New Light on the Illumination of Grendel's Mere

Beowulf is an intertexual poem, and our understanding and appreciation of it depends to a great extent upon our engagement with texts beyond its physical boundaries in Cotton Vittelius A.xv. As Joseph Harris has asserted, an important part of the process by which we come to terms with Beowulf is the identification and interpretation of intertexts from its potentially limitless tradition—the "vast network of discourses behind the poem and ultimately constituting it."¹ Conventionally, these intertexts have been labelled as either "sources" or "analogues" of the poem, although this terminology is vexed.² Lacking direct access to the traditions that were available to the poet, a modern audience must construct for itself, on the basis of other texts presently available, a new network of discourses to take the place of the lost network of traditional narratives out of which Beowulf weaves its narrative. Identifying and accounting for the resonances we perceive between Beowulf and its intertexts, wherever we find them, therefore remains an important task for critics. In this article, I will suggest that an intertext that casts a new light on the episode of Beowulf's descent into Grendel's mere can be found in Old Norse–Icelandic skaldic poetry, and I shall demonstrate how incorporating this intertext into our reading of the episode might enrich our interpretation of the poem as a whole.

Before Beowulf descends into the mere to fight Grendel's mother, Hrothgar provides the hero with information about the nature of the monsters' home:

                                    Hie dygel londwarigeað wulfhleoþu,      windige næssas,frecne fengelad,    ðær fyrgenstreamunder næssa genipu    niþer gewiteð,flod under foldan.    Nis þæt feor heononmilgemearces,    þæt se mere standeð; ofer þæm hongiað    hrinde bearwas,wudu wyrtum fæst    wæter oferhelmað.Þær mæg nihta gehwæm    niðwundor seon,fyr on flode.    No þæs frod leofaðgumena bearna,    þæt þone grund wite.

(1357b–67)³

(They occupy a secret land, wolf-inhabited slopes, windy headlands, a perilous fen-path, where a mountain stream goes down in mist underneath the crags, a torrent under the earth. It is not far from here, measured in miles, that the mere lies; above it hang frost-bound groves: the wood, fixed by its roots, overshadows the water. There each night a fearful wonder may be seen: fire in the water. There is no one alive among the children of men so wise as to know the bottom.)

The niðwundor (1365b: "terrible" or "fearful wonder") that Hrothgar describes, the strikingly unnatural fyr on flode (1366a: "fire in [or on] the water"), is now usually explained as part of a motif-complex that represents the mere as being not merely otherworldly, but actually hellish. Klaeber stated that "manifestly conceptions of the Christian hell have entered into the picture as drawn by the poet," while Kemp Malone called the presentation of the mere throughout the poem a "consistent and carefully wrought picture of a hell on earth."⁴ Subsequent research has elaborated upon this interpretation.⁵ Geoffrey Russom has recently argued that Grendel and his mother live in hell itself, and that the mere is a watery portal into the Christian inferno. For Russom, who prefers to gloss the phrase as "fire in the flood," fyr on flode describes the flickers of infernal light glimmering through the waters at the mouth of hell: as Russom notes, this interpretation accounts for the fact that the fire is only visible at night. If it had been on the water, it would also be seen in daylight.⁶ Other scholars have seen in this half-line an allusion to the fiery river of the apocryphal Visio Pauli, the influence of which upon the description of Grendel's mere has often been assumed: this influence may have been direct or mediated in the vernacular through the sixteenth Blickling Homily.⁷ In the tradition of the Visio Pauli, a flumen igneum ("fiery river") is a feature central to hell's topography; this motif is part of a long and established tradition, stretching back to Scripture.⁸ (An equivalent to...