Longfellow’s Christianizing Rhetoric: ‘Preached the Gospel with His Sword’

Henry ​​Longfellow’s “Musician’s Tale: The Saga of King Olaf” from his Tales of the Wayside Inn appears on the surface to be little more than a retelling and versification of the Old Norse-Icelandic saga Heimskringla which includes accounts of King Olaf Tryggvason. Of course, in the process, Longfellow adapts the medieval story honoring converter-king Olaf Tryggvason in his modern English translation suited for American audiences and his poem is mediated through Samuel Laing’s translation which Longfellow used as a model. Situating the poem in its the historical context, I would argue, highlights some of the rhetorical implications surrounding early American works of medievalism, such as Longfellow’s “The Saga of King Olaf.”

Miniature of Olaf Tryggvason in Flateyjarbók (1387).

Archaic diction, especially medieval English terms and compounds, adorn the epic poetic retelling of the saga, such as the line “Through weald, they say, and through wold,” which include two alliterating terms “weald” [a forest] and “wold” [a wooded hill], both deriving from the Old English word wold meaning “wilderness,” and this embeds archaism into the poem.

In the previous blog, I included the opening stanza of the epic poem, “The Challenge of Thor” which Olaf then answers:

“And King Olaf heard the cry,
Saw the red light in the sky,
  Laid his hand upon his sword,

There he stood as one who dreamed;
And the red light glanced and gleamed
  On the armor that he wore;
And he shouted, as the rifted
Streamers o’er him shook and shifted,
  “I accept thy challenge, Thor!”

This initiates the presentation of Olaf as a violent converter and warrior of Christ, which makes him an enemy of indigenous Scandinavian religion.

Religion continuously causes tension in the poem. When Queen Sigrid, whom Olaf pursues as his queen, refuses to convert to Christianity, he beats her in punishment, demonstrating again his use of violent conversion.

“A footstep was heard on the outer stair,
And in strode King Olaf with royal air.

He kissed the Queen’s hand, and he whispered of love,
And swore to be true as the stars are above.

But she smiled with contempt as she answered: “O King,
Will you swear it, as Odin once swore, on the ring?”

And the King: “O speak not of Odin to me,
The wife of King Olaf a Christian must be.”

Looking straight at the King, with her level brows,
She said, “I keep true to my faith and my vows.”

Then the face of King Olaf was darkened with gloom,
He rose in his anger and strode through the room.

“Why, then, should I care to have thee?” he said,–
“A faded old woman, a heathenish jade!

His zeal was stronger than fear or love,
And he struck the Queen in the face with his glove.“

This section, surely designed to demonstrate Olaf’s Christian zeal, reveals to Sigurd how abusive a husband he would be, and her decision not to wed him, while couched in fidelity to her indigenous beliefs, could have just as much to do with the violence he displays toward her as a result of her assertion of her voice and her commitment to her beliefs.

Olaf’s violence persists as he converts the pagans—frequently called warlocks and witches—but Longfellow seems to applaud the deliverance of his enemies for “thus the sorcerers were christened!”

Held up as validation of his conversionary conquests, Olaf finds the ghost of Odin, and proclaims the Allfather dead:

“King Olaf crossed himself and said:
“I know that Odin the Great is dead;
Sure is the triumph of our Faith,
The one-eyed stranger was his wraith.”

Longfellow’s narrative takes this a step further later in the poem,

“All the old gods are dead,
All the wild warlocks fled;
But the White Christ lives and reigns,
And throughout my wide domains
His Gospel shall be spread!”
On the Evangelists
Thus swore King Olaf. 

Olaf Tryggvason in the late fourteenth-century Icelandic manuscript Flateyjarbok (1387). This image has been sourced from Handrit.is.

When it comes to human sacrifice, Olaf threatens that if the pagan practice continues, then it will be the upper not the lower class offered as sacrifices to the gods, and in making this threat of violence against the aristocracy, convinces them to give up the practice.

“Such sacrifices shalt thou bring;
    To Odin and to Thor, O King,
As other kings have done in their devotion!”

    King Olaf answered: “I command
    This land to be a Christian land;
Here is my Bishop who the folk baptizes!

    “But if you ask me to restore
    Your sacrifices, stained with gore,
Then will I offer human sacrifices!

