#like it's always About fungi and ravens and coyotes and vultures and scavengers

[leohtttbriar]

‘se wonna hrefn / ... / earne secgan, hu him æt æte speow, / þenden he wið wulf wæl reafode’ (the dark raven ... will tell the eagle how he surpassed him in eating, when he with the wolf laid waste to the slain) (3024a–7).

Although Beowulf is, ostensibly, the portrait of a heroic culture that values homosocial intimacy, it is also incapable of imagining this intimacy without the shadows of failure and grief. We learn of the king’s companion only in elegy; we perceive him only as a bloodied, disembodied head and in the image of the king’s grief. Yet I do not suggest that we pursue this homosocial loss through the lens of what is now called queer mourning, grief for what has been rendered conventionally ungrievable.

While it is not sufficiently significant to some modern queer readings to merit much analysis [...], Hrothgar’s love is culturally intelligible and therefore this loss can be avenged with all available resources. Vengeance is primary, as Beowulf reminds Hrothgar, among what Judith Butler calls the ‘cultural conventions’ of mourning through which grief may be acknowledged and expunged in this world. Hence the frustrated griefs of this poem, when those who cannot avenge find shame or depression their constant companions. In the act of violence itself, and in the acts of planning, coaxing, and bragging that precede it and boasting that follow, human bodily integrity is affirmed, homosocial cohesion restored, and supremacy over the wide and terrible non-human world temporarily regained.

Avian confidences bring the cycle of loss to a new beginning. When the raven and the eagle share a boast over human corpses, they are not only recapitulating the poem’s paradigmatic moment of human helplessness, when a man past the age of strength watches the raven slowly delight in the body of his dear one and realizes the world is too much for him. Nor are they, to speak in more detached terms, only liberating avian life and language from their accustomed yoke of symbolism. They are also forging, and recounting, interspecies connections to which human intelligence is not privy, speaking a language that humans cannot even hear, much less accurately translate. They are making human flesh the material substrate of this non-human culture – our ravaged bones and bodies, our severed bonds, the fuel for animal knowledge and thought.

"What the raven told the eagle: animal language and the return of loss in Beowulf", Mo Pareles