Spatial Violence of the “Halls” in Old English and Old Norse Poetry

In the recent years, the scholarship of Urban Space has primarily focussed on the postmodernist discourse, but this essay, by connecting the Anglo-Saxon and Old Norse culture, takes up the subject of early mediaeval literature and the narrative of violence in urban spatial discourse. A leitmotif that keeps on figuring in Old English and Old Norse poetry is that of the ‘hall’ - a transcultural conjunctive space for transaction or exchange of both material goods such as fighting men, treasure and the like, and the non-material items such as martial honour, power, comradeship and the like. Though such a space easily seems to be a dispositif heterotopia, this essay explores how its (non-crisis) heterotopic motif, with the true manifestation of the ‘hetero’- an encapsulation of the ‘diversity of an emplacement of a cityscape’, is ruptured by an unmasking of violence that is ironically disrupting this trans-culturalism yet uniting the heteroglossic discourses by dominating this space. The space of Gunnarr and Högni’s hall and Heorot are both equally stained with the blood of the unjustly slaughtered victims: the murder of Gunnarr and Högni by Atli in the former case, and the murder Hrothgar’s men by Grendel’s mother in the latter case. Murder and bloodlust, the polarised ‘evil’ or ‘othered’ character(s) not only unite the literary space of these two tales but also unite the cultural space of the Danes and the Anglo-Saxons, through the metaphor of the ‘hall’. This is reinforced by the fact that the disruptive force of revenge in both cases takes place ‘outside’ the halls, ‘the area of unity’: in the former case, Guðrún does not burn Atli in the hall but kills him outside and buries him, and in the latter case, in the ‘den’ where Beowulf ventures to battle and kill the monster. Therefore, this paper attempts to explore how the othered discourse of violence actually assumes the central role and problematizes the narrative of dispositif heterotopia through the spatial metaphor of ‘hall’, a miniature cityscape, by acting as a both uniting and disrupting force.