https://youtubetranscript.com/?v=LZF_yIV8WEo
Grendel and Grendel’s mother are probably one of the closest connections that the Beowulf poem has to the Book of Enoch. So they are, first of all, giants. They’re referred to frequently throughout the poem as being giants, like normal words for giants. Eotin, which is a normal Anglo-Saxon word for giant, fierce, which means like a troll or a marsh troll. What’s the difference between a troll and giant? Well, not really a whole lot for purposes of the story that we’re talking about here. But also, Grendel is frequently referred to as a demon. The language that’s used for him is the language that is used to describe demons and evil spirits in other Anglo-Saxon literature. Grendel, of course, eats humans, but he doesn’t just eat humans. He drinks blood. He likes to rip the heads off of people. Famously, Beowulf’s retainer, Han Shou, which by the way means glove. Glove is a hand shoe. So anyway, some guy with the name Glove, he gets his head ripped off and Grendel drinks his blood. But this sort of cannibalistic blood drinking activity is one of the attributes, one of the things that is described about the giants in the Book of Enoch. So there are similarities there, but the similarities go beyond this. So when Beowulf is meditating on the fate of Grendel and the eternal torment that he’s going to experience, he quotes this passage that is basically just a few lines which are basically a line from the Book of Enoch paraphrased into Anglo-Saxon verse. Talking about the eternal judgment that will fall upon this evil soul. And so it gets even a little more complicated because, first of all, in the Book of Enoch, or sorry, in the Beowulf poem, we’re told that Grendel is the descendant of Cain. But one of the major themes of the poem is this idea that the flood, this is also an idea very clearly found in the Book of Enoch, for instance, the idea that the flood was sent to the world primarily to destroy the giants, right? Everybody, the old Scandinavian, old Germanic peoples had this memory as well, this memory of the war between the gods and the giants, right? And so the Beowulf poet is able to take this knowledge that as Germanic people they have that there was this war with giants and is able to take that and combine it with his knowledge of the same war with giants from the scriptures. But of course, it’s not explicitly spelled out in Genesis. It’s in the Enochian traditions. Right, yeah. And so you get the question and somebody sent me this question in an email recently and I said, well, you have to listen to the next episode. And the question was, well, if the giants were destroyed by the flood, then how is Grendel the descendant of Cain? And how is Grendel a, like, how is he like a giant? How is he like one of the Nephilim or whatever? But there’s a harder question than that, which is why in the Bible? Like, there’s two places where the word Nephilim is used. One is used in Genesis and one is used in the, I think it’s in Deuteronomy when they come up to the land of the, when they come up with the two spies in front of Jericho. And then it says they are of the Nephilim. Those are the two places. So it’s like the same question. The Anakim and all these other giants are said to be Nephilim. So how do you, it’s the same question. Like, how do you, how does this work? Why are there still giants after the flood? Why are there still giants after the flood? And then are the, are the descendant of Cain thing, is the descendant of Cain thing, is that mutually exclusive with the idea of being like a Nephilim or a giant? Like, you know, like the two, like the Sethite hypothesis versus the Nephilim hypothesis or whatever. So we actually find pretty good answers to both of these questions in the Beowulf poem. Oh, really? Okay. So first of all, first of all, we’re told that all these different monsters descend from Cain, very common kind of a medieval theory about the origin of like fairies, elves, orcs, goblins, you know, all these things. They’re all bad guys as far as the Beowulf poet is concerned. He’s a hardliner as an old professor of mine might say he’s a hardliner when it comes to fairies. But the, the way that they, but the way that then that this, this similarity to or this descent from Cain is used in the Beowulf poem, if you start to pay attention to it, you start to realize that it’s not really a question of like lineal, let’s say genetic descent. Yeah. Right. But the way that it’s used and the reason that it’s important to the poem is because Cain was a kinslayer. Yeah, so in Anglo-Saxon society and like the society, let’s say the Germanic Iron Age, to be a kinslayer is the worst possible sin. Right. In a, in a, in a very similar way, and I think for a very similar reason that for Dante in the Inferno, the worst possible sin. And I, I mean, I lead a book club through Inferno every Friday night for like several years now, or not necessarily through Inferno, through the whole comedy. Through the comedy. And we just finished Inferno a couple of weeks ago. And what we see for Dante in Inferno is that the worst possible sin is betraying your lord, betraying your master. And what both of these things have in common is that for their respective societies, for Dante’s and for the Germanic Iron Age, these relationships are the, are the relationships through which society coheres. If you cannot trust the bonds of kinship, right, if, if you can’t even trust your brother or your