Laying Down My Arms - On Failing to Write Femdom Beowulf

Hopefully if you're reading the Voss Papers you already know I'm a writer of intelligent femdom with strong characters and brutal orgasm denial. Hopefully you also know I just published my most audacious book yet, a collection of short stories called Anna Voss Writes The Classics. 

It's a fantastic exploration of femdom in a range of different authors’ literary styles through history from the Canterbury Tales to 1940s Noir… But there's no Beowulf: it was just too hard! 

The Thesis 

Of course I've played with other author’s styles before: The Ruritanian Pretender is pure Ruritanian Romance in the (dommed-up!) tradition of Anthony Hope; On Chestnut Tree Lane is dystopian femdom by way of George Orwell, and (spoilers!) one of the novels I’m working on right now is… well. 

Let’s just say I hope everyone likes Femdom Cold War Espionage... 

But Anna Voss Writes The Classics is different because of its key argument: femdom isn’t new. It's not new today, and it wasn't new even in eras that we think we know - because we know them mostly through the literature they left us, or the TV adaptations they inspired, or the less-good-than-the-TV-adaptations feature films they caused... But even though none of that does much to show dominant women, it doesn’t mean femdom wasn’t there. It’s just nobody wrote it down. 

So I did. From Geoffrey Chaucer (born about 1343) through to Raymond Chandler (died in 1959), I took on the narrative style and voices of great authors and tried to show how Literary Femdom might have looked if they’d written it. 

I honestly think this is important. I mean, I think it’s hot too - it’s femdom, of course it’s hot! But particularly in an era when it can seem like everyone and their dog is keen to repurpose the past to fit whatever political point they’re trying to make in the moment, let’s be very clear: our view of the past is influenced entirely by the books we read, the films we watch, and the spin that's put into them by the authors. 

If female dominance - and kink in general - is missing from our typical view of the past, that's because it has been omitted from the sources that shape that view. So I sat down to fix it: I rewrote all of the English literary canon. 

…All?

Well… no. Not quite all. 

The Hero

English Literature has an Ur-hero, a Saxon Heroic epic, a work of literature so significant that J.R.R. Tolkien - the man who essentially invented the modern fantasy genre - took on the translation as a side project alongside writing The Silmarillion. That's the calibre of author you're meant to be before you try and mess with this hero. 

That Hero is Beowulf. 

He's a figure who looms so large in English literature that I'd bet most people reading it still have a reasonable idea how to pronounce his name, at least if you're from anywhere that regularly speaks any form of modern British or American English. 

If you don't think it's that simple to read, I get your point... but compare it to other names from that era: Ælfthryth, Byrhtnoth, or Ecgberht - they're weirder, right? 

They're weirder because we stopped saying them. But Beowulf kept going, not as a common name, but at least as something you might still hear once or twice, even if you never study Saxon literature. 

Frankly, that's a better deal than most superheroes get: bear in mind, Old English seems to have died (a little slowly) in the wake of the Norman Conquest in 1066, and our earliest manuscript of Beowulf dates from somewhere around 975. By contrast, Superman didn't show up until 1938, Batman in 1939, and Spiderman waited until 1962.

Or, to express it another way - have you ever sat down to read Shakespeare and thought “Hang on, what?” 

Shakespeare sounds a bit off to our ears, yes - but what he's writing in is still modern English: he was only writing 425 years ago. Beowulf was written - once people finally thought to write it instead of just reciting it - about 1,050 years ago.

It's not Modern English (not even Shakespeare's Early Modern English), it's not Middle English: it's Old English, a part of the language so old and so ancient we don't even notice that it's there any more because it is (in a polished, evolved form) so built into everything, we stopped noticing it, like the sound of a neighbour's hoover that you only notice when it stops. 

It's mostly short words. Like ‘The wife sat and her man knelt: he licked her deep,’ for example - perfectly intelligible, and even kind of hot, in a sparse way. 

But the original, something like “Sæt wīf and hire mann cnēowlode: hē liccode hīe dēope” is a nightmare (though I'd like to meet a man who could get his tongue around words like cnēowlode). 

The spellings have evolved a lot, thank goodness, but the roots are there still. 

So, obviously, I figured if I’m rewriting English literature as femdom, let’s start there, right at the beginning: two and a half times further back in linguistic history from Shakespeare than Shakespeare is from us. How hard could it be?

Well, put it this way: I'm a pretty great author when it comes to femdom. But I am definitely not at Tolkien's level. 

The Problem 

Writing it now, it’s actually humiliating how hubristic my idea of creating ‘Beowulf but femdom’ actually sounds, but I swear it made kind of a sense at the time (I was, admittedly, in a luxuriously hot bath, and the bottle of wine might have been empty, and the candles were burning out, and I’d kind of lost myself in a fantasy for a while... Beowulf is, after all, the first great masculine hero of English: bare-chested, brawny, slaughtering monsters by hand. What could be more delicious than breaking him to my own preferred register, with the kennings twisted into something obscene, and the epic reimagined as femdom?)

Well… staying sane, for a start. Once I dried off and came at the issue with a clear head, I ran into problems very, very fast.

