripts. While Silva argues that the term itself connotes ‘cultural and familiar bonds’ (1998, 242), Fleming, in particular, makes a persuasive case for studying the manuscript’s runic letters as an integral part of the poem: ‘the first scribe of Beowulf, comfortable with these aspects of his [heroic, Germanic, and pagan] past, conceivably could have added the runes to the manuscript as a sort of archaism, an heirloom which itself is part of the same past that is celebrated in the poem’ (2004, 181).
See also Page, who argues that the rune in most other instances ‘appears with rounded initial vowel, as oeþil, oeþel. The Scandinavian name is unrecorded. Gothic has a letter name utal’ (1973, 84). Page also reports that ‘had had the name *oþil, ‘family estate, native land,’ but this now became oeþil, later eþel (1973, 45). In his notes for the ‘Rune Poem,’ Dobbie also notes that ‘there is no corresponding O.N. rune name’ for eþel (Anglo-Saxon Minor Poems, 1942, 158). See also Halsall: ‘in Old English […] o was fronted to œ by following i and later unrounded to e […]; hence there are two forms of the Old English rune name: the earlier œþel and the later West Saxon and Kentish ēþel (1981, 148). The Dictionary of Old English also has ‘(hereditary) land’ and ‘(ancestral) domain.’
For further reading on this, see Jesch (2008).
At lines 519, 913, and 1702.
The first sense of OE writan is given by Bosworth and Toller (1898) as ‘to cut a figure on something,’ cognate to Old Saxon writan to cut, wound; to write and Icelandic rita, ‘to cut, scratch; to write.’ Seth Lerer has also made this important conceptual: ‘Germanic *writan and *reðan find themselves associated from the earliest inscriptions to signal processes of carving and reading’ (1991, 16–7). By extension, Lerer suggests that, as a signifying process, ‘runes are not ‘symbols’ of anything, but may instead be thought of as a power of their own – a power activated by their proper cutting and interpretation (1991, 16–7). See also Howe (1993) and Foys and Trettien: ‘Versions of the Old English verb writan appear exactly twice; in both instances, the term relates not to marks on a page, but to swords and the different kinds of marks they occasion’ (2010, 80).
Loyn notes that England is mentioned in at least 25 runic inscriptions in Scandinavia, all of which date after 1000. Runic inscriptions are made as late as the twelfth century in North West England (Loyn, 1977, 116–7). See also Hadley (2006).
Here is where Lerer sees writing as memorial, epigraphical, and ultimately material: ‘Just as the hero did not notice the runic inscription in the heat of battle, so Hrothgar sees only those things his environment permits him to see. To a Danish king in a pre-Conversion court, the hilt will come as a familiar object of memorial epigraphy […] Hrothgar may read the hilt; but what he reads are the memorial conventions of the rune master’ (1991, 171).
‘A cynn’s inherited nature which determined its actions was its æþelu […] an inherited capacity for action,’ but it was ‘not just an inner state […] In a warrior’s case that was notably the battlefield, but the connection differed from cynn to cynn’ (Clemoes, 1995, 76–7). For the connection between æþele (‘noble’) and constructions of race, see Harris (2003, 54).
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Miyashiro, A. Homeland insecurity: Biopolitics and sovereign violence in Beowulf. Postmedieval 11, 384–395 (2020). https://doi.org/10.1057/s41280-020-00188-3
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/s41280-020-00188-3