Beowulf ’s Poetics of Absorption: Narrative Syntax and the Illusion of Stability in the Fight with Grendel’s Mother

In Beowulf, the last survivor stands before the barrow in which he has just interred his kin (lines 2236–2246).¹ Absorbed in grief, he then speaks his famous lament for his lost people. The poem allows us partly to imagine the survivor and his world as his lament unfolds, but it also bars us from becoming fully affectively engaged with him by positioning him as alone (he has no audience, and he does not address us; we only overhear him) and by setting his elegy in syntactically negative, imagistically sketchy forms (lines 2247–2254). “Heald þū nū, hrūse, nū hæleð ne m(ō)stan, / eorla ǣhte” [Earth, hold now the possessions of earls, what heroes cannot] (lines 2247–2248), the survivor opens, but in this sentence he gives no more precise direct object than “eorla ǣhte” [possessions of earls]. Instead of describing his people’s treasure, he says that “hyt ǣr . . . / gōde begēaton” [good men earlier obtained it] (lines 2248–2249). Beowulf does not allow its audience to picture the treasures or the survivor or his people, and by preventing a full mental picturing, it lessens affective engagement.² We are thus barred from sympathy with the survivor’s grief at the same time as we hear his expression of grief. The poem focuses the audience’s attention on the survivor, yet denies them their full ability to sympathize with him. This state of imaginative and affective suspension I call the absorption-denial dynamic.³ The absorption-denial dynamic exemplified by the lay of the last survivor characterizes several passages in Beowulf and provides a useful means of understanding how Beowulf ’s formal elements operate on the imaginative and affective states of the poem’s audience.⁴ As I define it, the absorption-denial dynamic is the way in which a poem immerses its audience while at the same time distancing that audience. We are familiar with the sense of being absorbed in a text—that sense of having our imaginations filled with imagery and emotion. Yet the absorption-denial dynamic makes explicit the paradoxical fact that the artwork also forces its audience to realize that they are outside its world, ultimately not able to sympathize with or picture its characters fully.

One effect of the absorption-denial dynamic is a stilling of time: the audience finds itself suspended between immersion in and separation from the artwork. Often, absorptive pieces represent moments in which something is about to change but has not yet done so—the survivor is about to die from heartbreak; Heorot is about to burn—to enhance the audience’s sense of imaginative or affective suspension with a sense of temporal suspension. In this article, I will focus on a passage in Beowulf that embodies this liminal temporality in a surprising way. This passage is Beowulf’s fight with Grendel’s mother, which runs from line 1399 to line 1569. Depicting Beowulf’s encounter with Grendel’s mother in her underwater cave, the fight scene is an example of an epic set piece. It is an unusual example of an absorptive scene since it is not contemplative or explicitly affective, as is the lay of the last survivor or the poem’s concluding depiction of Beowulf’s funeral pyre. Beowulf and the monster are absorbed in fighting each other; the audience expects a dynamic, quickly moving battle narrative, a narrative that invites complete imaginative immersion in the action. Beowulf’s fight with Grendel’s mother contains syntactic structures that are not present during Beowulf’s fight with Grendel, syntactic structures that might seem aesthetically counterintuitive to a modern audience. Indeed, whereas Beowulf’s fight with Grendel often receives scholarly attention because the poet renders the fight in gripping synesthetic detail, his fight with Grendel’s mother has seldom been discussed in aesthetic terms.⁵ However, the poem’s linguistic structures here actually slow the narrative’s pace and prevent audience immersion.

A reexamination of Beowulf ’s formal elements in light of the way they position the poem’s audience, particularly...