[In the essay that follows, Parks focuses on the ambivalent nature of all three monsters in Beowulf but particularly on that of Grendel, whose shifting status as both animalistic predator and human-like opponent adds to the terror associated with him.]

Since ancient times, the bestiality of man has been a topic of such resonance in the discourse of high culture as to suggest that it strikes upon deep tensions in the human psyche. While certain features of this problematic relationship between the human and infrahuman are fairly stable, in different eras it has been conceived through radically differing paradigms. The Christian ascetic, for example, while acknowledging the bestial within the human soul, castigated it as the source of fleshly temptations that distract the pilgrim in his ascent to God. Seeking a mechanism of relationship on the material rather than the spiritual plane, Charles Darwin shocked the religious sensibilities of his day by postulating that the kinship is genetic and evolutionary, that man is literally descended from the ape. In the last few decades, the rapidly maturing sciences of ethology and sociobiology have vastly enlarged the body of evidence concerning the social behavior of higher life forms and the role of such patterns in an evolutionary process. In this study I would like to bring some of these modern behavioral perspectives to bear on an ancient poet's delvings into the same basic issue. For the ambiguous standing of the Beowulf monsters, and more specifically the liminality of the brood of Grendel, who is neither fully human nor fully bestial, is an essential defining characteristic of the particular challenge to human community that the poet wishes to pose. And Beowulf's response, heavily laden with symbolic gesture, is designed to reconstitute this catastrophe in terms acceptable to the heroic world view.

The fundamental ambivalence that Grendel embodies and that Beowulf must resolve relates to the distinction between predatorial and agonistic aggression. In brief, Grendel wants to ravage like a predator, whereas Beowulf insists on contesting with him like a conspecific adversary (that is, as a member of the same biological species). The association between the poem's horrific imagery and mood—especially in its early movements—and the theme of predation is very clear. Consider the famous passage that immediately precedes the Beowulf-Grendel encounter. The glæca (monster) has just made his way from the dark and misty moors into the great Danish hall of Heorot, finding there a delectable comitatus of savory, sleeping Geats. Seeing no need for delay, Grendel proceeds directly to the feast:

ac hē gef ng hraðe forman siðe
slæpendne rinc, slat unwearnum,
bat banlocan, blōd drum dranc,
synsnædum swealh; sōna hæfde
unlyfigendes eal gefeormod,
f t ond folma.

(but he seized quickly on the first pass a sleeping warrior, he tore him up with ease, bit his body, drank blood in streams, swallowed huge chunks; at once he had devoured the entirety of that lifeless man, feet and hands.) [See Beowulf and the Fight at Finnsburg, ed. Fr. Klaeber, 3d ed. (Lexington, Mass.: D.C. Heath, 1950), ll. 740-45. All subsequent textual citations will refer to this edition. Translations are my own.]

Now much of the ghastliness of this passage derives from the fact that Hondscioh—Grendel's victim (l. 2076)—is not just killed but physically eaten; the Beowulf-poet underscores this point through the graphic detail with which he describes the monster's gory meal. This is not a heroic contest between champions but a lion pouncing on a helpless deer. Were it not that we, the human audience, are perennially susceptible to this very concrete, very creaturely terror, the scene would not grip us as it does. The symbolic accomplishment of Beowulf the hero is to reject the role of prey and to establish himself as Grendel's worthy opponent. In the process, he begins to modulate aggressive violence in the poem out of the predatorial pattern of stealthy-attack-and-flight into that of formal, agonistically styled contesting.

