King Hrothgar of the Danes has built a magnificent new mead hall ‘Heorot’, unparalleled in size and beauty. This hall is the symbolic center of royal fellowship, gift-giving, and communal joy. Hrothgar throws a lavish party to celebrate the completion of the project. The high point of the evening is when his Queen, Wealhtheow, ceremonially carries the king’s prized possession, a lavish golden drinking cup first to Hrothgar and then to his warriors, reinforcing social bonds and allegiances.
Then, something terrible happens. The sounds of all this joyful merry-making has spilled out into the night and travelled up the mountain where it has awoken Grendel, a horrifying monster, embodying exile and resentment towards communal order. He is referred to in Norse literature as ‘border-walker’, a liminal being of immense strength and ferocity which now descends upon Heorot with primal destructive rage.
The revellers are slaughtered horribly, torn limb from limb; the hall is utterly trashed and the royal couple with a few warriors only just manage to escape with their lives. The next day a boat arrives bearing Beowulf, a great hero, with a handful of men. He has heard about Grendel and vows to defeat him. Hrothgar is overjoyed but warns everyone against displaying too much happiness lest it reach Grendel’s ear once more.
That night Beowulf and his warriors set up an ambush in Heorot. They deliberately sing bawdy songs and make out that a great time is being had in the mead hall. Grendel descends but the warriors are ready and waiting. Beowulf fights Grendel, naked and unarmed, managing to sever his arm. The monster retreats to his mountain stronghold shrieking…
That night Grendel’s mother, called ‘Brimwylf’, ‘she-wolf of the waters’, falls upon the hall to avenge her son, killing many of the remaining warriors. Hrothgar pleads with Beowulf to hunt her down in her watery lair and after a terrible battle he manages to defeat her….
well, back in the 6th century version of the story.
In the spirit of ‘midrash’, the amplification and embellishment of stories over the years, the 2007 film of Beowulf starring Anthony Hopkins adds some interesting plot twists. It turns out that Grendel is Hrothgar’s son. The golden drinking cup of which he is so proud is a symbolically charged fetishistic object which binds Hrothgar to Grendel’s mother via their illicit union. Eventually Hrothgar confesses the truth, passing the golden cup, his queen and his kingdom to Beowulf before throwing himself from the battlements of his castle in shame.
When Beowulf goes to fight Grendel’s mother he too is seduced by her. Their child becomes yet another monster, a great dragon which, like Grendel, attacks the kingdom and particularly Queen Wealhtheow, hellbent on destroying the bond between the new royal couple. Beowulf is killed and the crown is passed to Wiglaf, Beowulf’s kinsman. The movie ends with Wiglaf picking the golden drinking horn out of the sand by the shore where Beowulf’s funeral pyre ship slowly sinks. Grendel’s mother rises from the waves and studies Wiglaf with seductive intent…
This embellishment of the story feels relevant in the way amplifications do by flagging up the compulsive repetition often present in destructive enactment. Hrothgar’s betrayal of his queen comes back to haunt him, then Beowulf makes the same mistake and finally Wiglaf is caught up in the cycle of adultery and fathers killing their sons. On the eve of the Piscean age the collective psyche offered up a story about the consequences of banishing the divine feminine, and at the end of that age extrapolated some further plot twists detailing the specific fallout of such rash action.
We are used to thinking about envy as an interpersonal dynamic, A envies B because A has something B does not. The original story of Beowulf depicts Grendel as an independent envious spirit who attacks the joyful Heorot out of random spite for the other. The midrash reveals that Hrothgar is not a random other at all, but the closest of kin and that Grendel is in fact heir to the hall he has been excluded from. The story now depicts Hrothgar being attacked by a split off and denied part of himself, the product of concealed relations with the rejected goddess. The envious attack on Heorot is Hrothgar’s own doing.
Whilst the psychoanalytic process is replete with stories of abandonment and abuse by others, all of which need honouring and cathartic working through, so too is there the pernicious issue of the way in which we attack ourselves and shore up identity by sabotaging new self-constructs symbolised by the Heorot. What we could loosely call the integration of the shadow is not confined to acknowledgement of those ‘negative emotions’ we harbour towards others but also the way in which we actively limit our own possibilities and spoil our own joys.
Self-envy is the internal process by which one part of the personality attacks and undermines another, more creative and healthy part of the self. Addictions, self-sabotage, compulsive acting out, and blocked creativity can be understood as the result of an unconscious ‘civil war’ within. Rather than envying another person, the individual envies their own potential for growth, vitality, and emotional integration.
The contribution of object relations theorists such as Melanie Klien and Wilfred Bion is that they identify how early developmental experiences lead to the formation of split-off ‘child part self-objects.’ These are primitive internal structures whose feelings of rage, deprivation, and envy are preserved precisely because they are banished, like Grendel, beyond the perimeter of the warm and cozy where they cannot be humanised nor the effects of which be ameliorated.. When a person begins to experience creative or loving states, these split-off parts perceive such experiences as threatening and attacks them.
The prejudice we have towards ‘negative emotions’, even to the point of identifying them with irredeemable evil, is precisely what keeps them in place and destructively turned against what we otherwise consider ‘the good’. These dynamics manifest clinically as sabotaging success, relapsing into addiction, destroying relationships, rejecting help, feeling guilty about creativity or happiness, and unconsciously attacking what is most desired.
The 2.0 version of Beowulf is so valuable because it points to the centrality of Grendel’s mother to the story and the way in which she holds sway over first Hrothgar, then Beowulf and finally Wiglaf via their totemic fascination with the golden mead cup which she makes sure keeps the men in the story enthralled. The rejected goddess as ‘Mater’ is unwittingly symbolised in a more concrete, mater-ial form as the cornucopic golden drinking cup with which the fascinated kings are then caught like rabbits in the headlights. The lure of money and status, the bottomless bucket list, the end justifying the means, the next exciting lover, the diminution of relatedness, all serve to keep us small so as not to bring Grendel down upon the joyful hall of Heorot, and keep the gyre of self destructive acting out forever turning.
Had Hrothgar maintained a more conscious and reverential relationship with the Brimwylf and acknowledged her as the source from which the golden cup had come, he might have avoided the illicit alternative and been spared the divisive consequences.
