by Adam Roberts
Actually, Tolkien was not the first to talk of the poem in these terms. A. J. Wyatt’s 1914 standard edition, still widely used in the 1930s, starts with a prefatory note saying that whilst ‘the editors of Beowulf have with rare exceptions concentrated their attempts upon the problem of fixing and interpreting the text and have avoided discussing the literary history of the poem’, there are many critics (‘in monographs such as those of ten Brink, Mullenhoff and Boer’) who do precisely that, and Wyatt himself promises a volume entitled ‘Introduction to the Study of Beowulf’ which will take the poem as poetry.3 Perhaps for our purposes what is more interesting is that Tolkien’s lecture expressly considers Beowulf to be a ‘riddle’: an ‘enigmatic poem’, constituted by the bringing together of two apparently incompatible things. He quotes from W. P. Ker’s The Dark Ages:
The fault of Beowulf is that there is nothing much in the story. The hero is occupied in killing monsters, like Hercules or Theseus. But there are other things in the lives of Hercules and Theseus besides the killing of the Hydra or of Procrustes. Beowulf has nothing else to do, when he has killed Grendl and Grendl’s mother in Denmark: he goes home to his own Gautland, until at last the rolling years bring the Fire-drake and his last adventure. It is too simple. Yet the three chief episodes are well wrought and well diversified; they are not repetitions, exactly; there is a change of temper between the wrestling with Grendl in the night at Heorot and the descent under water to encounter Grendl’s mother; while the sentiment of the Dragon is different again. But the great beauty, the real value, of Beowulf is in its dignity of style. In construction it is curiously weak, in a sense preposterous; for while the main story is simplicity itself, the merest commonplace of heroic legend, all about it, in the historic allusions, there are revelations of a whole world of tragedy, plots different in import from that of Beowulf, more like the tragic themes of Iceland. Yet with this radical defect, a disproportion that puts the irrelevances in the centre and the serious things on the outer edges, the poem of Beowulf is undeniably weighty. The thing itself is cheap; the moral and the spirit of it can only be matched among the noblest authors.
Tolkien insists that this view of the poem remains influential, and potently so; but he identifies in it a ‘paradox’ that has given Beowulf something of the flavour of an enigmatic poem. The paradox, he thinks, has to do with the disjunction between perceived defects in the theme and structure of the poem on the one hand, and the widely reiterated nobility, grandeur and genius of the poem on the other. After surveying some other critics, Tolkien declares: ‘The riddle is still unsolved.’ His solution (the thesis of his lecture: that the monsters are at the heart of it, not in the margins) is a good one, but—as with OE riddles more generally—perhaps not the only one. He goes on to discuss the nature of what he calls ‘Northern’ bravery: its unyieldingness. He quotes Ker again (‘the Northern Gods have an exultant extravagance in their warfare which makes them more like Titans than Olympians; only they are on the right side, though it is not the side that wins. The winning side is Chaos and Unreason but the gods, who are defeated, think that defeat no refutation.’) He finishes by defining true heroism as unyielding will and courage made ‘perfect because without hope’.
We are getting closer to the ethos of Anglo-Saxon life itself, which so inspired Tolkien and which is immanent in both The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings. But to revert to the actual subject of this chapter—what has any of this to do with pockets?
Despite not being invented until the 1600s, pockets make a surprising appearance in Beowulf. About two-thirds of the way through the poem the titular hero recalls his fight against the monstrous Grendl. Here, for the first and only time in the poem, we hear about Grendl’s enormous glove.
He had this roomy ‘glof’,
a strange accoutrement, intricately strung
and hung at the ready, a rare patchwork
of devilishly fitted dragon-skins [‘dracan fellum’].
I had done him no wrong, yet the raging demon
wanted to cram me and many another
into this bag—but it was not to be.
