ABSTRACT

The song of Beowulf, the conqueror of Grendel, depicts the mist-spirits of the corruption-breeding moor on another and mightier scale. Uhland (1865-73:8, 486) expresses himself on the two monsters whom the brave Geatish hero overcomes in the following way: ‘The first naming of Grendel with the appositive “the famous border-treader, who owned the moor, the swamp and strand”, his and his like-natured mother’s stay in the water-deeps, together with the striking landscape-picture of the wild and misty moor-region, leave no uncertainty that these man-eating giant-creatures, whose uncanny dwelling-place is avoided even by the hunted hart, are no other than the plagues of a marshy, sickness-ridden sea-coast.’ Even in the state of a centuries-old culture the Low German bogland, that coastal fringe of the marshes, barely a mile broad, has kept its swampy character: this ‘over-veiling’ of the Frisian land with its in winter and late autumn bottomless paths belongs ‘undoubtedly to the most fertile, but also rainiest and mistiest areas of Germany, and the sea-marshes especially, e.g. the Wursten area, the Butjadinger-Jeverland [the area west of Bremerhaven] often exhale truly sickness-bringing vapours, from which strong and persistent fevers arise, ending all too often in death from consumption’ (Kutzen, 1867:2, 302, 305). Grendel is depicted accordingly: he comes walking out of the moor under the misty cliffs, strides out beneath the clouds (711, cp. 651); he and his mother possess the inaccessible land, the wolf-cliffs, windy fells, impassable swamps, where the mountain-stream pours down under the mountain-mists; the sea lies ‘not a mile away’ from it, overshadowed by trees, and in its unfathomable deeps one can see by

also bear the name of wolf-cliffs (wulfheodhu): the oldest German epic in this way furnishes a proof for the mythical meaning of the wolf put forward in our first chapter [i.e. that ‘wolf’ is a synonym for ‘cloud, mist’]. The mixture of waves that rises up from the uncanny spot to the clouds, till the heavens weep, is the mist welling up from the flooded depression of the ‘misty and rainy’ marshland. The magic haunting in the sea near by obviously refers to the sea-phosphorescence, and it might almost appear as if at the bottom of it all lay the idea that the mist had been produced by this ‘fire in the water’.