Firstly, I never actually studied Old English, or Anglo-Saxon, or whatever it is you call it when you can actually read lines like “Her Ælle gefeaht wiþ Wealum neh Mearcredesburnanstaðe” and actually know what it’s saying. I highly doubt it’s a reference to a Mercedes-Benz with a broken wheel but at first glance… 

So the first problem was that, basically, I had no idea what I was doing.

The second problem was that the Anglo Saxons appear to have been allergic to nouns, at least when they were writing poetry. Seriously, their literature is like a game of Articulate gone mad. For “the sea”, for example, (and despite having the word “sǣ”, meaning “sea”!) their writing seems to have preferred to use a Kenning, a little descriptive riddle, like “Whale-road”. 

It’s very poetic, and I imagine it passed the time while they waited for the BBC to be invented... But if you want to say “I thought of this idea in the bath” it’s much easier to say bath than “in the water-prison”, or whatever they might’ve used.

(In fairness, in inventing that example, I just realised that I still know people who call a sink a “wash-basin”. Maybe we’re not as far apart as we think!) 

Actually, “water-prison” sort of appeals to me, but in general I've learned kennings are a terrible format for writing erotica in; they are pretty well inherently unsexy. 

This did not stop me trying (at least initially), but it probably should have. 

The Plan

You might think the hard bit would be turning Beowulf (plot synopsis: “there's a monster called Grendel killing everyone. This hero Beowulf shows up, says ‘hold my mead’, rips Grendel's arm off, kills its mum, and then becomes king, gets old, and does a full-on Iron Man, taking out a dragon in a last burst of glorious self-sacrifice”) into the kind of thing I write - all breathless male submission and orgasm denial and chastity and begging at the feet of strong women. 

But actually that bit was the part I found easy, possibly because I think quite a lot about that sort of thing… 

I was going to make Grendel’s mother into a sort of cougar: a rapacious, mature, dominant woman who was very, very willing to take what she pleased - and what she pleased, I thought, would be the sobs and pleas for orgasm of Beowulf. 

He’d imagined himself a great man, he’d stormed into her house, he’d abused poor Grendel rotten: Grendel’s mum was going to have her revenge.

Basically, I was planning to:

a) give her a name, and

b) invert the “Mum confronts bully” porn trope so that the bully (Beowulf; already tastelessly displaying Grendel's arm as a trophy of his conquest) was going to be the one who got broken - because Grendel’s mother was going to edge him over and over again. 

Eventually Beowulf would admit she had stronger arms than him, beg to be allowed to come, and Grendel's mum would… well, I never quite got that far, actually; my plans kept getting distracted by the idea of the edging scene, with all Heorot watching him whimper and beg, pleading with her for release... 

I still think that was a good idea, actually. I really do. 

But I also know now that I cannot possibly make it work, both because I cannot write poetry in the Old English style, and also because I cannot write kennings about body parts without laughing so much that all possible eroticism has fled the room. 

So in the unlikely event anyone else wants to take the job on, I would say, firstly, “Survive thou safely, adventure so glorious” and, secondly, here is the one bit of this idea that I managed to come up with, in case it helps you in your oddly specific quest. 

I am truly ashamed to show it - it is far from my best work - but I still believe in the core thesis: Grendel’s mother would make an excellent if monstrous dominatrix, and I regret I can't even give her a cute little short story for Halloween or something. And also - she deserves a name of her own, damn it. 

The Attempt 

Here, then, in case it helps anyone else conquer it - the fragment that survives of Anna Voss’s Femdom Beowulf. 

Brave, bare-chested    bold she stepped

 Powerful pushes     pinned him to that dream-bench

 Wide-wakers watching  as weakly he yielded

 That hero hardened    helpless and held.

 Savage her sheath-place  showed before him

 Granite-hearted she    growled her demand.

 Grimly he gave it,  ground with his face-hill

 Heart-hammer beating  Haft standing strong

 Softly she stroked    Slick-fingered, cruel

 Lost lightning leapt    Lanced at that seed-pipe…

...Once I’d written “seed-pipe,” it was pretty much over. 

The Failure 

I've written sci-fi implants that block a man’s orgasm, pre-cum collection quotas in a purity-obsessed hellstate, heartfelt stories exploring the many shades of submission… But even I have limits. 

It turns out one of those is inventing Anglo-Saxon kennings for “penis” when “cock” is right there waiting for me to use it… 

“Lost lightning leapt, lanced at that seed-pipe” as a euphemism for “he whimpered as he felt the come surging up inside him” was the point I had to give in.

Until then, I’d told myself I could perhaps get the hang of Old English poetry. I was wrong. 

Saxon, I swore at: style served my words poorly. Once I wrote “seed-pipe,” kennings wrestled - and won. 

The Lesson 

But here’s the twist: losing was the best thing that could have happened. It taught me what this project really was. I wasn’t here to conquer the canon on its own terms. I didn’t need to out-wrestle Beowulf himself. I just had to show that dominant women have always been with us - and so, thank goodness, have good, submissive boys.

I didn’t have to rewrite everything, just… show how femdom could have been written, in a few eras and styles.

And that’s what Writes The Classics became.

Each piece in the collection is (in a purely metaphorical way!) me, kneeling in homage to a different pillar of English Literature: Chaucer, Austen, Shakespeare, and others besides. But they kneel back too: I hope you'll take the time to read Anna Voss Writes The Classics and find out how.

But Beowulf? I'll let him keep control of his seed-pipe. 

At least until next time.