Before focusing on the poem in detail, I need to state more fully the differences between the predatorial and agonistic aggressive patterns. The distinction between these aggressive modes in Beowulf can most clearly be seen in terms of three variables: objective, style, and interrelationship of the adversaries in terms of biological species. The objective of predation is obvious enough: hunters stalk their prey in order to make them their food. By contrast, formal agonistic contesting is usually undertaken for the control of some external resource (such as territory or mating prerogatives), or simply for the exhilaration of "winning." And so contest rivals need only to be beaten, not eaten. This difference in aim engenders contrasting combat styles. For predators, ceremonial display addressed toward prospective victims would in most cases be counterproductive; their purposes are better served by a secretive than by a well-advertised approach. Agonistic combatants, on the other hand, attach a great premium to such intangibles as high dominance ranking or "honor and glory" since, within their communities, these abstract gains are often betokened by and translate into concrete benefits. For these reasons they exhibit a penchant for elaborate battle ceremony accompanied by flamboyant threat displays and predictable styles of combat, preferably conducted in public arenas. Finally, the aggressive mode correlates significantly (though not absolutely) with comembership or lack of comembership in a species; that is, predators usually prefer victims from other species whereas agonistically styled duels generally match conspecifics. The converse does not hold true: interspecific aggression is not always predatorial, and violence among fellow-members of a species is frequently unceremonialized, as in the case of a stealthy murder. One might, moreover, cite exceptions, such as cannibalism, or elaborate game strategies in interspecific encounters. In general, nonetheless, predators prefer to hunt creatures over whom they enjoy overwhelming fighting advantages; and this state of affairs is best brought about interspecifically. By contrast, the ceremonialization of combat flourishes best amid symmetrical, thus intraspecific, opposition.

There are, of course, other types of aggression besides the predatory and agonistic. Indeed, the integrity of "aggression" as a scientific category has from time to time been questioned; and the accent of much recent research has fallen on its physiological determinants. Yet behavioral differentia cannot be disregarded, particularly in literary study where the subjects of investigation are, in a biological sense, nonexistent; and in the behavioral terrain that "aggression" seems conventionally to designate, the distinction between high-display agonia and low-display predation has a real heuristic value. In a recent study Robert O'Connell (1989) has made this point, showing that the alternation between predatory and "intraspecific" (i.e., agonistic) patterns has been a persisting theme in the history of weaponry and its deployment. Even in animal combat, he points out, that weaponry (such as a stag's antlers) biologically engendered for intraspecific combat is both more spectacular and less destructive than the weaponry of predation. Human warfare, he maintains, has witnessed a tension between the impulse toward an intraspecific ceremonialization that limits (though it by no means eliminates) bloodshed and an increasingly impersonal and destructive weapons technology that confers the advantage to those who wage war predatorially, without restraint. O'Connell's book is replete with superb examples, such as the Anglo-American naval establishment's stubborn distrust of the invisible and subversive submarine. Completed before I became aware of O'Connell's work, my own study of verbal dueling in heroic epic (1990) recognized a similar distinction. For the bragging and abuse exchanged between heroes joined in an agonistic encounter is fundamentally akin to threat displays between conspecific mammals, such as the roaring matches with which red deer preface their clashing of antlers. Predatorial encounters do not feature such bilateral symmetrical displays to anything approaching the same degree.

While the Beowulf-poet's artistry draws upon this contrast, of course we must recognize that neither he nor his fictional creations understood it through these same analytic categories. Yet a mouse trapped by a cat, while it may never have read Konrad Lorenz or E. O. Wilson, knows perfectly well that it has a problem; and so do the Danes. Moreover, the sheer gruesomeness of the Danish catastrophe makes it plain where the poet's sympathies lie. Modern readers critical of martial idealism are sometimes disposed to valorize the viewpoints of Grendel and his mother, arguing that their "monstrosity" is no worse than that of their human foes. John Gardner's Grendel plays on something of this sensibility. Yet such most emphatically is not the standpoint of the Beowulf-poet. His outlook is thoroughly homocentric—or, if I may unleash the neologism "anthroscopic," whose syllable - scop-, derived from the Greek verb skopein 'to see' puns with the Anglo-Saxon word for "poet." Such parochialism may be easily derided by persons who have seldom been exposed to physical violence; but when one's survival is in question, decentered and dehumanized viewpoints quickly lose their appeal. Critics who assume an impartial response to the massacre of the Danes have not sufficiently grappled with the imagistic horror of those scenes. In warlike times, or in their recent memory, mythic narratives of atrocities against human community are no joke. Neither the Scandinavians within the action of the poem nor the poet-audience group witnessing it has any sympathy to waste on demonic ravagers whose "lifedays" they, like Beowulf, "reckon beneficial to none of the [human] nations" (ll. 793-94). The only good predator is a dead predator: so say the prey.

