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By John Henry Frederick Bacon
I’ve been listening to Tom Shippey’s lectures on Beowulf again and reading “The Monsters and the Critics”. Pre-Tolkien scholars seem to have loved finding other things that Grendel could be, besides a monster. They wrote papers proving he was a symbol of malaria, or floods, or the plague, or bears. People in the middle ages loved finding hidden meanings for things that are obvious on the surface. Scholars in the modern era kept it up. Old habits are hard to break.
I got to wondering, though. This poem was meant to be heard, not studied. What did the name “Grendel” sound like to the people who heard the poem? I have the entire corpus of Old English literature here on a disk — let’s find out! How would the name resonate with other words in the language? What other words use those sounds?
Let’s re-use the technique I mentioned earlier with respect to Gollum, except this time we’ll use Old English instead of modern. I constructed a regular expression that has only vowels separating G, R, N, D, and L. Consonants are much more stable than vowels., so I kept them fixed and let any vowels slide in and around them. The word has to start with G because alliteration is so important. We’ll exclude Beowulf and derivative places named for Grendel himself, like “grendles mere” or “grendles bece”, that we sometimes find in land-grant charters. What else do we find?
Grundling
17 mentions, meaning totally, or from the ground up. Bible stories love this word. A phrase like hi tobræcon þa burh grundlinga “the broke the castle down to the ground”, is a great way to describe just how bad the Israelites had it, back then.
Grundleas
15 mentions, meaning groundless, or bottomless. Grundleas pytt is a common phrase, too. Tartarus grundleas seað, “Tartarus is a bottomless pit”.
Grindle
Today I learned that “grindle” is still an English word. It means a narrow ditch. Those are useful for marking land grants, too. There five such mentions. It also used to mean a herring; I think there’s one use like that.
Conclusion
That’s all I found. The general theme is that Grendel’s name sounds like it belongs underground, in a deep pit. It reminds us of destruction, and of hell. Even if the poet didn’t call Grendel a devil, this would hold up. There’s a hint of water there. So it’s entirely possible that the poet didn’t mean Grendel as a symbol of anything — his name sounds like exactly what he is.
This is the same conclusion JRRT reached, which greatly boosts my confidence in its correctness.
