Embracing Queerness in Medieval Literature

Part I: What Even is Queerness in Medieval Literature?

What if the Middle Ages were actually more queer than we thought?

Welcome back to the Whale-Road, weary traveler! Today, I’ll begin part one of a three-part series on queerness in the Middle Ages and what that means for us in 2024.

Fraught with tales of knights and magic and supernatural beasts, medieval literature loves to hype itself up. Was there really a man with the strength of thirty men like Beowulf or a “green knight” who could be decapitated and walk away like they were on their way to their favorite lunch spot? Probably not, but scholars historicize these moments anyway, providing contexts that are temporal or Christian or political. Nothing is free from our contemporary gaze—not even queerness.

In worlds of dragons and shattering mugs (looking at you, Egil), would it be so unusual for two men to be gay (or two women, for that matter)? The definitive answer is no, and so I shall end my Substack here. Thanks for reading!

But seriously, why would that be so strange? One common argument, perhaps one which could be employed here to combat the concept of medieval queerness, is that our concepts and the words which we use to describe them are contemporary. “Queer,” for example, in the way that we use it now, probably didn’t refer to a person (as opposed to something simply being unusual, or a host of other possible and potentially unrelated uses) until the late 1800s. Not quite so easy for a study of medieval literature in its own context, huh?

Yet much of what we know now about gender and sexuality, both necessary components of queerness, is owed to the Middle Ages. In “Homoeroticism in Antiquity and the Middle Ages: Acts, Identities, Cultures, ” Mathew Kuefler writes, “In his study of Anglo-Saxon England, [David] Clark considers the condemnation of effeminacy in men as being at the heart of contemporary attitudes toward homoeroticism, where gender nonconformity was much less easily tolerated than variant sexual desires” (1258). In other words, the ways in which we categorize gender and sexuality in 2024 (or in 2018, when Kuefler writes his essay) can at least in part be owed to attitudes in the Middle Ages. So-called “male effeminacy,” a term which itself could be picked apart (but that act lies outside the scope of this newsletter), constituted a “category crisis” that “threatened the distinctions between men and women, and, accordingly, male dominance” (1258). Of course, the Middle Ages needed rigid lines to distinguish between “men” and “women” as well as perpetuate “male dominance” both socially and politically, right?

(What could possibly go wrong, apart from everything?)

All of that probably (I hope) sounds familiar to you, dear reader. You’ve probably heard these kinds of words phrases in the twenty-first century. (That’s a lot more recent than the Middle Ages, if you’re keeping score.) These kinds of words and phrases might be more likely to come from certain groups of people (such as members or affiliates of a particular political party in the United States as well as some outlying groups with similar political values), but these words nevertheless are proudly proclaimed with the absolute worst of intentions and disseminated across various platforms in a way that is difficult if not altogether impossible to ignore. It’s also especially male-centric, which sounds quite a bit like a good chunk of medieval literature.

Could a queer reading of The Saga of the People of Laxardal as a female-centric text be fruitful as well as interesting? I certainly think so, but that’s outside the scope of this series. I leave it here simply as food for thought about the ways in which we conceptualize not only queerness but also gender, both within and outside of the umbrella of “queerness.” I want it to linger at the back of your mind when you think of “queerness.”

I also mention Laxardal because I want you to consider checking out one of my previous Substack posts on Laxardal, “Justice for Brak,” where I write that “the lived experiences of people during the medieval period were no more monolithic than the lived experiences of people today, and medieval literature offers us a window into that world.”

If, as I have asserted before, the lived experiences of people in the Middle Ages is not monolithic, then why ought their experiences be treated as such? Okay, the word “queer” or even “gay” or “lesbian” wasn’t used nine hundred years ago in the way that we use it now. Does that mean that the concept—in the most metaphysical sense of the word, in the way that a concept can as much be a thought as simply a lived experience—didn’t exist nine hundred years ago?

Well, if there was a “category crisis” that “threatened the distinctions between men and women, and, accordingly, male dominance,” then it’s obviously not the case that these concepts didn’t exist nine hundred years ago. Maybe the subjects of “male effeminacy” were gay or trans or simply straight but struggling to stay afloat in the vast sea of gender norms. However, to speculate on the history of gender norms is to acknowledge that gender and deviate forms of it (and, by extension, sexuality as a concept parallel to, if not inherently interested in, gender) are not new new concepts. The lives of the people in the Middle Ages were varied; clearly, there were not only “masculine men” and “straight men” and “feminine women” and “straight women.”

How preposterous the thought.

So if concepts of gender and sexuality and rigid gender lines and gender normativity have pervaded Western history, whatever words we might have used (or not used) to describe them, then so too has “queerness” pervaded Western history.