The poet's predatorial coloring of the original crisis implicitly imputes nonhumanity to Grendel; and other strokes in his portraiture accentuate this effect. He inhabits an inaccessible, underwater den and stalks the misty moors beyond the margins of human community outreach. Possessed of overpowering strength, he nonetheless prefers not to attack frontally but to 'ensnare' (besyrwan, l. 713) through stealthy nighttime assaults, carrying off in his glōf (l. 2085) what he does not devour at the time. When he enters Heorot he sees not prospective worthy adversaries by whom he might enhance his glory but only the 'expectation of a plentiful meal' ("wistfylle wēn," l. 734). Although it seems he could not "approach the throne" (ll. 168-69), whether God's or Hrothgar's, in all other respects Grendel exhibits disregard if not outright disdain for the symbols and ceremonies of human order, including even the civilities of warfare. Thus he eschews formal challenge and prebattle flyting—not, we must assume, out of fear but mere contempt. Similarly, he will not undertake the postbattle restoration of peace through "wergild" (ll. 154-58), such as one might hope for in intertribal feuding. These implied attitudes on Grendel's part are thoroughly predatorial: why should a cat come to terms with mice? Further—and this is a particularly telling detail—human weaponry is unavailing against him. And in this connection we should recall, as O'Connell points out, that the weaponry as well as the defensive strategy that evolution has designed for intraspecific combat is often useless or unused against predators. Thus the experience of the Danes and Geats echoes that of other prospective prey when they discover that, against Grendel, their swords do not bite (ll. 801-5).

That Grendel and his mother are indeed predators par excellence is underscored in one of the poem's most striking anecdotes. After Grendel's defeat has provoked the counterattack by his mother, Hrothgar sets about describing their lair to Beowulf. To highlight the baneful aura surrounding Grendel's Mere which the Geat will soon have to brave, Hrothgar introduces an explicitly predatorial figure (ll. 1368-72):

Ðēah þe hæðstapa hundum geswenced,
heorot hornum trum holtwudu sēce,
feorran geflymed, ær hē feorh seleð,
aldor on ōfre, ær hē in wille,
hafelan [beorgan]; nis þæt hēoru stōw!

(Although the heath-stalker hard-pressed by hounds, the strong-horned hart should seek the forest, put to flight from afar, sooner will he give up his life on the bank than go in to save his neck [lit.: head]; that is not a nice place!)

This passage works through an implied comparison of degree whose constant term is predatorially inspired terror. The hart is more frightened by the mere possibility of the death lurking beneath the waves than by its certitude at the teeth of the pursuing hounds. By so much, then, does the horror of Grendel's clan exceed that of other killers. Further, since Hrothgar's obvious intention is to give Beowulf a frank warning about the risks he is asking him to run, his anecdote implies comparison between the fate of the stag and that of any man who assails Grendel's abode. This association is strengthened by the fact that one of the terms in this passage for the hart, heorot (l. 1369), serves also as the name for the Danish hall. That men can be food for monsters Hrothgar knows all too well—no one better. Thus when the moment arises for him to summon his greatest descriptive powers to the imaginative construction of terror, it is a predatorial figure that he calls upon.

