We Ve Created A Monster: The Strange Case Of Grendel's Mother

Women in the Anglo-Saxon society have be viewed as having a very derogatory status, and although the Anglo-Saxon society did not necessarily have certain expectations of women ‘set-in-stone’, what they did have was a precise terminology for the words ‘man’ and ‘woman’.
According to Carla Nayland in her article, Role of women in historical fiction set in Anglo-Saxon English, the old English word ‘man’ meant ‘human, person’ and was no way related to a sex-specific gender. Nayland writes that a male was described as ‘wapman’ meaning weapon person, and a female as ‘wifman’ meaning weaving person. This theory suggests that the normal social roles required of men and women were obvious, with the assumption that men were expected to fight and women
Wendy Hennequin titled, We’ve Created a Monster: The Strange Case of Grendel’s Mother, we are presented with evidence of Grendel’s character outline which consists of being “…a noble and brave opponent and even as a somewhat sympathetic character” (Hennequin, 3). *Throughout the poem Beowulf, Grendel’s character has been constructed as Beowulf’s antagonist, but does not “depict her as a monster or even a villain in the modern sense of the word” (Hennequin, 3). Grendel’s mother had no choice but to be vicious because that was the only way to receive respect from a man in an age where most women were raped, beaten, or traded for land. She cares about her son, which is naturally expected from any mother, and because to her knowledge, she was in fact a great mother to her son, undoubtedly because she didn’t know any differently. Simply because Grendel’s mother doesn’t meet the required ‘expectations’ and criteria of a typical old English women, and sine she doesn’t behave and present herself like Wealtheow, Hygd, or Hildeburh, she’s referred to as a monstrous figure. With this being said, Grendel’s mother’s character has the intentions of being interpreted as a monster with merely no