The Riddles of The Hobbit (18 page)

So, why a
glove
? I propose a reading of
Beowulf
that takes Grendl’s glove to be no anomaly. What function does a glove serve except to cover a hand, to give it grip, either to keep it warm or otherwise to protect it? And
hands
occupy an extraordinarily significant place in the representational economy of
Beowulf
the poem.

Now, one simple explanation of the ‘glof’ might be simply to emphasise the might of the beast’s arm. The idea would be: if his glove is large enough to fit entire men inside, his hand must be
gigantic
. This in turn only serves to emphasise Beowulf’s own strength in defeating him. But actually it is the craft, rather than the sheer size, of the glof that gets stressed in the poem, the ‘rare patchwork / of devilishly fitted dragon-skins’. This is an interesting detail. It is not stated unambiguously that Grendl made this glove himself, but it is surely as likely that he did as that he did not, for after all he has no servants or slaves to do the work on his behalf. Yet because Grendl is so consistently and emphatically bestialised in the rest of the poem this strikes an odd note. We think of him very much as more animal than human; but here we cannot avoid the suspicion that he is a maker—strictly speaking, we could call him Grendl Glover. Of course, the notion that Grendl is more beast than man is something suggested by other details in the poem. For instance, and apart from the giant glove, we never see him using tools. He does not, for instance, wield a sword; and it is part of the carefully balanced symbolic logic of the poem’s universe that he cannot be defeated by a sword either. Beowulf’s repudiation of weaponry appears at first to be as reckless as the monster’s:

  The monster scorns

  in his reckless way to use weapons;

  therefore, to heighten Hygelac’s fame

  and
gladden his heart, I hereby renounce

  sword and the shelter of the broad shield,

  the heavy war-board: hand-to-hand

  is how it will be, a life-and-death fight.

(433–40)                                    

But later we discover ‘something that they [the Geatish warriors] could not have known at the time’, namely ‘that no blade on earth … could ever damage their demon opponent’. This is because ‘he had conjured the harm from the cutting edge’ (26): suggesting an ability to create magical charms again at odds with the notion of him as a mere beast.

So: if our assumption is that Grendl does not use a sword because he is too much the beast for such sophistication, the poem itself suggests otherwise. The glove, and his skill in magical charms, implies that the truth might be simpler. He does not use a sword because he does not need one. Over and again the poem stresses his deadly strength of hand:

Greedy and grim he grabbed thirty men …

(121)                                                   

No counsellor could ever expect

Fair reparation from those rabid hands.

All were endangered; you and old.

(158–8)                                                       

He grabbed (
nam þa mid handa
, lit. ‘clutched with his hand’) and mauled a man on his bench …

(746)

Venturing closer,

His talon was raised to attack Beowulf …

(747–8)                                                     

The Danes have bolted their hall-door against this attacker, but nevertheless ‘the iron-braced door / turned on its hinge when [Grendl’s] hands touched it … he ripped open / the mouth of the building’ (721–24). Strong! In Beowulf, of course, he meets his match in terms
of strength-of-hand. Grendl grabbed thirty men, but Beowulf has ‘the strength of thirty / in the grip of each hand’ (379). Grendl attacks:

He was bearing in

with open claw when the alert hero’s

comeback and armlock forestalled him utterly.

The captain of evil discovered himself

in a handgrip harder than anything

he had ever encountered in any man.

(749–55)                                      

The poet stresses the
manual
element of the conflict to an almost hyperbolic degree: ‘he had never been clamped or cornered like this … [he] got a firm hold. Fingers were bursting … the latching power / in his fingers weakened … [Beowulf] kept him helplessly / locked in a handgrip’. It follows from this that it is precisely Grendl’s hand that becomes the trophy of his defeat.

Clear proof of this

could be seen in the hand the hero displayed

high up near the roof, the whole of Grendl’s

shoulder and arm, his awesome grasp.

(833–36)                                     

… the awful proof

of the hero’s prowess, the splayed hand

up under the eaves.