Yet while Grendel's man-eating habits dehumanize him, in other respects he is much akin to his human victims. This kinship has indeed a literal aspect. For on two parallel occasions, immediately prior to the first attacks of Grendel and his mother, the poet inserts ring-framed meditations (ll. 99-114 and 1255-78) on the lineage of these monsters that traces back to Cain, the original fratricide and child of the original human parents. Of course, the fact that eotenas, ylfe, orcnêas, and gīgantas are also descended from Cain (ll. 112-13) mitigates the force of this genealogical association between monsters and men as evidence of cohumanity. Nonetheless, the hostilities between these races are described in the language of feuding (fæhðe, l. 109) and resonate against an all-too-human background of intertribal warfare. Moreover, Hrothgar specifically reports that the two mearcstapan ('border-walkers,' l. 1348) bear human likeness: the mother has 'the likeness of a woman' ("idese onlīcnes," l. 1351) while her son is in 'the form of a man' ("weres wæstmum," l. 1352). It is true, however, that he is 'larger than any other man' ("mara bonne ænig man ōðer," l. 1353), so much so that four of Beowulf's retainers are required to carry just his head (ll. 1634-39). This size difference seems to imply the extreme unlikelihood of interbreeding between Grendel's kin and Hrothgar's; and in this connection we should recall that the ability of male and female to procreate is one of the marks of comembership in a species. Then again, Grendel and his mother exhibit human life habits and may have mastered certain human arts. Like humans, they occupy a hall (albeit an underwater hall) whose approach is guarded by a comitatus of sorts, if one wishes to view the nicors in this way; on the other hand, the exile imagery marking the comings and goings of the Danes' marginalized foes colors them with a contrary yet equally humanizing stroke. Moreover, even though Grendel does not seem to know the mastery of such 'good things' ("gōda," l. 681) as swords, his mother can put a dagger ("seax," l. 1545) to use, and they own a sword heirloom whose hilt records runically a piece of family history (ll. 1677-98), if we can assume that giants whom the flood killed are Grendel's distant relations. Taylor has gone so far as to argue that Grendel knows speech and writing, although he never displays these skills in the poem. Further lexical corroboration for Grendel's intermittent humanity can be found in Tripp's comprehensive table of terms for him and his kin, which indexes a mixture of associations human, monstrous, and diabolical. My point, in sum, is that Grendel is irreducibly ambiguous with respect to the human-nonhuman dichotomy; and this very liminality is essential to the poet's designs. Because Grendel devours Danes like so many rabbits, he casts the survivors into an insufferable role. Yet because he exhibits so many human traits, he is susceptible to the radicalizing agonistic challenge of the hero. Thus the poetic narrator and the hero collaborate in his transformation. To try to fix him and his mother into one category of the other would be to deny one of the poem's most essential acts.

I would like to emphasize that the distinction this essay is exploring, while of real bearing at certain points in the poem, is nonetheless of limited importance; in no way does it constitute the controlling theme around which all other elements in the poem are organized. Grendel's nature has dimensions that the distinction cannot elucidate. For example, Norse analogues (such as Grettir's Saga) suggest his literary affiliation with the draugr and other supernatural miscreants of legend and saga. While these literary traditions may themselves feed occasionally on the interplay between predator and agonistic rival, they have a full life of their own these terms cannot explain away. Moreover, as Tripp's table details in full, Grendel is at times characterized as an infernal creature—a 'fiend in hell' ("fēond on helle," l. 101), 'hell's captive' ("helle hæfton," l. 788), an 'alien spirit' ("ellorgast / ellorgaest," ll. 807, 1617, 1621), a companion of 'devils' (l. 756), indeed, a devil himself, if we accept that the reference of "d ofla" in line 1680 includes him. Russom has gone so far as to argue that Grendel lives in hell quite literally. His diabolical pedigree is reinforced by the repeated allusions to the feud between God and Cain's progeny. This world of Christian mythological reference and resonance implicates far more than just the interrelations between the human and infrahuman; indeed, Grendel's ambiguous predatoriality is less essential to his representation than these other associations are. Yet there is no need to unravel and rank these threads in his nature. Other illustrious monsters—such as Homer's Polyphemos or the cultured yet man-eating rakshasas of the Indian epics Mahabharata and Ramayana—show similar blends of traits predatorial, human, and superhuman or supernatural. Each of these imparts to the resulting monstrous personality its own distinctive coloring, and none is reducible to another.

