Last week I read Chris Pipkin’s monograph on Monster Relics.1 It’s about a fascinating idea that I’d never encountered before: that there’s a connection between the way churches exhibit relics of saints and the way heroes carry home body parts or treasures or something to show their triumph over some monster or other. He looks closely at “Beowulf”, where hanging Grendel’s arm over the door of Heorot is an immediately-obvious example of his thesis, plus the alliterative “Morte Arthur” and “Sir Gawain and the Green Knight”.
Particularly interesting to me was all the background information about how relics were used in the medieval church. High ranking church officials would give relics to someone who was building a new church somewhere to help with its consecration. These gifts established a bond between the the hierarch and the new congregation, just like a Danish king giving out gold rings to his warriors. Then there was the theft of relics. People were proud to tell how their saint’s relics had been stolen from their previous location. Such a provenance guaranteed both the good will of the saint and the efficacy of the relic: the saint wouldn’t have allowed it to be stolen if he didn’t want it to be in its new home. This goes back ‘way before the Catholic Church; it sounds to me a lot like the story of Camillus stealing the idol of Juno from Veii and taking her back to Rome. The proof that Juno wanted this to happen? If she hadn’t, she wouldn’t have let Rome conquer Veii. Quod erat demonstrandum, as we say on the Palatine Hill.
The idea of relics is all over Tolkien, of course. The One Ring is the first one I thought of: a piece hacked off the body of the vanquished Dark Lord, brought home by the hero. It’s the epitome of a monster relic. The horn that Éowyn gives Merry was originally just a really cool horn, but because it was taken from the hoard of Scatha the Worm, it has become a monster relic. The Sword that was Broken is like a saint’s relic, though not precisely because Elendil wasn’t a saint (cf Jay Johnstone). It does have the chain of custody such as we’d expect from the church. The closest thing to a saint’s relic is Frodo’s clothes, we learn from Gandalf: “Even the orc-rags that you bore in the black land; Frodo, shall be preserved.” Depending on how hard Elessar wanted to push the New Age kingship thing, he might even have sent a crew into Mordor to find Sam’s pots and pans.
Kate Jensen gave a talk at Mythmoot XIII last weekend about the various kinds of holy, magical, or otherwise significant jewelry in Old English and Old Norse legends. JRRT had a lot of source material to draw from. Fitt 18 of Beowulf begins with a complicated story about a necklace of eorclanstanas, the “Brosing’s” necklace, that Hygelac wore to his doom. This made her think of the nauglamir, which meant the Brosings were analogous to the sons of Fëanor. But then, she went on, there are legends that have the goddess Freya wearing a necklace of that name.
not necessarily the sparrow in question
Kate didn’t talk about relics at all, but this chimed well enough to me that I asked her about what status these fancy arkenstones in the stories had, after the stories ended. She said nobody ever mentioned an afterlife for them. Larry Swain, my Old English teacher, 2 was there, too. He said there wasn’t any idea of enduring significance in any of those texts. The fancy jewelry was conceived and was given a back story, then when it was taken by some other barbarian tribe it loses all its importance. Which led me to the joke I was proudest of all weekend: “Was the necklace worn by a sparrow?”
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