ABSTRACT

From the clarification of the name light now falls on the myth itself. When we are told that Beaw conquered Grendel and his mother after a hard struggle, this means, translated from the mythic and poetic into real and prosaic terms: through agriculture and the blessings of the culture which followed it it became possible for the Ingvaeonic Germans to possess themselves peacefully and lastingly, unassailed by the force of the elements, of the swampy flood-plain on the North Sea coast, which until then had been inhabitable only at the risk of one’s life. The myth of the killing of Grendel symbolises the final and after long labours successful dyking of the marshland, and its rendering useful through the development of meadowland and the cultivation of grain. For I can consider Grendel as nothing else than a personification of the horrors of the undyked marsh. Think of the picture Pliny gives of this [Natural History, bk XVI], and then compare the way Grendel’s home is described in Beowulf. Pliny expresses himself in the following way on the land at the mouth of the Weser, where the Greater and Lesser Chauci lived: ‘twice every 24 hours the sea sweeps in wild flood over a tract too wide to see across, covering a land of which one cannot as it stands tell whether it is a part of the earth or of the sea. There a pitiable people has settled on elevated points or on artificial mounds of earth, where they have built their huts in order to take up the fight with the high flood: like seamen, when the lowland is flooded, like survivors of shipwreck, when the tide has ebbed. From their huts they catch the fish which get into the shallows when the sea has recoiled. They are forbidden to keep cattle and to feed themselves on milk like the neighbouring tribes; nor can they go hunting either, as no tree or bush grows far and wide.’ And immediately following he portrays a coastal region not far removed from the land of the Chauci, where the forest reaches the sea, so

They have often alarmed our fleets by the rigging of their monstrous branches, when they are driven as if deliberately up against ships lying at anchor at night, and these have to begin a pointless battle against trees.’