The ambiguity in Grendel's representation is exploited by Beowulf, who refuses to accept the premise of inequality that the predator-prey relationship presupposes but insists instead on conducting his anti-monstrous campaign in the high style, as between conspecific adversaries. It is true that most of his ceremonial display is directed toward his human cohorts, not the monsters; yet Grendel himself must bear much of the blame for this, since his reliance on surprise attack does not allow for dialogue. Nonetheless, the Grendel affair lies at the heart of Beowulf's intertribal dealings, which are notable for their altruistic motives and honorable course. Nowhere is this more evident than in his initial generous offer to risk his life for the benefit of a foreign people. To be sure, he has a family debt to repay, incurred when his father Ecgtheow was bailed out by Hrothgar during a difficult feud with the Wylfings (ll. 457-72); yet in the subsequent Danish crisis Beowulf presents himself without being asked and renders services that far exceed his obligations. Further, he binds himself to the Grendel venture with formal, unilateral pledges, first in his dialogue with the Danish coast guard (ll. 237-300), and later with Hrothgar himself (ll. 407-90). The culminating stage in this process arrives in his flyting with Unferth, where the Geat's heroic credentials are called up for inspection and wagered as the stake for victory or loss. This heroic flyting is an instance of a widely diffused contest genre whose defining characteristic is an oral contract binding one or both of the flyters to a martial test by which the quarrel will be adjudicated. In this case Beowulf and Unferth are the contestants, the right to claim heroic superiority is the prize, and Beowulf's fortunes against Grendel will measure their rival claims. The interesting point is that, since Grendel is unavailable for challenges and cannot be flyted with, his projected fight with Beowulf has now been woven into the structure of a larger intraspecific (man-against-man) contest that adumbrates a heroic ethos and conforms to a code of honor. Thus Beowulf's campaign against Grendel has been invested through his association with agonistic rather than antipredatorial overtones.

Since Grendel has been so thoroughly alienated from the homocentric (or anthroscopic) sensibilities of the poem, Beowulf's expedient of redirecting ceremonial display from monsters to men provides an acceptable substitute in bringing about the symbolic transformation that he desires. After all, the human community is trying to convince itself that it can combat with Grendel agonistically; Grendel's opinion on the likelihood of their success in such a project is thoroughly unwanted. Nonetheless, in his final boast at bedtime (ll. 677-87), Beowulf makes him the immediate beneficiary of a sincere and courageous heroic gesture. Ignorant of the charm by which, evidently, Grendel has rendered himself invulnerable to sword-blows (ll. 804-5), Beowulf renounces the use of weaponry on the grounds that Grendel, despite his great strength, is unversed in these arts. For the Geat does not consider himself inferior to his rival in war-strength (ll. 677-78) and wants to establish this in a fight where both enjoy the same advantages and limitations. God will assign glory as seems right to Him (ll. 685-87); and by this allusion to external witnessing (the third-stander) and supernal judgment Beowulf is calling upon one of the basic principles of the formal contest. In all of this Beowulf is distancing himself from the ruthless pragmatism typifying the self-protective stratagems of prey confronted with the overwhelming superior force of predators. To the contrary, he wants a fair fight between matched warriors; and as O'Connell points out repeatedly, the intraspecific fighting mode features symmetrical weaponry. Of course, all of this heroic idealism is quite lost on Grendel, one might say, since the brief moment of their encounter leaves Cain's man-eating descendant with no time to reflect on his opponent's gallantries. Yet again, this is quite beside the point. For the heroic service which Beowulf means to perform is for the benefit of the human community to whom he broadcasts these noble sentiments, not for his monstrous fëond.