    “Not slaves and peasants shall they be,
    But men of note and high degree,
Such men as Orm of Lyra and Kar of Gryting!”

   Then to their Temple strode he in,
   And loud behind him heard the din
Of his men-at-arms and the peasants fiercely fighting.

    There in the Temple, carved in wood,
    The image of great Odin stood,
And other gods, with Thor supreme among them.

    King Olaf smote them with the blade
    Of his huge war-axe, gold inlaid,
And downward shattered to the pavement flung them.

    At the same moment rose without,
    From the contending crowd, a shout,
A mingled sound of triumph and of wailing.

    And there upon the trampled plain
    The farmer Iron-Beard lay slain,
Midway between the assailed and the assailing.

    King Olaf from the doorway spoke.
    “Choose ye between two things, my folk,
To be baptized or given up to slaughter!”

    And seeing their leader stark and dead,
    The people with a murmur said,
“O King, baptize us with thy holy water.” 

Even the notoriously unruly Thangbrand, described repeatedly as “Olaf’s Priest” and credited with Christianizing Iceland through violence, is praised for his efforts and paralleled with Olaf’s missionizing work:

All the prayers he knew by rote,
  He could preach like Chrysostome,
From the Fathers he could quote,
  He had even been at Rome,
    A learned clerk,
    A man of mark,
Was this Thangbrand, Olaf’s Priest.

He was quarrelsome and loud,
  And impatient of control,
Boisterous in the market crowd,
  Boisterous at the wassail-bowl,
    Everywhere
    Would drink and swear,
Swaggering Thangbrand, Olaf’s Priest

In his house this malcontent
  Could the King no longer bear,
So to Iceland he was sent
  To convert the heathen there,
    And away
    One summer day
Sailed this Thangbrand, Olaf’s Priest. 

Of course, when met with resistance from those still adhering to indigenous cultural practice, Thrangbrand resorts to violence, in accordance with his benefactor:

Hardly knowing what he did,
  Then he smote them might and main,
Thorvald Veile and Veterlid
  Lay there in the alehouse slain.
    “To-day we are gold,
    To-morrow mould!”
Muttered Thangbrand, Olaf’s Priest. 

Much in fear of axe and rope,
  Back to Norway sailed he then.
“O King Olaf! little hope
  Is there of these Iceland men!”
    Meekly said,
    With bending head,
Pious Thangbrand, Olaf’s Priest

The final line of this stanza is repeated twice in the poem, communicating the violent nature of Olaf’s mission and emphasizing the brutality associated with his Christianization of the indigenous cultural practice.

In their temples Thor and Odin
Lay in dust and ashes trodden,
As King Olaf, onward sweeping,
    Preached the Gospel with his sword

Miniature of Olaf Tryggvason in Flateyjarbók (1387).

The ethnonationalist overlay, as well as situating this saga retelling as a tale in colonial America, parallels the violent Christianization of indigenous peoples in North America, extending from the earliest colonial period to the ongoing American “Indian wars,” which the United States government was conducting, and which would not conclude until after the Civil War. “White Man’s Burden” justifications loomed large, and literature such as Longfellow’s “Musician’s Tale” support the continued Christianization and Westernization of indigenous cultures in the United States as around the globe to European colonial powers.

Although primarily revered as a scholar and poet, Longfellow was also an abolitionist who supported the anti-slavery movement in the mid-nineteenth century with both his art and his resources, and in 1842 write Poems on Slavery in an effort to draw attention to the inhumane cruelty of slavery, and he contributed financially to abolitionist organizations and individuals. Additionally, Longfellow was intrigued by indigenous peoples, and Longfellow’s most famous poem, The Song of Hiawatha, tells a fictionalized tale in part inspired by Ojibwe legend, but likely influenced by nationalistic epic projects, such as the Finnish Kalevala. Of course, Longfellow’s goal to include Anishinaabe legend in American literary canon could be viewed as inclusive in that it offers Anishinaabe peoples representation that might help preserve and celebrate their cultural heritage. However, Longfellow’s poem, perhaps unconsciously or subconsciously, reinforces harmful stereotypes and corroborates assimilation attempts by missionaries and government Indian agents to Anglicize indigenous people, which worked to erase cultural practices and identities.

Theatrical portrayal of Hiawatha proposing to Minnehaha, NPS Photo, Longfellow Family Photograph Collection, LONG Collections.

