#Grendel's mother

[shortterm-emory]

Been listening to The Mountain Goats again

[lesbianshepard]

The cave mouth shines By pure force of will I look down on the world From the top of this lonesome hill And you can run, and run some more From here all the way to Singapore But I will carry you home in my teeth In the great hall you drink red wine You chew meat off the bone I beat down the new path to the castle I come naked and alone I laid my son on the bier, I burned the wreath Fire overhead, water underneath You can stand up or you can run You and I both know what you've done And I will carry you home I will carry you home I will carry you home in my teeth

[bedpolls]

Grendel’s mother from Beowulf

Please reblog for a larger sample size.

An illustration of Grendel's mother by J. R. Skelton from the 1908 Stories of Beowulf.

[momachan]

"I'm Robin the Boy Wonder. -Whereas I'm Robin, the even more wondruos Girl Wonder. And you're nicked. -Nicked? -What can I say? I'm a fan of british cop patois."

Batman Vs. Bigby! A Wolf In Gotham (2021). "Chapter Six: Wild Animals."

[tmglineaday]

I will carry you home in my teeth

[horizon-verizon]

Why do people always ignore how Jon puts Gilly’s hand over fire while threatening to burn her and kill her baby, as well as the wildling children he kept as hostages ? But somehow he’s definitely the hero and Daenerys is the tyrant.

If Daenerys was threatening innocent mothers like this we’d never hear the end of it.

Jon later admits that he’d willingly kill the other wilding children he has hostage if it’s needed.

“You will make a crow of him.” She wiped at her tears with the back of a small pale hand. “I won’t. I won’t.” Kill the boy, thought Jon. “You will. Else I promise you, the day that they burn Dalla’s boy, yours will die as well.” — A Dance with Dragons, Jon II

People are more desensitized towards a man doling out violence, even (or esp) against women and children, abused or not. Violence or destroying boundaries is the way a man affirms and/or obtains authority and respect from his male peers and in this system, it literally gets romanticized as necessary for those he is in charge of or wishes to be or others perceive him to be: "greater good" and all that. Because they say that he had to do what he had to do...but then argue Dany is "proving" how evil or unstable she is if she were to do anything similar, and they already try to by saying her violence against raping, pedophilic, dehumanizing slavers was "too much"...think about it. They don't say similar about male prisoners raping pedophiles or those who hurt kids, they even openly wish for the pedos to get "roughed" up in their cells. Oh, but a teenager former bridal slave killing slavers is too much.

That been the exact opposite for when women dole out violence for similar or even just to defend themselves or others. you see female monsters and monstrous characters take on a particular pattern of being more...simple, inhumane in stories with male heroes through the history of Western literature, but esp so from Victorian literature, the society/era where us Westerners inherited most of our ideas of sexuality and gender roles/expression--from the bourgeoise class to the working.

I hope you and anyone reading looks up the "monstrous feminine" theory first elucidated by Barbara Creed: horror film both have women as needing to be victims so they don't materialize as "castrators" (unmanners) of men AND positions mothers as matriarchal figures are depicted as monstrous because of their primal maternal instincts and reproductive capabilities. Think Grendel's mother in Beowulf. All in all, it's about abjecting women and esp their passion, or trying to "explain" something innately terrifying about them that presents, sometimes, an eternal and necessary, order-affirming challenge to male heroes or masculinized heroes/perceptions.

Anyway, back to Jon. The issue is this double standard; even if Jon "had to do" what he did to Gilly (he didn't), why isn't it when there is a slew of enslaved people (that these people imagine as brown bc of GoT even though they are pretty diverse in ASoIaF but either way are not Westerosi or "Westerners"), then it's not that serious as to leave hundreds of slavers dying on poles along a path to a city the same way they did to the enslaved? Because Americans and white people of today's world already don't care that much about trafficking, slaverys, etc. unless it happens to them of course. And Gilly was not a Westerosi, either, but a wilding who's only role is to be there so Jon and Samwell can do whatever to become better versions of themselves in their minds.

