Times Higher Education

Thanks to Peter J. Smith, reader in Renaissance literature, Nottingham Trent University! Here he writes in Times Higher Education about Grendel’s Mother: The Saga of the Wyrd-Wife. “This retelling of the Anglo-Saxon epic by one of the period’s most renowned scholars is gloomy and powerful in equal measure. Morrison names the poem’s anonymous character (Brimhild) and, in so doing, tragically personalises the victim of the poem’s patriarchal violence. The novel’s alliterative style constantly enacts the signature of its source: ‘loathsome love-making, putrid penetration, corrupt copulation’. Put this on the syllabus next time you teach Beowulf.”
~Times Higher Education, May 12, 2016