EPISTEMIC VIOLENCE LEADING TO INSIDIOUS TRAUMA AS A RESULT OF THE DISCURSIVE SHIFTS IN BEOWULF

Focusing on Beowulf’s presence in Heorot in the first part of the text, this essay aims to read the Old English epic Beowulf as an account of discursive shifts that are objectified in Heorot. The earliest discourse represented by Grendel and his Mother is closer to the matrilinear epistemologies; the second represented by Hrothgar and Beowulf belongs to a more organised form of early feudalism, and the third discourse represented by the Christian narrator is acting out a more recent epistemology that tries to integrate the previous discourses into itself by reformulating them. In the transition from the first to the second, and then to the third discourses we see what Spivak terms epistemic violence. As this violence is transgenerational, it has also led to insidious trauma that is infiltrated into the psyche of the individuals in the earliest epistemology despite the lack of visible violence. This essay claims that what Grendel does in Heorot is the return of the collective repressed of second oppressive discourse. It is argued that when the others perform a wholesale attack on Grendel, this process also reveals the oppositional energy between the three discourses. The narrator in the text is Christian and comes from a different epistemological background which is logocentric, patriarchal, and feudal (in a more enhanced form than the second discourse). What we hear from the narrator clashes with what the text reveals through its ruptures. This essay also aims to look at the ruptures in the text by taking Heorot as a space of interface between clashing discursive practices.