Untitled - California State University, Long Beach

Though the plot of Beowulf is not necessarily female-centric at first
glance, women play a significant role in defining and dictating the social
community in and around the mead-hall. The encounters we have with
the female characters are brief, yet often among the most vivid in the text:
a gold-adorned Wealhþeo passing the cup to the men in the mead-hall,
Modþryth sentencing men to death for their gaze, and Grendel’s mother
descending to avenge her son’s murder. While some, like Gillian Overing,
would contend this vividness is due to the fact that the female characters
function as “hysterics” (225) that inherently disrupt and destabilize the
masculine economy of the narrative, a close examination of the female
characters in Beowulf finds them integral to the structure of Anglo-Saxon
familial and community structures. However, amid a narrative seemingly
obsessed with detailing lines of kinship, there is little to be found in the
text regarding Beowulf’s own important female familial relations: his
wife and his mother. The lack of these important women in the text
serves as a glaring omission, one that draws more attention in its striking
absence than passing mentions of either would merit. To discuss the full
importance of these absences, I will look at the way these women would
fit into Anglo Saxon community and then determine how the absence of
a mother and a wife affect Beowulf as the leader of a failed community.
Carol Parrish Jamison has explored how women, ruling women
especially, might have functioned in Germanic tribes. 1 The peace-pledge,
as referenced in Jamison’s title, refers to the women exchanged between
unstable tribes to ensure peace between them. Jamison uses both Hygd
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