https://archiveofourown.org/works/86855616
Behold the thing that has lived in my google docs as “weird misgendering translation”.
The deep and eloquent articulation at length of my concept is a work in progress. Here is the version that I will be able to post by the end of June.
I think that explicitly using masculine pronouns for Grendel’s Mother is an appropriate way to translate the poet’s occasional use of the masculine for her— she/he pronouns would be more appropriate, but the purpose of my translation work is to highlight the unconventional (convention being to default to she/her pronouns), to deliberately overcompensate. Similarly I use she/her pronouns for Beowulf during the underwater fight, overcompensating in pushback against the hyper-masculinised mischaracterisation of the titular character. Other things I want to point out include water/associated imagery with femininity, with close attention paid to how Beowulf him/herself is characterised with an exceptional connection to water that other men lack (see Breca episode), here entrance/exit of lake setting corresponds with pronoun change, and that it’s sort of deliberately lacking the sexual playfulness that some (Jane Chance, Woman as Hero in Old English Literature 1986, pages 102-3) point out which is a whole nother thing in and of itself.
Mostly I want to think about about the possibility of Beowulf himself sharing characterisation with very feminine characters in the role he assumes as peace-weaver, the ways in which he is set apart from other male characters, and how other aspects of his characterisation, namely his childlessness and his lack of a wife, can be re-interpreted and understood in new ways if his gender expression isn’t bound to to the hyper-masculinity that he is conventionally assigned.
I also want to think about gender in Beowulf through the lens of contemporary multiple pronoun use— I want to read the poet’s confusion of pronouns in the Grendel and Grendel’s Mother episodes as deliberate in some way that can be accessed through multiple pronoun use. Breaking with readings of Beowulf’s femininity as failed masculinity, or of Grendel’s Mother’s masculinity as derisive monstrosity, I think that the language use of this particular moment of time and community can uniquely equip a reader to reinterpret and approach gender in the poem from a productive angle. This research will be forthcoming if God and grad schools will it.
