THE “EOTEN” GRENDEL:
FROM JUTISH GOVERNOR TO PLANETARY MYTH
Much
ink has been spilt on the nature of Grendel, the chief monster of the
Anglo-Saxon heroic epic poem, BEOWULF.
Although described vividly, the problem has always been coming up with a
decent etymology for his name. Scholars
have also been frustrated by the fact that despite the infamy associated with
this monster, no other sources – Danish or otherwise – see fit to so much as
allude to him in passing.
The
difficulty of assigning a meaning to the name Grendel was well laid out in the
classic study BEOWULF: AN INTRODUCTION TO THE STUDY OF THE POEM, by R. W.
Chambers, in 1921:
“The
name has generally been derived from grindan, "to grind"; either
directly, because Grendel grinds the bones of those he devours, or indirectly,
in the sense of "tormentor." Others would connect with O.N. grindill,
"storm," and perhaps with M.E. gryndel, "angry."
It
has recently been proposed to connect the word with grund, "bottom":
for Grendel lives in the mere-grund or grund-wong and his mother is the
grund-wyrgin. Erik Rooth, who proposes this etymology, compares the Icelandic
grandi, "a sandbank," and the common Low German dialect word grand,
"coarse sand." This brings us back to the root "to grind,"
for grand, "sand" is simply the product of the grinding of the waves.
Indeed the same explanation has been given of the word "ground."
However
this may be, the new etymology differs from the old in giving Grendel a name
derived, not from his grinding or tormenting others, but from his dwelling at
the bottom of the lake or marsh. The name would have a parallel in the Modern
English grindle, grundel, German grundel, a fish haunting the bottom of the
water.
The
Old English place-names, associating Grendel as they do with meres and swamps,
seem rather to support this.
As
to the Devonshire stream Grendel (now the
Grindle or Greendale Brook), it has been suggested that this name is also
connected with the root grand, "gravel," "sand." But, so
far as I have been able to observe, there is no particular suggestion of sand
or gravel about this modest little brook. If we follow the River Clyst from the
point where the Grindle flows into it, through two miles of marshy land, to the
estuary of the Exe, we shall there find plenty. But it is clear from the
charter of 963 that the name was then, as now, restricted to the small brook. I
cannot tell why the stream should bear the name, or what, if any, is the connection
with the monster Grendel. We can only note that the name is again found
attached to water, and, near the junction with the Clyst, to marshy ground.”
More
recent scholarship on the question of an etymology for the name Grendel is
found in Klaeber’s Beowulf, Fourth Edition, ed. R. D. Fulk, Robert E. Bjork,
and John D. Niles:
“The
following explanations of the name Grendel have been proposed: (1) The name is
related to OE grindan ‘grind’, here ‘destroyer’… and to OE *grandor… ON grand,
‘evil’, ‘injury’. (2) The name is related to OE grindel ‘bar, bolt’, OHG
grindel, krintil… (3) The name is related to ON grindell, a term in a thula for
‘storm’, grenja ‘to bellow’… (4) Formation by means of –ila (cf. strengel) from
Lat. Grandis… (5) Grendel < *grandil-, from *grand ‘sand’, ‘bottom (ground)
of a body of water’… (6) As a deformation of dialectical drindle or dringle,
‘trickle’, ‘small trickling stream’ or of *Drengel, ‘drowned’ or ‘drinker’… (7)
Grendel and Grettir both derive from the root *grandi-.”
More
profitable than the above exploration of the name is the ongoing debate on the
relationship between the Anglo-Saxon words for giants and Jutes: eotenas. Grendel is himself designated an eoten, and
the eotenas play a key role in the Finnsburg fragment. This last describes an early Dark Age battle
in England
between Danes and Frisians, the latter being accompanied by a Jutish
force. The Finnsburg battle and its aftermath
is also told about in Beowulf.
In
reality, the debate as to whether there are Jutes or giants present at
Finnsburg is a moot one. Why? Because the tribal name ‘Jutes’ would have
been associated in heroic legend with giants and, eventually, would have become
indistinguishable from latter. You start
out as Jutes, you end up as giants. And
it may well be that the tribal name originally denoted a fierce race of
unusually tall Northern people. Simek,
discussing the Old Norse cognate jotunn, says simply that
“As
yet it has not been totally explained whether the word originally belonged to
eta ‘eat’ (thus, ‘the big eater’) or to the tribal name of the Etiones.”
Here
is the listing for eoten, extracted from the classical Anglo-Saxon dictionary
by Bosworth and Toller:
EÓTEN
,
es; m. I. a giant, monster, Grendel; gĭgas, monstrum, Grendel :-- Wæs se grimma
gǽst Grendel, Caines cyn, -- ðanon untydras ealle onwócon, eótenas and ylfe and
orcnéas, swylce gigantas Grendel was the grim guest, the race of Cain, --
whence unnatural births all sprang forth, monsters, elves, and spectres, also giants,
Beo. Th. 204-226; B. 102-113. Eóten, nom. sing. Beo. Th. 1526; B. 761. Eótena,
gen. pl. Beo. Th. 846; B. 421. II. Eotenas, gen. a; dat. um; pl. m. the Jutes,
Jutlanders, the ancient inhabitants of Jutland
in the north of Denmark;
Jūtæ :-- Eótena treówe the faith of the Jutes, Beo.Th. 2148; 6. 1072: 2180; B.
