Distinctly different from its counterparts among the digressions in Beowulf, the Finnsburg episode focuses on the experience and trauma of a single woman: Hildeburh. Her peace-weaving marriage into the Frisian court fails spectacularly, and the result is a proliferation of death and destruction, including the loss of both her brother and son.
This essay utilizes Actor-Network theory to explore the ways in which the Finnsburg digression exposes human community-building impulses as fundamentally flawed and particularly challenging for women. The episode lays bare the ways in which human communities in Beowulf fail by foregrounding the relationship between human beings and non-human entities that are part of the wider collectivity in which humans are enmeshed.
Rather, her suffering demonstrates the interconnectedness that is both the condition of humans in the poem and their tragedy. Beowulf — both the poem and its eponymous hero — is inextricable from the monsters that structure its plot. The young Beowulf fights the mearcstapa border-stepper Grendel in the hall at Heorot; after the creature's mother attacks in an uncomfortably human scene of revenge, he travels to her watery abode.
There, Beowulf kills Grendel's mother with a sword made by giants and returns with Grendel's head to prove his victory. Later, when he is an old man, Beowulf will fight one more monster — a dragon — and that fight ends his life. Indeed, for all that scholarly readings of the poem have pushed back against this perception, Beowulf is inextricably identified with the monsters that form the core of its heroic action.
One of the most moving of these digressions occurs between Beowulf's initial fight with Grendel and the creature's mother's attack. Hildeburh, a queen who has married outside of her own kin group in order to secure peace between Frisians and Healf-Denes, witnesses the breakdown of the peace that her marriage was supposed to ensure. Hildeburh, despite her prominence in the conflict between the Healf-Denes and the Frisians, takes her only real actions when she stands before the pyre.
