Meet a Medievalist Maker: Laura Varnam
“Meet a Medievalist Maker” is an ongoing series of blog posts introducing our members and the work they are doing. Each post is organized around our Four P’s: a project they are working on (or have completed but want to highlight); their process: medium, etc; a peek at their work: images or excerpt; and a prompt: instructions for a brief exercise they share to allow readers to experience/explore their process. Would you like to write a post introducing yourself and your work? Send us an email!
Hwæt everyone! This is Laura Varnam, poet, medievalist and tutor at University College, Oxford (‘Univ’). As a poet, I’m currently working on two projects: the first is a poetry collection inspired by the women of the Old English epic Beowulf (and hwæt is the first word of Beowulf, it’s a call to attention– so listen up!). And the second is a creative-critical monograph on the fifteenth-century mystic Margery Kempe that uses my own poetry as part of my critical reflections on encountering Kempe’s Book in the twenty-first century.
Process
My making is very much tied up with my teaching practice as well as my research interests. I’ve always been a fan of using modern adaptations and translations as part of my teaching of Old and Middle English literature at Univ, both because it shows students how those texts are still active and dynamic in the modern world, and relevant to our present concerns, but also because using adaptations gives students themselves a ‘way in’ by making the texts feel less monolithic and fixed. Medieval authors such as Chaucer and the Beowulf-poet are already retelling older materials, of course, and giving the stories their own ‘spin’. Encouraging students to do creative responses as part of own work on medieval texts helps them to find (and own!) their individual readings and also to think more creatively and playfully about how they might approach their essays. The more we think about academic writing as ‘creative’, the more interesting– and enjoyable!– it becomes!
Project
The project that I’m currently working on is a collection of poetry inspired by the silenced, marginalised, and frequently nameless women of the Old English epic Beowulf. (And you can read about how this project arose from my teaching in my creative-critical essay in postmedieval).
My sequence of poems inspired by Grendel’s Mother was published in Primers Volume Seven (Nine Arches Press, 2024) and in these poems I give voice to Beowulf’s second antagonist, a woman (I refuse to say ‘monster’!) who is made troublesome by the original poet. In my Primers sequence I frame these poems using the Old English preposition wiþ, a word with a variety of meanings including ‘against, opposite, towards, in exchange for, in comparison with’ and this word represents the deliberately lively relationship that my poems have with the original narrative. My poems speak back to, reverse, unravel, disrupt and shake up the original Beowulf story, by placing the experiences and perspectives of its female characters front and centre.
This can be seen in my rewriting of the opening of the poem, which famously begins: Hwæt!We have heard of the Spear-Danes in days gone by, of the glory of the kings of that people, how their noblemen performed courageous deeds!
My version raises an eyebrow at the original poem and invites readers to encounter a different Beowulf. A female-centred story that reimagines the monster-slaying according to a different timeline and a different perspective, foregrounding emotional responses and according characters such as Grendel’s Mother the dignity and respect that they are often denied by the masculine original.
In her essay ‘When We Dead Awaken: Writing as Re-Vision,’ the American feminist and poet Adrienne Rich argued that:
‘re-vision– the act of looking back, of seeing with fresh eyes, of entering an old text from a new critical direction– is for women more than a chapter in cultural history: it is an act of survival. Until we can understand the assumptions in which we are drenched we cannot know ourselves. And this drive to self-knowledge, for woman, is more than a search for identity: it is part of her refusal of the self-destructiveness of a male-dominated society.’
Rich’s emphasis here on rewriting as a feminist act of survival and resistance is a crucial rationale for my collection.
Peek
This is a poem from my Grendel’s Mother sequence in which I imagine Grendel’s conception. The original poem does not tell us who Grendel’s father is and given Grendel’s Mother’s marginal status, living in her mere on the supposed edges of the known and inhabited lands of men, I wanted to speculate on how she might have become pregnant with Grendel. The alliteration and compounding in the poem is a deliberate echo of the Old English poetic style and my fellow GuMM founding member Eleanor Baker produced a wonderful image inspired by my poem that depicts Grendel’s Mother as a mermaid (or mere-maid) curled around her pearl.
Prompt
If you’d like to have a go at writing poetry inspired by medieval texts (or modern texts!) here are some ideas!
You could recast the opening of your text, as I did in my hwæt poem above, to establish a different approach to the story.
You could give voice to a voiceless character or retell an episode from their perspective. In another of my Grendel’s Mother poems, called ‘Aftermath I: Blood in the Mere’ (which you can read on the Nine Arches Press blog) I have written about Grendel’s death from his Mother’s perspective. The original poet describes in rather gory detail how Grendel bleeds out into the waters of the mere and so I wondered how his Mother might feel about her home being polluted by the blood of her son.
Exploring the emotions of a scene is a real good way of driving a retelling. Is your character angry at this moment or afraid? Full of grief or joy? Why do they feel compelled to speak at this particular moment– and who do they really want to be speaking to?
You could even give voice to an object (as we see in the Old English riddles from the Exeter Book) or to a landscape. How might the story appear different from a non-human perspective?
The most important thing is to think about the story from your point of view- make it your own!
‘Salt-in-the-Wound’ by Eleanor Baker
Reading Recommendations
Adrienne Rich, 'When We Dead Awaken: Writing as Re-Vision', College English 34.1 (1972), pp.18-30.
Laura Varnam, ‘Poems for the Women of Beowulf: A ‘Contemporary Medieval’ Project,’ postmedieval 13 (2022), 105-21.
