Been listening to The Mountain Goats again

The cave mouth shines By pure force of will I look down on the world From the top of this lonesome hill And you can run, and run some more From here all the way to Singapore But I will carry you home in my teeth In the great hall you drink red wine You chew meat off the bone I beat down the new path to the castle I come naked and alone I laid my son on the bier, I burned the wreath Fire overhead, water underneath You can stand up or you can run You and I both know what you've done And I will carry you home I will carry you home I will carry you home in my teeth

Grendel’s mother from Beowulf

Please reblog for a larger sample size.

An illustration of Grendel's mother by J. R. Skelton from the 1908 Stories of Beowulf.

"I'm Robin the Boy Wonder. -Whereas I'm Robin, the even more wondruos Girl Wonder. And you're nicked. -Nicked? -What can I say? I'm a fan of british cop patois."

Batman Vs. Bigby! A Wolf In Gotham (2021). "Chapter Six: Wild Animals."

Grendel's Mother is, from beginning to end, a song about resurrection beasts (which has some interesting implications about Beowulf as an intertext). Just listen to it, seriously. Artist credit, as per watermark, Briarwick

Beowulf confronting Grendel's Mother by John Howe

in the great hall you drink red wine

Haven't drawn them in a while

jd fucked up what did he do

[...] The qualities we hail as heroic in Western culture -- courage and fortitude, selflessness and nobility, steadiness of mind and will -- are not unique to men. Arguably, they're not even characteristic. But in the male-dominated myth, folklore, and literature that defines our culture, they've been annexed as "masculine" traits. We're still struggling to create or consume stories about valorous women, unless they also display the "feminine" virtues: passive sex appeal and fragility that requires rescue. In a hero, these are flaws. Thus, any heroine who tries to embody both contains the seeds of her own undoing. The female hero can hoist up the shackles of femininity and take them with her on adventures, but that's not the same as breaking free. [...] In college, I was a particular fan of Edmund Spenser's "martial maid" Britomart, who gets to wear armor and carry a spear and go on quests and even rescue maidens -- but eventually, even Britomart gallops back to her role as a princess, a wife, and the mother of a race of noble Britons. Her whole mission, in general, has been to find the man she glimpsed in a magic mirror and fell in love with. The rescuing damsels part was just a side quest. [...] And if the heroine truly slips the constraints that her femininity is supposed to place on her, the very heroic virtues she embodies often mutate into monstrosity. In the Old English epic poem Beowulf, the eponymous male hero is described as an aglæca, a word for which we do not know the exact meaning but which is usually translated as something like "hero" or "warrior". Beowulf's antagonist, the monster Grendel, also gets described as an aglæca, which in his case is usually glossed as "demon" or "monster" or something similar. What the two have in common is the sense of being awe-inspiring or formidible, so that's probably more or less what aglæca means. But the word has a feminine form, aglæcwif, and the ancient text contains an aglæcwif too: Grendel's mother. There is no abiguity to this word, not in the way it's come down to us; aglæcwif is translated as "monster-woman," "troll-lady," "wretch," or "hag." In other contexts, "wif" (which is also attached to other descriptors of Grendel's mother) specifically denotes a human woman, and yet -- like it's not indignity enough that she's always called "Grendel's mother," as if the bards were Grendel's schoolmates who didn't realize mothers had names -- the aglæcwif is assumed to be subhuman and bestial. She's just as much an aglæca as Beowulf, and just as much a wif as the other human women to which that refers, but the combination inspires not awe but horror. The monstrousness of Grendel's mother, the factor that makes her a hag or a troll or a wretch, comes from her stepping outside the slim strictures of womanhood into the realm of aglæca, of formidability and awe. In another world, she would have been a hero.

Zimmerman, Jess. Introduction to Women and Other Monsters: Building a New Mythology. Beacon Press, 2021.

Beowulf (2007)

reading beowulf in literature and fascinated by the shapeless and nigh-genderless grendelina (ever notice that grendel is an anagram for "Gender L". really makes you think)

"You look like boiled hell. -Trust me, I feel worse. What did you find? -This and that. Need help? -No. If I can't do this much myself, I've no business going out. -I agree. You've no business going out tonight. Why not leave it to me?... -Speaking of business let's get back to it. What do you know about this stolen book that you haven't confessed yet. -The book holds twelve of the most powerful spells known to my kind. It's why we kept it locked away in the most secure place we could manage. -Not quite secure enough. -It took an explosion that penetrated a hundred dimensions to spring it loose. That's pretty impresive in my book. No pun intended."

Batman Vs. Bigby! A Wolf In Gotham (2021). "Chapter Five: Boats Against The Current."

the cave mouth shines

This is how I imagined Grendel and his mother (who I call Rionach), the two creatures Beowulf killed