(984–86)                                        

In fact it is the monster’s whole arm, ripped from its shoulder by Beowulf’s strength: but it is the
hand
that is the element upon which the poem concentrates. Later Beowulf boasts that Grendl ‘broke and ran. Yet he bought his freedom / at a high price, for he left his hand …’ (971–72); and then again later still: ‘although he got away / to enjoy life’s sweetness for a while longer, / his right hand stayed behind him in Heorot’ (2096–99).

It has, in other words, something to do with hands. When Beowulf boasts that he will kill Grendl with his bare hands it is, in part, just
that: a boast, a vaunt of strength. Clearly it requires greater strength, and closer quarters, to kill with bare hands than it does to kill with a weapon. But something more than that is going on. Using his hands signifies, for Beowulf,
agency
. Hrothgar praises the strength of Beowulf’s father to his face (‘ … your father. / With his own hands he had killed Heatholaf … ’). Beowulf himself recalls killing a huge sea monster: ‘through my own hands, / the fury of battle had finished off the sea beast’ (557–58). When he fights Grendl’s mother his sword fails and he realises ‘he would have to rely / on the might of his arm … [he] gripped her shoulder’ (1537–38). And as an old man, Beowulf recalls killing ‘Dayraven the Frank’ in open battle:

   No sword blade sent him to his death,

   my bare hands stilled his heartbeats.

(2506–07)                                     

And he goes on with evident regret that he will not be able to challenge the dragon in the same manner:

I would rather not

use a weapon if I knew another way

to grapple with the dragon and make good my boast

as I did against Grendl is days gone by.

So he takes his sword, although in the event it does him no good. At the crucial moment in the battle it snaps, and the poet notes that Beowulf’s hand
is simply too strong for his weapon
:

When he wielded a sword

No matter how blooded and hard-edged the blade,

His hand was too strong, the stroke he dealt

(I have heard) would ruin it.

(2680–84)                                

It has to do with hands. What is happening here, over and above the sheer vaunt of physical strength, is the weighted construing of a particular triad that in turn determines the structures of power in the text.
Beowulf
is a poem about power in the first instance. The
narrative, which concerns the physical power (and courage, but mostly power) of the hero is interleaved with passages that elaborate the logic of political power. The poet gives us advice from the start, on how to win and keep allies, on how not to alienate one’s people. The authority of specific kings may be challenged in the poem, but authority itself (which is to say, power) is consistently respected.

Often the
Beowulf
-poet invokes the highest authority, God Almighty. Beneath God come kings, and beneath kings the king’s men—the ordinary people such as you and I, do not figure in the poem at all, unless it is as the low thief who sneakily steals from the dragon and wakes him to rage near the end. Indeed, one of the core relationships in the poem is that between Hrothgar the King, ‘protector of the Shieldings’ and Beowulf, who for most of the poem is not a king. We might ask why the protector of the Shieldings does not, in fact,
protect
his Shieldings against Grendl; why, in other words, he requires an outsider, a Dane, to do that job for him. But to ask this question, of course, is to misunderstand the role of Kings. Kings do not fight hand-to-hand with monsters (Beowulf’s combat with the dragon at the end of his life is a key exception, of course, and one to which I will come back). Kings send in their champions, or warriors, to do that sort of thing. That is what it means to be King.

To put it concisely: there are three ways of killing mentioned in
Beowulf
. Most directly, one may kill with one’s bare hands. Then again, one may kill with a weapon: sword, knife or spear. Or, finally (and this is the mode of kings) one may kill with a
word
. Kings speak and others die; and they are able to do this because they have subjects who will wield swords, or their bare hands, to make those words come true. Beowulf in a figurative, but also more than figurative, sense
becomes
Hrothgar’s hand. The King wills the blow, and Beowulf executes it.