Longfellow’s interest in King Olaf I aligns him with other romantic antiquarians, but the rhetoric that emerges from a retelling of an Old-Norse Icelandic saga as a tale told in the cozy Wayside Inn in colonial Massachusetts creates an ethnonational link with medieval Europe and a religious model for conversion subjugation of indigenous peoples and belief systems by force and through an overt threat of violence. Since the advent of early modern European colonialization, efforts to Westernize indigenous people in North America were part of the same tradition of civilizing heathens through violent missionizing, just as certain early medieval Christianizing kings, such as Olaf I and Charlemagne, practiced conversion by the sword.

Longfellow articulates a melancholy nostalgia and romantic reverence for indigenous people, stating:

“As population advances westward, the plough-share turns up the wasted skeleton; and happy villages arise upon the sites of unknown burial-places. And when our native Indians, who are fast perishing from the earth, shall have left forever the borders of our wide lakes and rivers, and their villages have decayed within the bosom of our western hills, the dim light of tradition will rest upon those places, which have seen the glory of their battles, and heard the voice of heir eloquence;—and our land will become, indeed, a classic ground.”

However, the use of pronouns—us and them—demonstrates Longfellow’s view that the time for the indigenous is over as United States continues expanding west, an idea that remains toxic to the numerous, yet all-too-invisible, indigenous communities who resides in every state in the union.

Portrait of Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, Science History Images / Alamy Stock Photo.

Moreover, Longfellow’s medievalism participates in a broader social trend that serves to connect America with Europe through a shared historical and ethnonationalist identity. This rhetorical implication and paralleling create an historical allegory and provides the rationale for acts of genocide perpetrated by the American government and European colonists against indigenous peoples in North America, and the “New World” more broadly. It further reinforces as well, the New World—Old World rhetorical connection. Like many medieval theologians parallel the Old Testament with the New Testament, and at times use the Old Testament as a source of prophecy, Christianization of the indigenous Old World of the pagan North serves as a prophetic roadmap for Manifest Destiny and American westward expansion, which frequently employ violence and committed acts of genocide as a means of Christianizing and Westernizing indigenous peoples.

Richard Fahey, Ph.D.
Medieval Studies
University of Notre Dame

Longfellow’s Tales of the Wayside Inn: Early American Medievalism and Ethnonationalism

American mythology is filled with larger-than-life figures, like the axe-wielding Paul Bunyan and the rattlesnake-handling Buffalo Bill. Some of them are historical or pseudo-historical, such as Davy Crocket and Daniel Boone (who both famously die in the Alamo siege during the Texas revolution). Of course, there is little ground more fertile for American mythology than the colonial and revolutionary historical periods, with George Washington’s cherry tree and Paul Revere’s famous midnight ride to alert colonists in Lexington and Concord of the British army’s approach. Both of my latter examples demonstrate how historical figures are imagined and reimagined by subsequent generations of Americans, considering that Washington probably never actually chopped his cherry tree, nor did Paul Revere quite make it to Lexington or Concord to warn that the redcoats were coming toward the rebel munitions stored there. Indeed, all of the aforementioned mythic American figures and stories are somewhat less invested in historical fact and more in the self-fashioning of a European ethnonationalist identity in the United States.

In early America as elsewhere, storytellers and mythographers, such as Washington Irving (who famously wrote “The Legend of Sleepy Hollow” about a little haunted town in New York), begin not only looking to the colonial period but also across the pond to European ethnonationalist antiquarianism in the construction of distinctly American mythology following a successful revolutionary war overthrowing the British government. This is observable in another of Irving’s works, “Rip Van Winkle” which tells the tale of a man who meets with a dwarvish fairy in the Catskill Mountains and falls magically asleep for the bulk of his life, only to awaken as an old man and find his children grown. This fantastic story brings early medieval fairy lore—elves, dwarves and the like—into the American frontier and invites these supernatural beings from the “old world” into the newly formed United States.

Illustration from Washington Irving’s The Sketch Book of Geoffrey Crayon, Gent. prior to the start of the short story, “Rip Van Winkle” (1848).

The story begins with an explicit epitaph from the tomb of one Diedrich Knickerbocker that invokes the pre-Christian Germanic mythic figure “Woden, God of Saxons” (1):

By Woden, God of Saxons,
From whence comes Wensday, that is Wodensday,
Truth is a thing that ever I will keep
Unto thylke day in which I creep into
My sepulchre

(Irving , “Rip Van Winkle” 1-5).