(lines 2085b–90)4
A glove? It is a strange detail, so much so that translators often try and gloss it over, rendering the word as ‘bag’ or ‘satchel’—the celebrated Seamus Heaney translation of the poem, which I have just quoted, actually renders ‘glof’ as ‘pouch’. But ‘glove’ is most assuredly what the word means.
Here is something else: Andrew Orchard notes that it is not until Beowulf’s retelling, here, that we readers learn ‘the name of the Geat devoured by Grendl’ in the original attack.5 His name is Hondscio, which means—‘glove’ (‘compare’, Orchard suggests, ‘modern German Handschuh’). So the glove is in a sense doubly pointed-up here. Why?
In fact, critics on the glove do not know quite what to make of it. An article by Earl R. Anderson points out various Latin analogues.6 Some other editors and critics make reference to an Icelandic legend recorded by Snorri Sturluson—the god Thor is travelling towards the land of Giants and is finds shelter from darkness and thunder in a ‘a very big hall’ with a ‘side chamber’. In the morning he discovers that he has been sleeping in the glove of the giant Skrymir; and that the thunder he thought he heard was actually the giant’s snoring. (Orchard points out that the glove in this legend is ‘evidently more of a mitten, since there are apparently no fingers to it, and the “side chamber” turns out to be the thumb’.) But does this illuminate the Beowulf passage? Skrymir’s glove is clearly on a completely different scale to Grendl’s, and simply drawing out parallels from myth does not explain the function of this reference in this specific text.
So, why a glove? I propose a reading of Beowulf that takes Grendl’s glove to be no anomaly. What function does a glove serve except to cover a hand, to give it grip, either to keep it warm or otherwise to protect it? And hands occupy an extraordinarily significant place in the representational economy of Beowulf the poem.
Now, one simple explanation of the ‘glof’ might be simply to emphasise the might of the beast’s arm. The idea would be: if his glove is large enough to fit entire men inside, his hand must be gigantic. This in turn only serves to emphasise Beowulf’s own strength in defeating him. But actually it is the craft, rather than the sheer size, of the glof that gets stressed in the poem, the ‘rare patchwork / of devilishly fitted dragon-skins’. This is an interesting detail. It is not stated unambiguously that Grendl made this glove himself, but it is surely as likely that he did as that he did not, for after all he has no servants or slaves to do the work on his behalf. Yet because Grendl is so consistently and emphatically bestialised in the rest of the poem this strikes an odd note. We think of him very much as more animal than human; but here we cannot avoid the suspicion that he is a maker—strictly speaking, we could call him Grendl Glover. Of course, the notion that Grendl is more beast than man is something suggested by other details in the poem. For instance, and apart from the giant glove, we never see him using tools. He does not, for instance, wield a sword; and it is part of the carefully balanced symbolic logic of the poem’s universe that he cannot be defeated by a sword either. Beowulf’s repudiation of weaponry appears at first to be as reckless as the monster’s:
The monster scorns
in his reckless way to use weapons;
therefore, to heighten Hygelac’s fame
and gladden his heart, I hereby renounce
sword and the shelter of the broad shield,
the heavy war-board: hand-to-hand
is how it will be, a life-and-death fight.
(433–40)
But later we discover ‘something that they [the Geatish warriors] could not have known at the time’, namely ‘that no blade on earth … could ever damage their demon opponent’. This is because ‘he had conjured the harm from the cutting edge’ (26): suggesting an ability to create magical charms again at odds with the notion of him as a mere beast.
So: if our assumption is
that Grendl does not use a sword because he is too much the beast for such sophistication, the poem itself suggests otherwise. The glove, and his skill in magical charms, implies that the truth might be simpler. He does not use a sword because he does not need one. Over and again the poem stresses his deadly strength of hand:
Greedy and grim he grabbed thirty men …
(121)
No counsellor could ever expect
Fair reparation from those rabid hands.
All were endangered; you and old.