As should be clear by now, queerness is not an easily defined word. Its disparate relationships to academia, history, and casual social use today potentially trouble the word “queer.” Richard E. Zeikowitz suggests as much in “Befriending the Medieval Queer: A Pedagogy for Literature Classes.” Opening his essay, he writes, “The analytical term ‘queer’ has become so familiar within academic discourse that it is in danger of losing some of its subversive force” and adds that “‘Queer’ can thus signify any nonnormative behavior, relationship, or identity occurring at a specific moment” (67). This definition of queerness, one which is still common in academia twenty years after Zeikowitz writes, suggests that queerness is inherently about a struggle against normative powers.

Take for example Zeikowitz’s reading of Grendel in Beowulf. He writes, “Upon observing the sleeping men, who were content after a night of feasting and [. . .] bonding with one another, and viewing them as ‘insensible to pain / and human sorrow,’ Grendel suddenly attacks them ([lines] 118-25). The narrator suggests that Grendel suffers the pain of the condemned—the suffering of evil humans” (71, his emphasis). In this moment, Grendel comes off as a monster who ; one might suggest that he’s attacking humans because humans get on his nerves. But that monstrousness and the way in which it displaces him from “humanness” means that “Grendel is decidedly not like the men of Heorot—he is the loathsome, dangerous queer” (72). He has been othered by these sleeping men, who are insensitive and content in being so.

This reading of Grendel as queer is certainly fine. Grendel does stand apart in a way that defies normativity and has been explicitly othered by the dominant power (in this case, an organized group of humans). This kind of reading could also be applied to Laxardal, which emphasizes the lives of women and even gives them a great deal of attention and power in a way that enriches them rather than sets them apart as villains, as is the case for many women in other medieval texts as well as characters like Grendel.

However, this reading only employs one facet of queerness. While the academic use of the word “queer” to tackle power structures and reimagine the ways that words and meaning work is certainly fruitful, we mustn’t ignore the other uses of the word too.

Just as it is fine to read Grendel in this way, it is also fine for the everyday member of the LGBTQ+ community to use queerness as a personal descriptor, to suggest that “queerness” is a concept to describe someone who might be gay for gaysake as much as it might be used to describe someone who “is not heterosexual” and so defies a heterosexual-centric power structure.

And historically, the word “queer” (and “q***r” as a slur) are all important to the way queerness has developed through today. Kuefler’s closing remarks in “Homoeroticism” are certainly apt: “The purpose of history cannot be divorced from the present, and [. . .] the start of all history is a question posed in the here and now” (1266). In other words, “queerness,” whether in the form of academic queer theory or just in its everyday social use, cannot stand without consideration to the past that gave rise to it. The present did not happen in a vacuum, and we must ask questions of the past and acknowledge its importance when continuing to develop our understandings of concepts like queerness.

And, of course, we can ask questions of the past because queerness existed in the past. It existed in the Middle Ages and in the medieval literature that we still read now.

All of that is to say, dear reader, that queerness is not easily defined because its history has made it not easily definable. To answer the question of my post’s subtitle, queerness is many things. And that’s okay! We can examine medieval literature or other kinds of literature through whatever queer framework we so desire, as long as we do so with consideration, both to the subjects we’re examining and to the history of queerness.

I don’t think it’s so radical to say that. When we engage in critical work, whether it’s in academia or on Substack or on Facebook or chatting with friends after watching a movie together, we should do so with care, at least intellectually. I daresay we should even do so with empathy, but maybe that’s too much to throw in just for this one newsletter.

Thanks for sticking with this part’s line of thinking. Until next time!

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Works Cited (and Referenced, for good measure)

Donoghue, Daniel, editor. Beowulf: A Verse Translation. Translated by 
Seamus Heaney, W.W. Norton and Company, 2019.

Kristiánsdóttir, Bergljót, editor. The Saga of the People of Laxardal and Bolli Bollason's Tale. Translated by Keneva Kunz, Penguin Books, 2008.

Kuefler, Mathew. “Homoeroticism in Antiquity and the Middle Ages: Acts, Identities, Cultures.” The American Historical Review, vol. 123, no. 4, 2018, pp. 1246-1266. JSTOR, https://www.jstor.org/stable/26581375.

Óskarsdóttir, Svanhildur, editor. Egil’s Saga. Translated by Bernard Scudder. Penguin Group, 2004.

Sir Gawain and the Green Knight: A New Verse Translation. Translated by Simon Armitage, W.W. Norton and Company, 2007.

Zeikowitz, Richard E. “Befriending the Medieval Queer: A Pedagogy for Literature Classes.” College English, vol. 65, no. 1, 2002, pp. 67-80. JSTOR, https://www.jstor.org/stable/3250731.