In order to grow, myths need both substance and storyteller—in other words both the story itself and persons to pass the tale along to others. The art of storytelling and oral narratives are seemingly as old as humankind, but storytelling as a pastime is regularly associated with the medieval period, made famous by late medieval works of literature such as Giovanni Boccaccio’s Decameron and Geoffrey Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales. Indeed, in the tradition of English literature, Chaucer’s work looms large, and has inspired numerous imitators and allusions even in recent years.

Margaret Atwood’s book, The Handmaid’s Tale (1985), follows in this tradition, and her novel’s name serves both as a pejorative toward the historical period—suggesting the future could go backwards in time in terms of social progress with respect to religiosity, intellectual freedom and gender equality—and as a simultaneous homage to the literary influence of Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales. Atwood, whose novel is understood by the reader to be an academic transcription of a personal diary, logged on a voice recorder and being discussed centuries later after the log is transcribed and analyzed by a scholar who gives the book its editorial title included in the back “Historical Notes” section of the book:

“The superscription ‘The Handmaid’s Tale’ was appended to it by Professor Wade, partly in homage to the great Geoffrey Chaucer…I am sure all puns were intentional, particularly that having to do with the archaic vulgar signification of the word tail…”

(Atwood, The Handmaid’s Tale 300-301).
“America’s Oldest Inn, Longfellow’s Wayside Inn in Sudbury Massachusetts,” photograph by Constantine Gregory (April 29th, 2014).

Similarly, Harvard professor and early American poet, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, follows Chaucer’s model in his collection of poems, Tales of the Wayside Inn, where a group of fictitious European colonialists meet for some storytelling at what is now a famous inn in Sudbury, Massachusetts. As fate would have it, my maternal grandparents happened to live right down the road from the Wayside Inn in Marlborough and as a child they would take me and my siblings to play in the nearby woods and explore the nearby grist mill where I would search for dinosaurs and dragons with my twin brother and younger sister. So, you can imagine, I’ve had my share of meals and heard my own share of tales at the Wayside Inn—in fact my father’s second marriage held its reception there—so the place has special meaning to me, a sort of gravitas. Having grown up a few towns over in Massachusetts, I always found the inn and surrounding area charming, but the historical and literary influence of the space in which I have lived most my life continues to find new ways of inspiring me, especially as I have recently returned to work and teach in Marlborough and have begun to reconnect once again with the area. This brought my mind back to Longfellow’s tales.

Longfellow writing on the eve of the American Civil War is none other than the author credited with reimagining the story of Paul Revere’s midnight ride, in his “The Landlord’s Tale” also known as “The Midnight Ride of Paul Revere” in which American revolutionary figure, Paul Revere, is the dashing hero who delivers the all-important message, undercutting Samuel Prescott’s successful journey out of the story entirely, and erasing Revere’s capture and partial failure by replacing it with a version of events in which Revere is victorious in his epic quest.

So through the night rode Paul Revere;
And so through the night went his cry of alarm
To every Middlesex village and farm,—
A cry of defiance and not of fear,
A voice in the darkness, a knock at the door,
And a word that shall echo forevermore!
For, borne on the night-wind of the Past,
Through all our history, to the last,
In the hour of darkness and peril and need,
The people will waken and listen to hear
The hurrying hoof-beats of that steed,
And the midnight message of Paul Revere!

(Longfellow, “The Landlord’s Tale: The Midnight Ride of Paul Revere” 199-130).
“Paul Revere’s Ride, April 19, 1775” by Thomas Addis Emmet, 1828-1919, New York Public Library.

Other tales told by European colonials at the Wayside include: “The Student’s Tale” “The Spanish Jew’s Tale” “The Sicilian’s Tale” “The Musician’s Tale” “The Theologian’s Tale” and “The Poet’s Tale”. These titles chime with Chaucer’s titles named for each distinct pilgrim on the road to Canterbury, some of which include “The Knight’s Tale,” “The Miller’s Tale,” “The Wife of Bath’s Tale,” “The Nun’s Priest’s Tale,” and “The Pardoner’s Tale.”

