Styling Texts: Dress and Fashion in Literature By Cynthia Kuhn an ...

Ward Parks, in “Prey Tell: How Heroes Perceive Monsters in Beowulf,” says that “Grendel wants to ravage like a predator,” but then Parks goes on to claim that “Beowulf insists on contesting with him like a con-specific adversary (that is, as a member of the same biological species),” in other words, man to man (2). To the extent that Beowulf is attempting to fight Grendel as an equal, Parks is correct. I think he is mistaken, though, in suggesting that Beowulf elevates Grendel to share his own human status. Rather, my thesis is the reverse: Beowulf lowers himself to Grendel’s monstrous status; he becomes less than human, though more than beast. Grendel, descended from Cain, has human blood, but blood that has been perverted by fratricide and implied miscegenation with

Dragland, in “Monster-Man in Beowulf” mentions the Grendel-kin’s “human side” (610), and quotes Joseph Baird, O.F. Emerson, and J.R.R. Tolkien, among others, who all see the human qualities of Grendel and his mother. Grendel, then, is no beast, but nor is he fully human: he is, therefore, a monster—not quite human, not quite animal. By relinquishing the use of armor and weapons, Beowulf symbolically moves from humanity to the monstrous.

It is the inversion of disarming before a battle that monsterizes Beowulf. One is supposed to arm before a battle; indeed, according to Derek Brewer in “The Arming of the Warrior in European Literature and Chaucer,” these “formal arming passages” are “a literary ritual corresponding…to a solemn and impressive ritual in real life, and the arming marks out both the hero and a combat of some particular importance” (221–22). These arming passages, or “topos,” as Brewer calls them, appear as set-pieces in heroic literature from Homer’s Iliad to Gawain and the Green Knight. Furthermore, according to Macaraeg, these arming scenes, as examples of public weapons displays, are important: