Homeland insecurity: Biopolitics and sovereign violence in Beowulf

This article argues that the figure of Grendel in the heroic poem Beowulf can be read through theories of biopolitics in order to understand the concept of sovereignty and 'ancestral homelands' as it has been presented in the poem. I argue that we must regard the poem as presenting a particular biopolitics of the homeland and sovereign power, specifically in how Grendel and his kin are represented as a kind of 'proto'-Indigenous people that unsettle the Danes' territorial and political stability. In this way, Grendel and his mother trouble the kingship of Hrothgar and the Danish territorial sovereignty, portrayed as violent and as both inside and outside of the political order. I conclude by examining the term e thorn el ['ancestral homeland'] which crystallizes in a single linguistic and orthographic unit the relationship between kin/genealogy and territory/property.