My blog today will end with a brief introduction to Longfellow’s “The Musician’s Tales” which is also called “The Saga of King Olaf” in reference to Old Norse-Icelandic Saga Olafs konungs Tryggvasunar. Structurally, the tale is the longest tale—a sort of epic poem—with subtitled chapters.

i. The Challenge of Thor
ii. King Olaf’s Return
iii. Thora of Rimol
iv. Queen Sigrid the Haughty
v. The Skerry of Shrieks
vi. The Wraith of Odin
vii. Iron-Beard
viii. Gudrun
ix. Thangbrand the Priest
x. Raud the Strong
xi. Bishop Sigurd at Salten Fiord
xii. King Olaf’s Christmas
xiii. The Building of the Long Serpent
xiv. The Crew of the Long Serpent
xv. A Little Bird in the Air
xvi. Queen Thyri and the Angelica Stalks
xvii. King Svend of the Forked Beard
xviii. King Olaf and Earl Sigvald
xix. King Olaf’s War-Horns
xx. Einar Tamberskelver

Illustration for Henry Wadsworth Longfellow’s “The Saga of King Olaf” from Tales of a Wayside Inn. Titled “And his ships went sailing, sailing,” from section II: “King Olaf’s Return.” From The Complete Poetical Works of Henry Wadsworth Longfellow (Boston: Houghton, Mifflin & Company, 1899).

This heavily alludes to Old Norse-Icelandic Heimskringla which Longfellow had access to via Samuel Laings’ modern English translation published in 1844. In doing so, this tale draws directly from Old-Norse Icelandic saga literature and serves to connect early American literature and mythography with early medieval Europe and antiquarian notions of “The Germanic” and “Anglo-Saxon” ethnonationalist identities. The first poem, “The Challenge of Thor” demonstrates how Viking warrior ethics and mythology are interwoven directly into early American literature and mythography. The challenge reads almost as an invocation to the pagan god of Northern medieval Europe in a romantic display of American eurocentrism:

I am the God Thor,
I am the War God,
I am the Thunderer!
Here in my Northland,
My fastness and fortress,
Reign I forever!

Here amid icebergs
Rule I the nations;
This is my hammer,
Miölner the mighty;
Giants and sorcerers
Cannot withstand it!

These are the gauntlets
Wherewith I wield it,
And hurl it afar off;
This is my girdle;
Whenever I brace it,
Strength is redoubled!

The light thou beholdest
Stream through the heavens,
In flashes of crimson,
Is but my red beard
Blown by the night-wind,
Affrighting the nations!

Jove is my brother;
Mine eyes are the lightning;
The wheels of my chariot
Roll in the thunder,
The blows of my hammer
Ring in the earthquake!

Force rules the world still,
Has ruled it, shall rule it;
Meekness is weakness,
Strength is triumphant,
Over the whole earth
Still is it Thor’s-Day!

Thou art a God too,
O Galilean!
And thus single-handed
Unto the combat,
Gauntlet or Gospel,
Here I defy thee!

(Longfellow, “The Musician’s Tale: The Challenge of Thor” 1-42).

The references to hazardous weather and natural disasters, such as earthquakes, lightning and thunder, and allusions to Mjölnir (10) and Thor’s girdle (16), are enveloped in the themes of “Force rules the world still” (31) and “Meekness is weakness” (33) in the poem. Additional references to Thor’s “red beard” (22), his goat-drawn “chariot” (27) and his syncretism with Thor and Zeus is dramatized in the line “Jove is my brother” (25). As Irving does with Wednesday as “Wodensday” (2) in “Rip Van Winkle,” Longfellow too emphasizes how Thursday derives from “Thor’s-Day” (36) and thus highlights the pervasive cultural resonance rooted in the medieval lore sung by the musician in their tale. The challenge ends with a direct conflict between Thor and Christ, the “Galilean” (38). Thor names Christ a “God too” (37) but stresses his own continued cultural influence which Thor frames as an affront to Christianity, juxtaposing “Gauntlet or Gospel” (42) and adamantly opposing Christian virtues by challenging Christ’s ethical superiority. This rhetorical move reminds the reader, and perhaps also many early Americans living in the antebellum United States, that United States’ cultural inheritance was repeatedly upheld as distinctly European, and that eurocentric ethnonationalism would remain a shared legacy in both the “old” and “new” worlds thereby helping to erase and ignore indigenous and non-white perspectives.