[doctorskelegoats]

Grendel's Mother is, from beginning to end, a song about resurrection beasts (which has some interesting implications about Beowulf as an intertext). Just listen to it, seriously. Artist credit, as per watermark, Briarwick

[john-gosh-darnielle]

in the great hall you drink red wine

[marytanager]

your honor, my son may have eaten 30 warriors in their sleep, but in his defense, he's a growing boy

[rhymeswithfart]

Haven't drawn them in a while

[publicdomaincharacters]

Here are 2 public domain villains,Grendel and Grendel's mother from Beowulf

[berattelse]

[...] The qualities we hail as heroic in Western culture -- courage and fortitude, selflessness and nobility, steadiness of mind and will -- are not unique to men. Arguably, they're not even characteristic. But in the male-dominated myth, folklore, and literature that defines our culture, they've been annexed as "masculine" traits. We're still struggling to create or consume stories about valorous women, unless they also display the "feminine" virtues: passive sex appeal and fragility that requires rescue. In a hero, these are flaws. Thus, any heroine who tries to embody both contains the seeds of her own undoing. The female hero can hoist up the shackles of femininity and take them with her on adventures, but that's not the same as breaking free. [...] In college, I was a particular fan of Edmund Spenser's "martial maid" Britomart, who gets to wear armor and carry a spear and go on quests and even rescue maidens -- but eventually, even Britomart gallops back to her role as a princess, a wife, and the mother of a race of noble Britons. Her whole mission, in general, has been to find the man she glimpsed in a magic mirror and fell in love with. The rescuing damsels part was just a side quest. [...] And if the heroine truly slips the constraints that her femininity is supposed to place on her, the very heroic virtues she embodies often mutate into monstrosity. In the Old English epic poem Beowulf, the eponymous male hero is described as an aglæca, a word for which we do not know the exact meaning but which is usually translated as something like "hero" or "warrior". Beowulf's antagonist, the monster Grendel, also gets described as an aglæca, which in his case is usually glossed as "demon" or "monster" or something similar. What the two have in common is the sense of being awe-inspiring or formidible, so that's probably more or less what aglæca means. But the word has a feminine form, aglæcwif, and the ancient text contains an aglæcwif too: Grendel's mother. There is no abiguity to this word, not in the way it's come down to us; aglæcwif is translated as "monster-woman," "troll-lady," "wretch," or "hag." In other contexts, "wif" (which is also attached to other descriptors of Grendel's mother) specifically denotes a human woman, and yet -- like it's not indignity enough that she's always called "Grendel's mother," as if the bards were Grendel's schoolmates who didn't realize mothers had names -- the aglæcwif is assumed to be subhuman and bestial. She's just as much an aglæca as Beowulf, and just as much a wif as the other human women to which that refers, but the combination inspires not awe but horror. The monstrousness of Grendel's mother, the factor that makes her a hag or a troll or a wretch, comes from her stepping outside the slim strictures of womanhood into the realm of aglæca, of formidability and awe. In another world, she would have been a hero.

Zimmerman, Jess. Introduction to Women and Other Monsters: Building a New Mythology. Beacon Press, 2021.

[pedroam-bang]

Beowulf (2007)

[momachan]

"You look like boiled hell. -Trust me, I feel worse. What did you find? -This and that. Need help? -No. If I can't do this much myself, I've no business going out. -I agree. You've no business going out tonight. Why not leave it to me?... -Speaking of business let's get back to it. What do you know about this stolen book that you haven't confessed yet. -The book holds twelve of the most powerful spells known to my kind. It's why we kept it locked away in the most secure place we could manage. -Not quite secure enough. -It took an explosion that penetrated a hundred dimensions to spring it loose. That's pretty impresive in my book. No pun intended."

Batman Vs. Bigby! A Wolf In Gotham (2021). "Chapter Five: Boats Against The Current."

[nul-viya]

reading beowulf in literature and fascinated by the shapeless and nigh-genderless grendelina (ever notice that grendel is an anagram for "Gender L". really makes you think)