This in turn implies that metaphorical or metonymic conception of the King as the whole kingdom, or as the kingdom as a sort of leviathan man. Beowulf’s actual hand become a synecdoche for himself as a warrior, and in turn for the power that a king can muster; at the same time that Beowulf himself becomes a metaphorical ‘hand’ of the king himself.

Why are hands so prominent in this poem? There is something
honest
about the ‘hand’. Hand-to-hand seems to be presented as a more straightforward, cleaner mode of conflict than swordfighting. It predominates
because
of its honesty, in a sense. This connects,
I think, with something that Heaney says about the tone of the poem in his introduction to his translation.

I remembered the voice of the poem as being attractively direct, even though the diction was ornate and the narrative method something oblique. What I had always loved was a kind of foursquareness about the utterance, a feeling of living within a constantly indicative mood … (xxvii)

There is, in other words, a ready-to-hand-edness about the poem’s tone. It is a poem that feels hand-worked, a poem whose occasional roughness of texture and construction seem to be the fingerprints left by the sculptor’s or potter’s hands in the medium he has worked. And it is a poem that celebrates not merely strength, but strength-of-hand.

Why would a warrior wear a glove? The dandy adornment of the body is presumably not to the point. Presumably the issue is, rather, one of protection. And here we come up against another notable oddity in the account of Beowulf’s fight with Grendl’s mother. Quite apart from Beowulf’s improbable ability seemingly to breathe under water there is the counter-intuitive protection afforded him by his chain-mail.

  So she lunged and clutched and managed to catch him

  In her brutal grip; but his body for all that,

  remained unscathed: the mesh of the chain mail

  saved him on the outside.

(1501–04)                             

But this is patently not right. Were Grendl-mama using her talons like swords, as she subsequently does (‘her savage talons / failed to rip the web of his war-shirt’) we could understand how chain mail would help prevent the blow cutting into the warrior’s skin. But how can something as flexible as
chain-mail
help against a giant monster who is trying to
crush
the life out of you in a ‘brutal grip’? Sheet metal might act as a rigid exoskleleton, but chain-mail cannot do this. So what is going on?

The protection chain mail offers is to do with the difficulty a weapon has in penetrating, not in tensile-strength. The warrior’s own skin must be both flexible and strong, as well: and if hands are to become death-dealing then they will need to combine flexibility
and rigidity. Beowulf’s strange flexible-and-rigid chain mail merely enacts this essential quality of the warrior’s own body, a transference of his strength onto his outward wear. Grendl’s glove does something similar. It is an external emblem of the monstrous capacity for death that the creature’s hand represents.

This is my point. The
manual
quality in the poem is precisely what endears it to so many readers and critics.
Beowulf
is a poem with which we, as readers,
grapple
; it admits us to a world that flatters our sense of the
strong touch
. It is a poem that we feel we can grasp, take in our hands and
feel
, not just admire in a distant or cerebral sense.

To put this another way: where later poetry sometimes reads as too polished, too (we might say) machine-tooled,
Beowulf
with its rough-edges and burly awkwardnesses, its inconsistencies and narrative jolts, feels like something
hand-made
. Its appeal was therefore always likely to increase after the cultural aesthetic shifted from admiring finish, polish and regularity as the eighteenth and nineteenth century tended to do, towards admiring individual craftwork the way we do today. Hand-made is now a term of approbation, after all; and all the little niggles and glitches in the product are things in which we symbolical invest our admiration, precisely because they represent the craftsman’s touch. No longer to be explained away as ‘not silk’, the Hessian-cloth-texture of the poem is presented as the very ground of its appeal.

But this is the irony of the piece, of course. Because of all the works admitted to the canon of English literature
Beowulf
is the only one that was
not
hand-made, not produced
cum manis
onto manuscript. It was not
written
. Oral composition is the work of the spoken word and the memory, not the processes of hand-writing or hand-typing than nowadays characterise composition. But Grendl’s glove, the magical and threatening hand-covering, is exactly the right emblem for the strong-manual, dextrous-manual and above all the intimate, connective,
hands-on
quality that the poem exhibits.