Colorized photograph of American poet, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow (1807 – 1882), late 1800s (photo by Stock Montage/Getty Images).

Further discussion of Henry Longfellow’s medievalism in “The Saga of King Olaf” centered on some of the subsequent sections will be featured in a blog later this spring, so check back soon!

Richard Fahey, Ph.D.
Medieval Institute
University of Notre Dame

Works Cited:

Atwood, Margaret. The Handmaid’s Tale. McClelland and Stewart Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 1985.

Boccaccio, Giovanni. The Decameron, trans. by John Payne. The Villon Society, London, 1886.

Chaucer, Geoffrey. The Canterbury Tales. Harvard University, 2023.

Heimskringla, ed. by Finnur Jónsson. Copenhagen, 1911.

Helgisaga Óláfs konungs Haraldssonar, ed. Guðni Jónsson. Reykjavík, 1957.

Irving, Washington. “Rip Van Winkle” in The Sketch Book of Geoffrey Crayon, Gent., 1819.

—. “Legend of Sleepy Hollow.” in The Sketch Book of Geoffrey Crayon, Gent., 1819.

Longfellow, Henry Wadsworth. Tales of the Wayside Inn. Boston: Ticknor and Fields, 1863.


Further Reading:

Calin, William. “What Tales of a Wayside Inn Tells Us about Longfellow and about Chaucer” in Studies in Medievalism XIIFilm and Fiction: Reviewing the Middle Ages, ed. by Tom Shippey and Martin Arnold, 197-214. Boydell & Brewer; D. S. Brewer, 2003.

Lowrie, Robyn. “My American Poetry Review of Henry W. Longfellow’s ‘The Belfry of Bruges.'” My French Quest: Adventures in Literature, French Culture and Language Acquisition, 2016.

O’Donnell, Kerry. “The Handmaid’s Canterbury Knight’s Tale.” Utopian, Dystopian, Fantasy Fiction, 2016.

Sheko, Tania. “What’s in a Tale? The Canterbury Tales and The Handmaid’s Tale.” Red or Dead, 2017.

Trzcinski, Matthew.The Handmaid’s Tale Author Changed the Original Name of the Book.” Showbiz Cheat Sheet, 2021.

Grendel the Vampire?

Contemporary monsters associated with modern Halloween celebrations—such as vampires, werewolves and mummies—borrow heavily from the genre of Gothic Horror which takes shape during the early modern period in the hands of Romantic and Victorian authors.

“Gothic Horror Environment” by Unreal Engine (2021).

Indeed, Gothic Horror, the literary source of many monsters commonly associated today with Halloween, regularly draws inspiration from the medieval period. Authors from Mary Shelley to Edgar Allen Poe capitalize on the haunting way the past is often reimagined in the present as mysterious, unknown and full of terrors. This year’s Halloween special, in celebration of Samhain and All Hallows Eve, considers the characterization of one famous medieval monster sometimes associated with the modern concept of “the vampire” in popular culture.

One of the most well-known monsters from the Middle Ages, Grendel, the terrifying cannibal from Beowulf, is frequently regarded as a medieval vampire in contemporary vampire lore, despite that the Old English poem seems not to have been readily available during the Victorian period. Although, Beowulf was first transcribed in 1786, with an edition later printed in 1815 by Grímur Jónsson Thorkelin who also translated the poem into Latin, its influence remained obscure. Some verses from Beowulf were translated into modern English in 1805, and nine complete translations were produced in the 19th century, including one by William Morris, but it was only after the turn of the 20th century that an abundance of translations became available making Beowulf accessible to public audiences and leading to growing interest in the Old English poem during the period which helps establish Beowulf as central to English literary canons thereafter.

The iconic scene of Count Orlok on the stairs from F. W. Murnau’ film, Nosferatu (1922).

Nevertheless, when Lord Byron, John Polidori, John Stag and Bram Stoker were contributing to the development of tropes and stereotypes that inform modern representations of vampires, they self-consciously and explicitly looked to the past “dark ages” with a macabre, antiquarian eye. Often, these authors will cite unspecified ancient lore and legend in an attempt to ground their vampire literature in a mythologically (if not historically) authenticated past in which monsters and magic are possible. These possibilities, then, extend into the present as gothic monsters reach from the deep recesses of time into modern times so that they may haunt the living. Vampires like many gothic monsters are generally understood as an anachronism, able to exist now only because they existed then, thereby suspending modern sensibilities and skepticisms. Indeed, the longstanding affiliation between medieval corpses and modern vampires is mobilized in a recent blog centered on vampirism, succubi and women’s monstrosity.