1088: 2286; 3. 1141: 2294; B. 1145. [O. Nrs. jötunn, m.] v. ent, eten.
Now,
as the Hall of Heorot is believed to have stood at Lejre in Sealand, not far
east of the Jutland of the Jutes, might not
Grendel himself have been a Jute? The
fact that eoten had the meaning of ‘giant’ may well have imparted much to his
character, and a mere Jutish chieftain or warrior would then have been
transformed in heroic legend to the status of a horrible devouring monster.
As
this seems plausible enough to me, I would put forward as the historical
prototype for Grendel an early 5th century governor of Jutland
called Gervendil. This man was father of
the more famous Horwendillus of Saxo Grammaticus’s History of the Danes, ON
Aurvandil, but Old English Earendel. The
Prose Edda of Snorri Sturluson has Thor toss the toe of Aurvandil up into the
sky. The evidence strongly suggests this
toe is the Morning Star (Venus; see below).
As
for Aurvandill, a derivation from a Proto-Germanic reconstructed compound
*auzi-wandilaz "luminous wanderer" or from a Norse borrowing of Latin
aureum, ‘gold’, do not have much credence.
Instead, we must again look to the Norse myth, which has Aurvandill carried
across Elivager, the ‘stormy wave or sea’, thought to be (see Simek) the name
for the proto-sea that surrounds the world.
As ON aurr, ‘wet clay, mud, wet soil’, has as its cognate in OE ear,
‘sea, ocean’, we might assume that at some point in the development of Norse
aur carried the same meaning, which was later lost. Thus Aurvandill may be simply the
‘Sea-wanderer’, i.e. the one who crosses Elivager.
Finally,
I’ve shown elsewhere that aur as ‘clay’ is used poetically for the cloud that
the Norns take from the sea and spread over the sky-tree. As Thor is the thunderstorm god, and he
carries Aurvandill, ‘Cloud-wanderer’ might also work, allowing for a possible
poetic meaning of aur.
If
a form like Aurvandil or [H]orwendillus can become Earendel in Old English,
then Gerwendillus (also from Saxo), which in Old Norse would probably have been
Gervandil or Gerrvandil, could by a very regular and rather simple process
evolve into ‘Grendel’. We first allow
for the dropping of the v/w, and then either propose the dropping of the /e/ in
Ger through elision or a metathesis of Ger- to Gre-, followed by the loss of
the /e/ in –wendil[l].
However,
the vowel in ger-, geir-, OE gar- is long and takes the principle stress. It
does not seem to be a good candidate for metathesis, in which case the Ger- of Gerwendillus is unlikely
to be the word for 'spear'. Instead, I
would propose
ON
gerr, 'greedy, gluttonous', found in Geri, 'the ravener' or 'greedy one', one
of Odin's wolves. The name Geri can be traced back to the Proto-Germanic
adjective *geraz, attested in Burgundian girs, Old Norse gerr and Old High
German ger or giri, all of which mean "greedy". Derived from *geraz is OESc giri, 'greed', Norw.
dial. gir id., OS fehu-giri 'rapacity', OHG giri 'rapacity, greed'. The word
does not appear in Old English.
I
have confirmation of this last possibility from Jackson Crawford of the
Department of Scandinavian Studies, University of Wisconsin-Madison:
“In
Old Norse (the language in question which I can comment on with most
authority), you can get *ger- > gr-, though the only cases I'm aware of are
those which involve the old perfective prefix *ga-/ge-, like "granni"
("neighbor," cf. Gothic "garazna"). And for the loss of v
in such a position, there is the common verb "gera"/"gøra" which in old
poems rhymes as "gørva."
There
is also the point that from an Old English standpoint, you may not necessarily
have to go from *ger > gr to be cognate with Geri. No exact (pre-)OE cognate
to the adjective "gerr," of which "Geri" is a formation
(and to which OHG ger/giri, Modern German Gier/gierig are cognate), is
attested, but that is not to say that it might not have existed, and that it
might have metathesized (so have been something like *gre-).”
In
either case, we end up quite naturally with Grendel, a Jute or ‘Giant’ who for
12 long years raided Hrothgar’s Hall of Heorot until he was slain in personal
combat by Beowulf.
As
for Grendel being made into a creature of the fen and mere, it is probable this
is a reference to the many pools and extensive peat bogs of ancient Jutland, where hundreds of bodies, well-preserved by
tannins, have been discovered in modern times.
