Why Should We Care about Medieval Literature?

Grendel Was Just Doing What the Poet Told Him to Do

When I started brainstorming for this week’s newsletter, my most pressing thought was, “Why medieval literature? Why Beowulf?” Do we engage with certain types of literature because we’re expected to do so, especially as literature majors?

Do we do it out of fun or personal interest, which was a driving force in my decision to take the medieval lit course over, say, the professional writing one?

Of course, I read Beowulf because it’s part of the curriculum, but that can’t be all, right?

Welcome back to The Whale-Road! Last week, I talked about how cycles take center stage in Beowulf. If you’ll bear with me, we’ll talk about something else—but cycles will still be relevant! This week, I’m interested in the question of “why medieval literature?” which I pose to you, dear reader, as much as I try to tackle myself.

Beowulf seems as good a starting place as any, and not just because that’s what we’re currently discussing in class. Why do we care about some ancient poem about some guy who killed some people and was celebrated as a hero for it? Sounds like pretty standard “heroes win and villains get the pointy end of the stick” procedure. It’s nothing new in modern or contemporary literature, where we often find “good” in a world of darkness overcoming evil (even if it takes some number of sequels to get there sometimes).

Yet last week, I didn’t focus on this traditional storytelling or why we should care about Beowulf being a hero and Grendel being a villain. In fact, my line of thinking is that the story itself, the people, the structures in which conflict occurred, were secondary to the importance of cycles. Beowulf is a story about cycles, and Beowulf’s heroic deeds and Grendel’s villainous occupation of Heorot were vehicles to understanding cycles.

In short, what I suggest now is that Beowulf and Grendel are on equal footing. They are both important for understanding cycles in the epic poem, and they are both important for approaching some kind of understanding of why we care—or should care—about medieval literature. As Timothy Morton points out in The Ecological Thought, we are all connected, human and non-human. We all exist on this earth, and we all have needs that must be satisfied. In fact, Morton writes, “Think Blade Runner or Frankenstein: the ethics of the ecological thought is to regard beings as people even when they aren’t people” (8), and “A questioning attitude needs to become habitual” (13).

If we can actively deconstruct the ways that our thoughts and thought processes predispose us to certain understandings but also certain practices, then I think we can arrive at an answer to why we read and should care about medieval literature. For example, can Frankenstein’s monster, a being not explicitly human, actually be considered a person, as Morton suggests? The monster was created in the image of a person. He seems to possess some form of emotion and thought, even if it’s not altogether profound. And more to the point of our topic, medieval literature, what about Grendel? If “his alien spirit / would travel far into fiends’ keeping” (lines 806-7), does he not possess a soul? Would possessing a soul not at least put him on the table for consideration in the hall of personhood?

Beowulf and Grendel both die. They both leave behind legacies, even if one is constructed as heroic and the other as villainous. They both play pivotal parts in the importance of cycles in the epic poem. What if we took a moment to consider that Grendel, monster or not, was also a person, just like Beowulf; and like many people in the real world and even still today—people who fall outside the norm, who don’t satisfy our thirst for heroics, whether or not they are villainous—Grendel was cast aside for his difference.

After all, we don’t know the full story for why he’s even considered a monster, only that he is considered one. Maybe he was once a hero too and decided to exact his revenge.

Maybe the poet simply didn’t think about Grendel’s feelings on the matter.

The point is that Beowulf and, I hope, medieval literature as a whole cast a light on humanity and society just as much as Frankenstein or insert any other well-known novel about “the human condition” does; that we, as astute readers and open-minded learners, should care that even in medieval literature, on the pages of a burnt manuscript where people are vehicles for understanding cycles, we can find reflections of ourselves and ask the burning questions of who we are and how we interact with others. Why should Beowulf be the hero? Does Grendel have a soul? Did Grendel ever stand a chance before he was assigned the role of villain just for being different?

If Grendel had been welcomed long ago, would he have ever killed a single person, except in a heroic quest as notable as Beowulf’s?

Works Cited

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

Timothy Morton. The Ecological Thought. Harvard UP, 2010. EBSCOhost,
search.ebscohost.com/login.aspx?direct=true&db=e000xna&AN=390177&site=eds-
live.