Each of these Victorian authors reach to the medieval period in order to craft their modern undead monsters, sometimes even looking toward historical figures, such as Vlad III of Wallachia (better known as Vlad “the Impaler”) as an inspiration for Bram Stoker’s Dracula. Of course, it seems that none would have borrowed directly from the Old English poem.

So why is Grendel considered a vampire? Is there any textual evidence to support this claim?

“Grendel” by KaRzA-76 (2005).

While Grendel’s monstrosity remains mysterious, and some might see little resemblance between the medieval monster and Victorian vampires, there is one passage centered on Grendel’s cannibalism, which serves as a major source for Grendel’s association with vampirism. The section reads as follows:

Geseah he in recede    rinca manige,
swefan sibbegedriht    samod ætgædere,
magorinca heap.    Þa his mod ahlog;
mynte þæt he gedælde,    ærþon dæg cwome,
atol aglæca,    anra gehwylces
lif wið lice,    þa him alumpen wæs
wistfylle wen.    Ne wæs þæt wyrd þa gen
þæt he ma moste    manna cynnes
ðicgean ofer þa niht.    Þryðswyð beheold
mæg Higelaces,    hu se manscaða
under færgripum    gefaran wolde.
Ne þæt se aglæca    yldan þohte,
ac he gefeng hraðe    forman siðe
slæpendne rinc,    slat unwearnum,
bat banlocan,    blod edrum dranc,
synsnædum swealh;    sona hæfde
unlyfigendes    eal gefeormod,
fet ond folma.

“He [Grendel] saw in the hall many warriors, the troop of kinsfolk slept, gathered together, a heap of kindred warriors. Then his mind laughed, because he, the terrible, fearsome marauder, intended to rend life from the body of every one of them before day came, when the expectation of gluttony came over him. It was nevermore his fate that he might eat more of mankind over the night. The very mighty kinsman of Hygelac beheld how the criminal destroyer would fare with its sudden grips. The fearsome marauder did not think to delay, but he quickly seized a sleeping man the first time, tore ravenously, bit his bone-locker, drank the blood from his veins, swallowed the sinful morsel; soon he had finished off all of him, unliving, feet and hands” (728-745).

Most often, emphasis is placed on Grendel’s cannibalism and specifically his consumption of flesh mentioned in the passage. Few modern adaptations of Beowulf—from Michael Crichton’s Eater of the Dead (1976) to John Tiernan’s The 13th Warrior (1999) based on Crichton’s adaptation to Sturla Gunnarsson’s Beowulf & Grendel (2005), Robert Zemeckis’ Beowulf (2007), or even Cartoon Network’s adaptation of the poem in Adventure Time’s “The Wild Hunt” (2018)—depict Grendel as especially fond of blod edrum drincan “drinking blood from veins” (742), despite that the poem describes this vampiric act in gory detail.

“Gangrel” by Ypslon (2019).

Although most Beowulf adaptations focus more attention on flesh-eating than on blood-drinking, parallels between vampires and Grendel have not gone unnoticed, and categorizations of vampire-types sometimes include a Grendelish category, as demonstrated by the ferocious and bestial Gangrel, known for being especially close the “the Beast” within, their association with medieval Scandinavia and their ravenous consumption of blood in the popular roleplaying game, Vampire: The Masquerade. Moreover, Cain’s association with vampirism often mirrors his role as progenitor of the Grendelkin and all monsterkind in Beowulf.

Grendel may not be a proper vampire in the technical, stereotypical, modern understanding of the term. Moreover, Grendel’s characterization in Beowulf apparently did not affect vampire stereotypes developed in the early modern period before knowledge of the Old English poem became mainstream. Nevertheless, the graphic image of the monster haunting at night, coming from the darkness, perhaps shapeshifting from a shadow to human form, and most importantly, sucking the blood from the veins of his victim, marks Grendel’s characterization as eerily close in certain aspects to modern vampires, who share his love of darkness, often possess shapeshifting abilities and likewise glut themselves on human blood.

Richard Fahey, Ph.D.
Medieval Institute
University of Notre Dame