Many readers have noted the lack of dramatic tension in the actual Beowulf-Grendel fight. For the moment that Grendel recognizes the quality of his foe, he becomes "hinfûs" (l. 755), 'eager to escape' to his 'hiding place' ("heolster," 1. 755) in the fens. Yet the poet tells us explicitly that his strength is greater than his mother's (ll. 1282-87). Why, then does the aglæca perform so poorly in this his death-struggle? Of course, he does not enjoy the home-court advantage that his mother does when Beowulf encounters her in her lair. Yet the more basic reason is that he has not come prepared to contest with a heroic equal; his reaction typifies that of a predator suddenly meeting up against more than he has reckoned on. Despite the bench-bashing and wall-shaking, his fight with Beowulf never emerges into the full status of an agonistic contest.

Such is not the case with Grendel's mother, who has been alerted by her son's misfortune to the presence of an adversary who cannot be dispatched with the ease that his predecessors were. Nonetheless, in keeping with the habits of her clan, she too introduces herself to the Danes predatorially. Waiting until the revellers have gone to sleep, she sneaks into Heorot, snatches Æschere, and escapes into the darkness; and that she has made a good meal of the worthy thane is to be inferred from one of the most ghastly images of predatory violence in the poem in the Danes' discovery of his head on the cliff beside her mere (ll. 1417-21). All the same, while her behavior is predatory, her motives are not. The poet tells us specifically that she made her woeful journey "sunu dāoð wrecan" 'to avenge the death of her son' (l. 1278); and in his speech to Beowulf the next morning Hrothgar characterizes her assault as an act of vengeance within a feud (11. 1330-45), not a food-foraging expedition. Moreover, Beowulf's encounter with her proceeds much as a battle of champions. His approach is proclaimed as a kind of challenge by the blowing of a horn (11. 1423-24) and the shooting of a nicor (ll. 1432-36); and before plunging into the waters he arms himself in the formal heroic manner (ll. 1442-54) and engages in a decorous exchange with Hrothgar and his former rival and new friend, Unferth (ll. 1455-91). Thus a predatorially styled initiative has been countered by a ceremonious, agonistic response; and in the fight that follows, it is Beowulf's policy that prevails. For this epic struggle is conducted not as a predatorial massacre but as a single combat on fairly equal terms. Both tear at each other by hand; each deals the other an unsuccessful stroke with a blade. And here a further symmetry emerges: for the inability of Hrunting (Unferth's sword-gift) to injure her (ll. 1519-28), which recalls Grendel's invulnerability against sword-blows (ll. 801-5), is paralleled by the success of Beowulf's corselet in turning aside her dagger-thrust (ll. 1545-54). In the end Beowulf slaughters her with her own sword. With this act, and with the retrieval of Grendel's head as a display and token of his victory, Beowulf has finally and decisively cast off the image of predatory victim with which the human community has been straddled from the outset of the poem. And in the process he has vindicated agonistic heroism as a means of dealing with such problems.

Readers have often noted that the dragon in Beowulf is quite dissimilar from his monstrous foregoers, and this observation certainly holds regarding the issue under study here. In fact, the dragon is neither so predatorial nor so human as Grendel is. True, he destroys Geatland with ruthless violence and evident contempt for the opposition. Yet he never actually eats anyone, at least that we hear of; and even if one wishes to argue that the poet simply omitted to mention this detail, the omission is itself significant. Gone from this portion of the poem are gory images of a monster tearing limbs from a helpless man, slurping blood, and gulping hunks of flesh. The terror, though no less real, is less corporeal. Yet while he is not a predator, the dragon does not project the image of a champion or conspecific adversary either. He does fit into certain human stereotypes—that of the guardian (weard and hyrde), the hall-dweller, the miserly and vengeful king. Yet he lacks a comitatus, does not appear to enjoy active membership in a tribe or clan, and boasts no genealogy. Further, he is serpentine, and thus conspicuously nonanthropomorphic, in physical appearance. This is a monster truly alien to human kind. The contrast between predator and conspecific adversary simply does not comprehend him. And since he does not inhabit the margins between these categories, he cannot be transformed through the same process.