(158–8)
He grabbed (nam þa mid handa, lit. ‘clutched with his hand’) and mauled a man on his bench …
(746)
Venturing closer,
His talon was raised to attack Beowulf …
(747–8)
The Danes have bolted their hall-door against this attacker, but nevertheless ‘the iron-braced door / turned on its hinge when [Grendl’s] hands touched it … he ripped open / the mouth of the building’ (721–24). Strong! In Beowulf, of course, he meets his match in terms of strength-of-hand. Grendl grabbed thirty men, but Beowulf has ‘the strength of thirty / in the grip of each hand’ (379). Grendl attacks:
He was bearing in
with open claw when the alert hero’s
comeback and armlock forestalled him utterly.
The captain of evil discovered himself
in a handgrip harder than anything
he had ever encountered in any man.
(749–55)
The poet stresses the manual element of the conflict to an almost hyperbolic degree: ‘he had never been clamped or cornered like this … [he] got a firm hold. Fingers were bursting … the latching power / in his fingers weakened … [Beowulf] kept him helplessly / locked in a handgrip’. It follows from this that it is precisely Grendl’s hand that becomes the trophy of his defeat.
Clear proof of this
could be seen in the hand the hero displayed
high up near the roof, the whole of Grendl’s
shoulder and arm, his awesome grasp.
(833–36)
… the awful proof
of the hero’s prowess, the splayed hand
up under the eaves.
(984–86)
In fact it is the monster’s whole arm, ripped from its shoulder by Beowulf’s strength: but it is the hand that is the element upon which the poem concentrates. Later Beowulf boasts that Grendl ‘broke and ran. Yet he bought his freedom / at a high price, for he left his hand …’ (971–72); and then again later still: ‘although he got away / to enjoy life’s sweetness for a while longer, / his right hand stayed behind him in Heorot’ (2096–99).
It has, in other words, something to do with hands. When Beowulf boasts that he will kill Grendl with his bare hands it is, in part, just that: a boast, a vaunt of strength. Clearly it requires greater strength, and closer quarters, to kill with bare hands than it does to kill with a weapon. But something more than that is going on. Using his hands signifies, for Beowulf, agency. Hrothgar praises the strength of Beowulf’s father to his face (‘ … your father. / With his own hands he had killed Heatholaf … ’). Beowulf himself recalls killing a huge sea monster: ‘through my own hands, / the fury of battle had finished off the sea beast’ (557–58). When he fights Grendl’s mother his sword fails and he realises ‘he would have to rely / on the might of his arm … [he] gripped her shoulder’ (1537–38). And as an old man, Beowulf recalls killing ‘Dayraven the Frank’ in open battle:
No sword blade sent him to his death,
my bare hands stilled his heartbeats.
(2506–07)
And he goes on with evident regret that he will not be able to challenge the dragon in the same manner:
I would rather not
use a weapon if I knew another way
to grapple with the dragon and make good my boast
as I did against Grendl is days gone by.
So he takes his sword, although in the event it does him no good. At the crucial moment in the battle it snaps, and the poet notes that Beowulf’s hand is simply too strong for his weapon:
When he wielded a sword
No matter how blooded and hard-edged the blade,
His hand was too strong, the stroke he dealt
(I have heard) would ruin it.
(2680–84)
It has to do with hands. What is happening here, over and above the sheer vaunt of physical strength, is the weighted construing of a particular triad that in turn determines the structures of power in the text. Beowulf is a poem about power in the first instance. The narrative, which concerns the physical power (and courage, but mostly power) of the hero is interleaved with passages that elaborate the logic of political power. The poet gives us advice from the start, on how to win and keep allies, on how not to alienate one’s people. The authority of specific kings may be challenged in the poem, but authority itself (which is to say, power) is consistently respected.