Lastly,
the placing of Grendel’s hand/arm/shoulder high up under the roof as a trophy
suggests that Gerwendil, like his son Orwendil, was featured in a celestial
myth. I’m here reading the roof as symbolic of the heavens, and the
hand/arm/shoulder as being representative of a planetary body or, perhaps, a
constellation.
There
is little reason to doubt the identification of the Old English Earendel with
the Morning Star. For more on this, I
would refer the reader to David Allen Swanson’s “The Old English Christ Poems
and Anglo-Saxon Law”, to be found online here:
http://diginole.lib.fsu.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=4940&context=etd
Earendel,
in these Christ poems, is clearly substituted for Latin Oriens, ‘Morning
Star’. Of more recent interest is
"Eala Earendel: Extraordinary Poetics in Old English" by Tiffany
Beechy in Modern Philology 01/2010; 108(1):1-19. A similar discussion of Earendel as the
Morning Star can be found in her book THE POETICS OF OLD ENGLISH, Ashgate
Publishing, Ltd., 2013.
Most
authorities agree that the –wendil component of the father’s and son’s names
comes from a Germanic root meaning ‘to wander’:
http://www.utexas.edu/cola/centers/lrc/ielex/U/P2144.html
Some
have related such a meaning to our word planet, from the Greek word meaning
‘wanderer’. The Greek word was adopted
into the Latin language. I would note
that in the Old Norse myth, Thor carries Aurvandil in a basket. Old English has windel, ‘basket’, from the
Germanic root mentioned above.
We
do know that Grendel, perhaps the 'ravenous wanderer', as described in “Beowulf”,
is strictly a night creature. He is
never described as being abroad in the day, and all his devastating raids on
Heorot occur after darkness has covered the land. He himself is a ‘deorc death-scua’, a “dark
death-shadow”.
As
the Beowulf account has it, when the monster’s arm was ripped from his body,
‘Grendel
was driven under the fen-banks, fatally hurt, to his desolate lair [beneath the
mere].” (from Seamus Heaney’s translation)
As
we shall see when investigating the nature of the dragon slain by Beowulf at
the end of his life, each of the three monsters of the epic poem are lunar in
nature. The hero Beowulf is placed
either in the 5th or 6th centuries or straddling the two. When I checked NASA's Five Millenium solar
eclipse catalog, there were no notable events for Lejre, Sealand, Denmark
(scene of Heorot) or Ormror, Gotland (again, see the following chapter on the
Beowulf dragon) throughout the 500s.
However, during the previous century, there were three total eclipses of
major significance for the region. The
first had its central path right over Sealand, with its northern and southern
paths nicely matching the northern and southern points of the island. This occurred on April 16, 413 A.D., with the
maximum eclipse happening at 2:53 p.m. The second eclipse covered the southern
half of Gotland, including Ormror and Rone (the last being a site associated
with Beowulf's funeral cairn). This fell
on December 23, 447, with the maximum eclipse happening at 3:15 p.m., about 5 minutes
AFTER sunset (although the eclipse would certainly have been noticeable BEFORE
sunset). The third eclipse of May 28, 458 passed over the northern tip of
Sealand, but hit Gotland dead-center, with its northern and southern paths
lining up with the northern and southern points of the island. The time of maximum eclipse for this date was
1:18 p.m.
I
found it remarkable that between the first eclipse and the third, 45 years
elapsed. In the Beowulf poem, we are
told the hero became king some time after his slaying of Grendel and Grendel's
mother, and that he reigned for 50 years before dying as a result of the wounds
he sustained fighting the dragon.
While
the poem's narrative presents the killing of Grendel's mother as something that
occurred immediately - perhaps a single night after - the killing of Grendel, I
would make a case for the interval between the first and second eclipses being
compressed for the sake of dramatic effect.
Furthermore, the fact that the second eclipse only reached maximum AFTER
both sun and moon dipped below the horizon mimics the story of Beowulf's diving
into the mere and being pulled down to the bottom by Grendel's mother, where
the actual combat took place. Thus,
Grendel - the New Moon, the invisible, dark moon, that moves over the land
unseen - would have been "killed" by the solar hero (and later solar
king) Beowulf in 413. The monster's
mother would then have been slain in 447, while the dragon (again see the next
chapter) would perish at Beowulf's hands in 458. All three eclipses took place within the life
span of the hero of the poem.
Grendel's
trophy arm/hand/claw may well be symbolic of the waxing lunar crescent, which
becomes visible after a New Moon. In
other words, Beowulf "killed" the New Moon monster during the 413
eclipse, and by doing so made possible the reappearance of the waxing crescent. Grendel's mother - the New Moon of 447 -
reclaims the hand/arm/claw of her son when she visits Heorot, this act
representing the disappearance of the waning lunar crescent that precedes the
eclipse. But Beowulf brings the head of
Grendel back after slaying the monster's mother, and we can assume this means
the moon has once again entered its first visible phase.
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