cousin or your uncle, right, if you, if you can’t even trust the bonds of kinship, then really, how are you going to survive as a people? How are you going to survive as the civilization? This is actually one of the big questions, you know, that is raised at the end of the poem. As Beowulf is the last of the, yeah, it’s right, he’s the last king of his people, right? And, and, you know, the, the, the woman, you know, singing his funeral dirge, one of the things she sings about is like, well, now who’s going to fight for us? Who’s now, now who’s going to, you know, defend us? And so if you don’t, if you can’t trust a kinship, and then what that does is it makes like things like succession and things like that really unstable and really uncertain, then society, human society simply ceases to cohere. So for this society, that and ungenerosity, being ungenerous, you know, hoarding, in other words, like a dragon, this is why the dragon is, dragons don’t always hoard gold, they hoard gold in Anglo-Saxon, in Germanic society, because gold is the thing that you need to, you give to your retainers, right? A king gives gold to his thanes and his thanes give service to him in return. And it sounds the same as saying, I’m paying you for a service, but they didn’t think of it that way. And actually they thought about it very differently than that, right? It was always the idea that, you know, the king is in Anglo-Saxon literate language, he’s the ring giver. He’s the one that, you know, breaks off the gold rings from his chain and gives it and the idea is he’s supposed to be giving it with an open hand. And if he doesn’t, he starts hoarding the gold, then society starts to collapse. So these are kind of the two worst things and these are basically the two kinds of evil that we see exemplified by the giants or by the monsters, right? We’ve got the giants or the trolls or whatever you want to call Grendel’s mother who exemplified this kinslaying, right? And also the kinslaying and the idea of the blood feud, which was just tearing through Germanic societies at this time. And then with the dragon, you have the idea of hoarding, right? So in Grendel, how are they? You mean in the sense that they’re cannibals? Is that what you mean by their kinslayers? Like, when you say kin, do you mean that they’re killing humans like in that way? So they are called the kin of Cain and then they’re compared to and sometimes explicitly, sometimes in a subtle way to other famous kinslayers in the story. So there are a number of human kinslayings and also men betraying their masters and things like this in the background. So that when we read those stories and when we see these things happening, sometimes it’s foreshadowing. Hrothgar is the king of the Danes. His hall is eventually going to be destroyed by a civil war, which is a thing that really happened. And people reading the poem knew it had happened, but this poem is set before it happens. And so there’s like all this ominous foreshadowing. Later on, there’s this awful war that involves kinslaying and betrayals of alliances and all these other things with the Swedes and the Jeyats and all these different people. So the point is that, you know, C.S. Lewis, when he talks about fairy tales, he says that they wear their insides on their outsides. And so Grendel and his mother are in a way they’re manifesting. They’re bringing to the surface the kinslaying, the blood feud and everything else that’s really like the big evil or represents one of the great evils that has to be dealt with in Germanic society. And so when we look at this, the other question is, well, how are there more… So to answer the question, like, how is there still a line of Cain after the flood? Right. Well, it’s very simple. The way that you become, you know, from the line of Cain, the way that you become a monster is by doing what Cain did. Yeah. Like him, right. You know, becoming a monster, right. The way that you become like demons is to participate in their works. It’s really interesting because there’s other Germanic literature, for instance, Old Norse sagas, in which you literally have people actually become a monster in a very literal, transformative sense. Yeah. By, you know, for instance, this one guy abandons his comrades because they’re being attacked. And so he just takes all the treasure and he jumps overboard and they never see him again. But there’s this big sea serpent, like a dragon, like that haunts that bay from that point forward. Well, that’s him. The guy. Yeah. Yeah. So that kind of a thing. As far as… What’s interesting about this, like, and I’ve been, because I’ve been pondering that I knew some of these traditions. Like, I know the Bay of Poem well enough, not in any way close to you, but because I was always interested about the way in which… Because Cain is both is a kinslayer, but he’s also a civilizational figure, like he brings civilization. And so there’s an interesting, there’s a weirdness about Cain and there’s also a weirdness about giants themselves, which is that there’s a duality to the giants. One is the giant as an image of the of the civilization, the tyrannical civilization or this kind of oppression from above. You know, the demons kind of come and rape women or impose their order. But then there’s also the degenerate aspect of the descendants of Cain, which is the hybridity, monstrosity, chaos, cannibalism, broken causality. You know, in some ways it does represent in general