The study of hospitality has been carried out in Beowulf. While Heffernan (2014) and Michelet (2015) either inadvertently or advertently incorporated Derridean hospitality into their discussion, they have not adequately illuminated the profound connotation of the violence juxtaposed with hospitality due to their rough interpretation of violence itself. Their studies also register a tendency to ignore the nexus between main narrative and digressions, which is of decisive significance for comprehending the narrative cohesion and ethical correlation between violence and hospitality in this poem.
This paper explores the juxtaposition of hospitality and violence in Beowulf through conducting a closer inquiry into ethical norms in Anglo-Saxon England as represented in Beowulf and beyond, specifying violence as vengeance, which plays a pivotal role both in the ethical paradigms and haunts through the narrative of the epic. Given the preeminent fact that all hospitality occurs between people from disparate nations and monsters from an allegorical foreign land, this paper delineates hospitality as sovereignty hospitality. Meanwhile, this study investigates main narrative and its digressions with attention to their interplays across integrated narrative layers to unveil how Beowulf unfolds the coalition between hospitality and vengeance and demonstrates disparate yet complimentary aspects of this coalition within such an artfully designed interplay.
Against the unsettling social milieu of England following the decline of Roman rule and preceding Norman conquest, the pronounced preoccupation with the question of the foreigner in Beowulf exhibits a rather pessimistic outlook, revealing the difficulty of practicing hospitality and the aporia embedded within the concept of “hospitality”. This paper argues that Beowulf deepens the convergence between hospitality and vengeance incrementally in its main narrative and digressions, which reaches a climax in Beowulf’s battle with Grendel’s mother where harmonious hospitality and bloody vengeance become inextricably intertwined and even identical in terms of rhetoric, forms and purposes. This overt intermingling of hospitality and vengeance and the analogous transgressions of ethic norms among humans and monsters transcend the prevailing monologic discourse of myth and epic. In this vein, Beowulf offers a fresh reevaluation of the dominant ethical values and questions the symbolic demarcation between humans and monsters.