Often the Beowulf-poet invokes the highest authority, God Almighty. Beneath God come kings, and beneath kings the king’s men—the ordinary people such as you and I, do not figure in the poem at all, unless it is as the low thief who sneakily steals from the dragon and wakes him to rage near the end. Indeed, one of the core relationships in the poem is that between Hrothgar the King, ‘protector of the Shieldings’ and Beowulf, who for most of the poem is not a king. We might ask why the protector of the Shieldings does not, in fact, protect his Shieldings against Grendl; why, in other words, he requires an outsider, a Dane, to do that job for him. But to ask this question, of course, is to misunderstand the role of Kings. Kings do not fight hand-to-hand with monsters (Beowulf’s combat with the dragon at the end of his life is a key exception, of course, and one to which I will come back). Kings send in their champions, or warriors, to do that sort of thing. That is what it means to be King.
To put it concisely: there are three ways of killing mentioned in Beowulf. Most directly, one may kill with one’s bare hands. Then again, one may kill with a weapon: sword, knife or spear. Or, finally (and this is the mode of kings) one may kill with a word. Kings speak and others die; and they are able to do this because they have subjects who will wield swords, or their bare hands, to make those words come true. Beowulf in a figurative, but also more than figurative, sense becomes Hrothgar’s hand. The King wills the blow, and Beowulf executes it.
This in turn implies that metaphorical or metonymic conception of the King as the whole kingdom, or as the kingdom as a sort of leviathan man. Beowulf’s actual hand become a synecdoche for himself as a warrior, and in turn for the power that a king can muster; at the same time that Beowulf himself becomes a metaphorical ‘hand’ of the king himself.
Why are hands so prominent in this poem? There is something honest about the ‘hand’. Hand-to-hand seems to be presented as a more straightforward, cleaner mode of conflict than swordfighting. It predominates because of its honesty, in a sense. This connects, I think, with something that Heaney says about the tone of the poem in his introduction to his translation.
I remembered the voice of the poem as being attractively direct, even though the diction was ornate and the narrative method something oblique. What I had always loved was a kind of foursquareness about the utterance, a feeling of living within a constantly indicative mood … (xxvii)
There is, in other words, a ready-to-hand-edness about the poem’s tone. It is a poem that feels hand-worked, a poem whose occasional roughness of texture and construction seem to be the fingerprints left by the sculptor’s or potter’s hands in the medium he has worked. And it is a poem that celebrates not merely strength, but strength-of-hand.
Why would a warrior wear a glove? The dandy adornment of the body is presumably not to the point. Presumably the issue is, rather, one of protection. And here we come up against another notable oddity in the account of Beowulf’s fight with Grendl’s mother. Quite apart from Beowulf’s improbable ability seemingly to breathe under water there is the
counter-intuitive protection afforded him by his chain-mail.
So she lunged and clutched and managed to catch him
In her brutal grip; but his body for all that,
remained unscathed: the mesh of the chain mail
saved him on the outside.
(1501–04)
But this is patently not right. Were Grendl-mama using her talons like swords, as she subsequently does (‘her savage talons / failed to rip the web of his war-shirt’) we could understand how chain mail would help prevent the blow cutting into the warrior’s skin. But how can something as flexible as chain-mail help against a giant monster who is trying to crush the life out of you in a ‘brutal grip’? Sheet metal might act as a rigid exoskleleton, but chain-mail cannot do this. So what is going on?
The protection chain mail offers is to do with the difficulty a weapon has in penetrating, not in tensile-strength. The warrior’s own skin must be both flexible and strong, as well: and if hands are to become death-dealing then they will need to combine flexibility and rigidity. Beowulf’s strange flexible-and-rigid chain mail merely enacts this essential quality of the warrior’s own body, a transference of his strength onto his outward wear. Grendl’s glove does something similar. It is an external emblem of the monstrous capacity for death that the creature’s hand represents.
This is my point. The manual quality in the poem is precisely what endears it to so many readers and critics. Beowulf is a poem with which we, as readers, grapple; it admits us to a world that flatters our sense of the strong touch. It is a poem that we feel we can grasp, take in our hands and feel, not just admire in a distant or cerebral sense.