Beowulf's response to his challenge nonetheless incorporates many agonistic movements; the Geat's heroism is indeed founded on agonistic paradigms to such a degree that he cannot eschew them entirely. Thus he prefaces his assault with formal boasts before his retainers and apologizers for the necessity of armor (ll. 2510-37); soon after, he broadcasts his arrival at the dragon's barrow with a shout of challenge (ll. 2550-53), not unlike flyting, that succeeds indeed in arousing the ire of the wyrm. Yet his realistic recognition of the need for sword and shield and byrnie, in view of the anticipated battle-fire and poison (ll. 2522-24), shows that certain agonistic proprieties have had to cede place to expediency. The dragon's menace is simply too overwhelming to permit overscrupulousness regarding the niceties of formal dueling. The battle that follows, while certainly a supreme contest in a sense, is characterized more by an asymmetrical parity than by a genuine matching up according to a single system of rules. Fire clashes against shield, fang against corselet, sword against bone, advance by foot against an uncoiling and slithering: Beowulf and the dragon do not share a single common term in weaponry or styles of attack and defense. Finally and perhaps most tellingly, Beowulf cannot, despite his boast, defeat his opponent single-handed; the dragon dies only when Beowulf and Wiglaf team up. In short Beowulf, despite his heroic preferences, has had to yield to necessity. The dragon simply must be killed, whatever the means; and while the spirit of agonistic adventurism has not been quenched altogether, cooperation between fellow warriors has emerged into greater prominence.

Thus agonistic heroism no longer stands in antithesis to predation. This dichotomy, so crucial to the Grendel sequence, has faded entirely out of view. At the same time I would like to suggest that the vacuum created by the disappearance of this concern is filled by another newly emerging problem that exhibits a certain metaphoric likeness on the level of human community to the threat that predation posed on the level of individual corporeal existence. From its outset the story has been played out against a background of intertribal friendships and feuds. In the last thousand lines, however, the frequency and duration of these digressions increases markedly. To my reading, some of the most horrific imagery unfolds in these passages, as when the terrible Swedish king Ongentheow drives the wound-weary Geats into Ravenswood and serenades them the night long with threats to hack them open with swords and leave them swinging from gallows-trees for the sport of birds (ll. 2936-42). What the Geatish messenger who recollects this episode from tribal history wishes to convey is that, with the dissemination of the bad news of Beowulf's death and the cowardice of his retainers, bloody assaults like this are only what the Geats have to expect. In a figurative sense, then, the Swedes and other enemies are threatening to dismember the Geatish nation and "consume its substance," as it were. We would be wise not to press this analogy too far. No one ever implies that the Swedes or Franks practice cannibalism or genocide; nor can we gloss over the distinction between the graphically concrete violence of Dane-gobbling and the more abstract violence in the "rending of a community." The former inspires terror of a stark, bodily variety, the latter, a somewhat intangible mood of oppression and sense of impending doom. Nonetheless, the relationship between the devouring of persons and of tribes is sufficient to ensure that the disappearance of corporeal predation from the poem's surface texture does not cause a loss of momentum and let-down in dramatic power.

The burden of this argument is not to promote the positivistic reduction of Beowulf into some kind of Darwinian allegory. The poem stands as a mighty expression of the human spirit; and its sweep and majesty are in no sense curtailed by its willingness to engage terrors of the most creaturely sort. Indeed, these fears occasion much of the supreme heroism in the poem and thus make possible the vindication of human courage in the face of a hostile world.