While Grendel’s feud seemed well enough explained as just being part of his monstrous nature, the episode with Grendel’s mother always demands more explanation and raises more questions. It is portrayed less as an outcome of monstrosity and more in the terms of a feud. The mother is an “avenger” (1256), who remembers “her misery” (1258), and must take a “sorrowful journey” to “avenge her son’s death” (1278). These words might describe a less passive Hildeburh, a Hildeburh who decided not to weep at Finnsburg but instead to go to Hengest herself and ask for him to avenge her son against the other Jutes.
Germanic heroines of legend give us examples of the role of women in vengeance. In the story of the Volsungs, Signy puts avenging the death of her father and brothers above her own children, and eggs on her surviving brother to complete the vengeance. A generation later, Gudrun forces her sons to swear to kill her daughter’s murderer. In two tales from Iceland, another Gudrun goads her husband to kill a man who slighted her, and a mother scolds her son Bardi for not avenging his brother’s death. Women frequently vented their grief by demanding vengeance, even when the men considered that it was better to maintain a truce. Is Grendel’s mother justified in taking vengeance herself, when she has no one to send?
On the other side, the monsters are already outlaws. They may operate in the spirit of revenge, but they are not taking legal vengeance. A victim’s family could demand a life for a life, although by Christian times, the payment of blood-money was legally preferred. But Grendel had already demonstrated that he himself never played by these rules; he took life after life, and made no recompense.
The rules of the blood feud recognized that all the players were of equal moral stature, and that every man should be held accountable for his actions. Grendel was only partly human and refused to be held accountable, dying the undignified death of a wounded animal. Is it legally permissible for his mother to demand payment for his death?
To the audience of Beowulf, the two possibilities were probably both present. On the one hand, Grendel’s mother is grieving and has just come from the scene of her son’s death. The poem comments that there was no good exchange that “both sides” had to bargain with “the lives of friends” (1305-6). This seems to make a moral equation between the losses.
On the other hand, Grendel and his mother are outlaws, monsters, cursed by God, and half-bestial. The heart can allow that she would desire revenge, but the law cannot. Grendel’s death was just punishment, and no one allowed that the family of a man hung for murder or theft was due vengeance against the king. Grendel’s mother has merely continued the feud in the lowest sense—kill and kill alike—and it will only be settled with her own death, unless more relatives come forward.