when I talk about how the modern world is like a separation of heaven and earth. So the extremes manifest together, this kind of extreme of tyranny and the extreme of chaos and broken reality having together. But in the Grendel poem, there isn’t a sense that the giants represent an old civilization or that they represent, you know, a civilization that was there before us or something like that. I mean, that’s definitely there. It is there. When when when Beowulf goes to goes goes into hell, actually, maybe talk about that in a moment. But when he goes down into the the the lair, right, the underwater of of Grendel’s mother, the troll wife of Grendel’s mother, he finds in there. He finds this sword. And the sword was forged by the giants. OK. And it was like this. It’s like this huge sword. It’s better than any sword that Bill has. One of the one of the sort of tropes of the Bear’s son tale is that the weapons always like his weapons always break because he’s too strong. Yeah. And they will like throughout the story just constantly break swords. It’s like three or four times. But it’s but it’s bigger than any sword that he’s ever held. And but what’s really interesting is that is that actually sort of inscribed on the sword, right? Or is the is the actual legend of the giants in their war with God from the Book of Enoch? Mm hmm. So so it’s the idea that this is a technological marvel, a technological wonder, which is actually a result of giantish civilization. But that’s what actually allows Beowulf to kill Grendel’s mother is when he uses that sword, which he himself had made. He uses it to cut off her head, whereas his own sword hadn’t been up to the task. Yeah. I mean, that’s interesting also because it’s interesting because if you think of the whole problem that I always talk about this problem, like the idea of how death, how death fights death and how death kind of stands at that limit and to understand Noah as also a civilizational figure. Right. No, it builds the arc. And so it’s like if if technique comes through Cain’s descendants, Noah appears as this strange figure that seems to be able to bridge Cain and Seth because he takes technique and he uses it to survive the flood. And often it’s there’s all these weird ways in legends that you find that they try to bridge it. You know, they’ll say that he married Nama triple cane sister. Yeah, yeah. So that’s what he uses. And then, of course, like her blood eats away at the blade. So there’s nothing but the hilt left. Yeah. When he when he comes back up to the surface. So this is, I mean, there’s there are a lot of other interesting similarities that go deeper on the connection between Grendel and his mother and Seth. And the giants of the Old Testament. Maybe one question when you say on the sword, it says that it is the story of the Giants revolt against God, as in the Book of Enoch. How close is it to the Book of Enoch? So glad you asked, Jonathan. I’m so glad you asked. I wrote this out by hand, along with the it’s actually that’s the see if I can show you here. I mean, this is how fanatic I am about studying this. Like, basically, it’s like it’s like an inner linear thing. It’s like an inner linear thing. It’s like it’s it’s it’s like it’s, it’s like it’s really like a linear thing. It’s like, it’s like it’s really, it’s like it’s it’s like it’s like it’s like a linear thing. So that’s the book. show you here. I mean, this is how fanatic I am about studying this. Like, basically, it’s like, it’s like an inner linear thing, but then I have like notes about a facing page. Because there’s like two different passages, I should have had these ready to go. But in one of them, Krohgar kind of like contemplates, he’s looking at it way after the fight, and he kind of like looks at it and contemplates the blade. Like remembers the blade. Yeah. Yeah. So it says, on the west, or written. So on that sword was was the origin in written or engraved of ancient strife, when the flood slew, and the flood offslough, when the flood destroyed. With with the rush of the ocean, the race of the giants. They terribly, they fared terribly. That was an estranged race. That race was a strange to the eternal Lord. That was their final reward when the waters surge, the ruler gave so like the the the ruler of heaven that is God gave them their final reward with a surge of the waves. So and there’s some references to it elsewhere in the poem. I don’t want to like spend the whole day just going around through this. But I mean, I do but not on camera. But, you know, the point of this, the point of this is that the the Beowulf poet very clearly understands the flood as being mainly God’s judgment against the race of the giants, which is a very common ancient Christian understanding pretty much everybody regardless of whether or not you believe in a satellite hypothesis. Yeah, you don’t totally need the book of Enoch to have that. Yeah, you don’t totally need the book of Enoch to have this. To kind of to kind of show out like like draw out a couple of other similarities, though, I think the really strong linking, there are a couple of strong links to to the book of Enoch from the Beowulf poem, either either proof of a direct link or maybe as I’m going to talk about in a moment, this may be like a case of vernacular apocryphal literature, which the Beowulf poet had access to that doesn’t survive, but the Beowulf poem does. There’s some other examples of this I’ll talk about in a sec.