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Lair-as-Womb-as-Death: The Reproductive-Destructive Power of the Monsters' Lair in Beowulf

A note on language: In this essay, the term "female body" refers to bodies bearing a vagina and uterus. Meanwhile, "woman" refers to a person who is, socially/via identification, a woman, regardless of physical anatomy. Finally, "feminine" is used as an adjective to describe traits commonly assigned to the latter within certain psychoanalytic frameworks.

In opposition to the light, warmth, and revelry of Heorot lies the dark, cold, unforgiving depths of the lair Grendel shares with his mother. This “mere” is a liminal space between above and below, between life and death. In a poem filled with monsters, dragons, and heroic feats of strength, this bottomless pool serves as one of the most fantastical elements of the story. Beowulf and his foes may have strength and abilities of an exaggerated nature, but the mere is an impossible place beyond human understanding. The role it plays in the epic and the ways in which it is described suggest a certain set of cultural fears and anxieties linked to the archetype of the archaic mother. In Beowulf, existential fears of annihilation and dissolution are projected onto the female body in the form of the lair, which is described as a demonic womb that births monsters and brings death to men.

Grendel’s mother and her dwelling place are twined together into a single entity which exemplifies the “archaic mother” as envisioned by feminist theorist Barbara Creed. The archaic mother refers to an archetypal “pre-phallic” feminine figure, one which conceives and births life without the involvement of a masculine figure (Creed 20). She is often situated in horrific contexts as an arbiter of death and destruction; when she arrives in a text, she is a source of terror. This archetype provides new avenues for analysis of Grendel’s mother, as it enfolds not only female/feminine characters who act as pre-phallic mothers, but also “the abyss, the cannibalizing black hole” which often acts as an extension or projection of them (Creed 25). Grendel’s mother is deeply linked to just such an “abyss.” The monsters’ lair is, itself, an archaic mother and a primary source of the horror latent throughout the entirety of Beowulf.

The monster’s lair is a double-hidden location, elusive and shrouded in mystery, connecting it to the image of a vagina and/or womb. It is first obscured by its environment. It disappears “into mist and moorland,” and is protected by a “frost-stiffened wood” among a “maze of tree roots” (Beowulf 1361; 1362-64). Furthermore, the lair is even hidden within itself, so much so that “the mere bottom / has never been sounded by the sons of men” (1366-67). When Beowulf dives in to pursue Grendel’s mother, he cannot find her until he “entered some hellish turn-hole” tucked away in the depths (1513). The pool’s descriptions are that of the quintessential archaic mother, which is often associated with earthly and aqueous imagery and wild nature (Morgan 55). The interiority of the vagina/uterus, compared with the phallus, means that obscured and hidden locations, like pools or dark woods, are linked to the feminine. A deep and primitive fear of these places, which one may enter and never return from, suggests a conflation of the female body with destructive properties — the shadow side of its generative abilities. Such a location runs counter to the phallic qualities of towers, hills, and mountain peaks which protrude from the earth. The mead-hall Heorot, situated at the top of a hill, is an example of such phallic imagery. The phallic/masculine nature of mead-halls is solidified by their role in the structuring of Anglo-Saxon communities, “where the men’s hall occupie[d] the cultural center and define[d] that ‘semblance of order’” (Weston 284). Meanwhile, women existed “on the boundary between the hall and the nonhuman wilderness,” living as they did on the outskirts of the hall (284). In this way, the Anglo-Saxons perpetuated the association between women and wildness on a daily basis. This social structure is reflected in the juxtaposition of the phallic symbol of Heorot (which stands in for values of order, civilization, and light/life) with the vaginal/uterine symbol of the monster’s lair, which connects to chaos, wild-ness, and darkness/death.

