I gave a talk on contemporary women’s rewritings of the Beowulfian figure of Grendel’s Mother last month in the Online Midsummer Seminar sponsored by the Mythopoeic Society. This was a revised and slightly extended version of a talk that I gave last year at Mount Saint Vincent University.

The OMS talks have all been recorded and are available here. You can view my presentation, “Grendel’s Mother Talks Back: Contemporary Women’s Mythopoeic Revisions” by clicking on the link above or in the caption below.

In my talk, I discussed how Tolkien’s influential essay on Beowulf argues for a bipartite structure – first, Beowulf’s youth, in which he fights Grendel, balanced against his battle with the dragon in his old age. In Tolkien’s reading, Grendel’s Mother is subsumed in the story of her son and is barely mentioned. However, feminist scholars and creative writers have been taking a closer look at this figure, and I discuss a number of features that these retellings have in common.

And I apologize for mispronouncing Susan Signe Morrison’s middle name in the recording! Thanks to Rob Tally for letting me know.

Primary sources mentioned in my talk

Crownover, Ashley. Wealtheow: Her Telling of Beowulf.  Iroquois Press, 2008.

Gardner, Jane. Grendel’s Mother. Lasavia Publishing, 2022.

Headley, Maria Dahvana. The Mere Wife: a novel. Farrar, Strauss, and Giroux, 2018.

——–. Beowulf: a new translation. Farrar, Strauss, and Giroux, 2020.

Markotić, Nicole. After Beowulf. Coach House Books, 2022.

Morrison, Susan Signe. Grendel’s Mother: The Saga of the Wyrd-Wife. Top Hat Books, 2015.

Purvis, Meghan. Beowulf: A new translation. Penned in the Margins publishers, 2013.

Varnam, Laura. “Poems for the Women of Beowulf.” Primers volume 7, selected by Katie Hale. Nine Arches Press, 2024.

—–. “‘Against Misdirection’: Mapping poetic desire lines in creative criticism on Beowulf”  creativecritical.net  2025.