'Tha Com of More under Misthleothum Grendel Gongan': The Scholarly and Popular Reception of Beowulf's Grendel from 1805 to the Present Day

In the past few decades the study of monstrosity has proliferated, not in small part because of the idea, which has been extensively theorized, that monsters are a culture's anxieties incarnate. For cultures from which few textual sources and little archeological evidence survive, extant monsters may provide especially valuable insight into contemporary fears and anxieties. Beowulf's Grendel, the most famous of the Anglo-Saxon monsters and the one described in greatest detail, may thus reveal to us worries, fantasies, and preoccupations current at the time of the poem's conception in early medieval England, a period about which relatively little is known. Yet the great uncertainty surrounding the poem's date and compositional context means that analyses of Grendel will also depend on a number of assumptions a critic must make about the nature of the poem and its cultural moment. These assumptions, in turn, will be influenced by the critic's own preoccupations, values, and worldview. For the duration of his critical life, therefore, Grendel has functioned as a site where Anglo-Saxon anxieties have met a constantly changing set of new preoccupations. Grendel has thus become not just an embodiment of Anglo-Saxon worries and fears, but also a screen onto which nineteenth-, twentieth-, and twenty-first-century fantasies and concerns have been projected.;This dissertation explores the critical and popular responses to Grendel from the first printed discussions of Beowulf over two centuries ago up to the present day. It examines what the attribution of specific fantasies, desires, and anxieties to a past culture, based on the monsters it created, can tell us about how critics have conceived of that culture and in what kinds of monsters these critics themselves have tended to believe. Understanding better why certain approaches came into vogue at certain moments may ultimately also help us more judiciously evaluate their potential availability to and relevance for an Anglo-Saxon audience.;Chapter 1 explores the reception of Grendel in the nineteenth century by engaging with two questions that arise from twentieth-century engagements with the poem. The first question comes out of J.R.R. Tolkien's assessment that his predecessors had inexcusably marginalized Grendel and the dragon in their interpretations of Beowulf. Was Tolkien correct, and if so, how did nineteenth-century scholars understand Grendel? The second question comes out of the twentieth-century humanization of the monster. Why was this humanized reading absent from nineteenth-century scholarship when the example of Mary Shelley's Frankenstein (1818) shows that a model for the monster as a pitiable outcast did exist? Why was it not until the mid-twentieth century that Frankenstein's monster and Grendel came to be read as comparable creatures?;The second chapter describes the development in the twentieth century of the idea that the Beowulf poet may have been, at least to some extent, sympathetic to his monster. I provide an overview of the textual evidence that has formed the basis for this reading; I suggest that this approach is best understood against the backdrop of the burgeoning field of psychology and an increased emphasis on empathy in the post-WWII period; and I argue that caution is warranted when attributing the sympathetic interpretation of Grendel to the Beowulf poet himself.;In the third chapter, I compare the Grendels that emerge from the sociological and oral-formulaic approaches to Beowulf that became influential in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries. I show how opposing views on such issues as authorship, irony, and orality give rise to fundamentally different Grendels: one is an undisputed villain, the other functions as an ironic commentary on and personification of the flaws of the heroic world depicted in the poem.;Chapter 4 explores the ways in which Grendel has been visualized and reimagined in popular adaptations of the poem. I focus specifically on how adapters---filmmakers, playwrights, graphic novelists---have positioned themselves in relation to the academic scholarship of Beowulf. I describe both the desire among adapters to distance themselves from the academic study of Beowulf, which they often disparage, and their unwitting alignment with major trends in Beowulf criticism.;This final chapter also draws attention to the question of whether and how to differentiate between various forms of medievalism and, as an extension, underscores the medievalism---its dependence on fantasy, anxiety, and wish-fulfillment---of the scholarly inquiry discussed in the first three chapters. Understanding better how different preoccupations gave rise to vastly divergent Grendels over the course of two hundred years ultimately reinforces the importance of looking critically not just at the poem and its context but also at our own cultural moment when trying to make sense of Grendel as an Anglo-Saxon monster.