The mere conflicts with the phallic in a secondary manner within the poem, through invoking a form of impotence in the epic’s hero. When Beowulf enters the lair and finds Grendel’s mother, he quickly learns that the tools and skills which served him so well in the phallic realm are virtually useless in the depths of the archaic mother. He comes prepared for battle with a sword but “his battle-torch extinguished; the shining blade / refused to bite. It spared her and failed / the man in his need” (Beowulf 1522-1525). The sword, a phallic symbol, fails its user at the penultimate moment, in a scene that conveys impotence. Here, anxiety surrounding impotence runs parallel to anxiety around the powerlessness of humankind, with all of our weapons and inventions, against the inevitability of death. Beowulf overcomes Grendel’s mother upon finding a second, especially powerful sword in the lair with which he can finally kill her. Although he is the victor, this battle still represents a failure for Beowulf, who was able to beat Grendel in hand-to-hand combat, but could not match up the same against Grendel’s mother. Beowulf’s body and skill mean nothing in the face of death, and it is only a stroke of good fortune that rescues him. Even so, this new sword also becomes impotent when he uses it to cut off the head from Grendel’s dead body. After it comes into contact with Grendel’s blood, it “began to wilt into gory icicles / to slather and thaw” (1606-07). This impotency-via-weaponry is mirrored by Beowulf’s ultimate failure to produce any heirs and the fall of Geatland after he dies. This suggests that it is deep in the monsters’ lair that Beowulf’s good luck and metaphorical potency runs out, foreshadowing that his next fight shall be his last and that his legacy shall be insecure.

The lair is home to both feminine and masculine monsters, but embodies a primarily feminine presence suggested by its strong association with Grendel’s mother. The very first descriptions of the bottomless pool that harbors the Grendel family are nestled within the introduction of Grendel’s mother. Before this point, the lair is alluded to, but never described. The poem implies a relationship between the lair and the female body and violent femininity of Grendel’s mother. It is also the place from which both monsters emerge. As “unnatural birth[s]” and “fatherless creatures” whose “whole ancestry is hidden in a past / of demons and ghosts,” it is as if Grendel and his mother are born from this place, formed asexually from the shadowy depths (Beowulf 1353-57). The pool also produces “all kinds of reptiles [...] writhing sea-dragons / and monsters” (1426-27). Like a womb, the lair inhabits a liminal space between life and death — it is a place of uncertainty from which anything might emerge, or might not. Without the need for sex of any kind, this pool generates and reproduces these unnatural creatures on its own, a fertile yet monstrous earth-womb.

The womb connection is strengthened through imagery that evokes the violence of childbirth. Whenever a storm rages over the mere, “out of its depths a dirty surge / is pitched toward the heavens” (Beowulf 1374-75). This is both an apt description of a flood, as well as of water breaking as someone goes into labor. When Beowulf and his men go to the mere, they are met with “bloodshot water” and they all “gazed as the hot gore / kept wallowing up” (1416; 1422-23). Not only does the gushing blood and gore liken to imagery of menstruation and/or the child birthing process, but they draw an association between man’s beginning/birth with his violent end/death. The pool, as an archaic mother, has a latent power over life and death. Here there is a subconscious acknowledgement of a fact that all humans know deep within: the closest experience they’ve had to death was their time spent not being alive in the first place. Time spent in the womb is the most a human knows of nothingness until they die. Thus, the womb becomes inextricably connected with death — with dissolution, with annihilation of the self. The head of Aschere sits next to the mere, a reminder of the destructive, life-ending capacity of this life-giving pool.

The lair-as-womb-as-death — the bosom of the archaic mother — is where Grendel returns to to breathe his dying breaths. He returns to the darkness from whence he came, as we all eventually do. In this way, the mere sits as a core element of Beowulf; the place that confronts the epic’s hero with horrible truths even as he escapes from it alive. It emanates such darkness and fear that even the forest’s animals are said not to go near it, as they are subject to the same aversion to death as humans are. It is only the monsters that it births that know that death-lair’s depths, and they crawl from it, encroaching onto the human world as a carnivorous memento mori, to remind them that all will come to an end, even if they feel that they are on top of the world, untouchable. The womb-as-death proclaims, you were once nothing, before being a helpless infant; and soon enough, you’ll be a helpless man, and then you’ll be nothing again.

Works Cited