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AnonymousJudith
Fiction | Poem | Adult | Published in 975A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Symbols & Motifs
The Wolf and the Raven
Judith is a narrated poem, although the poem reveals its frame only infrequently. One such moment occurs at the opening of Part 4, when at dawn the Israelites, inspired by Judith and now “keen for the conflict” (Line 218), prepare for their surprise attack. The speaker observes in the woods along the periphery of what will soon be the bloody field of battle a “lank wolf” and a “wan raven” (211). The speaker notes the creatures “listened in joy” to the soldiers sharpening their weapons.
The wolf and the raven are symbols that foreshadow the massive slaughter that will be recounted in Part 5. Both creatures feed on carcasses. The raven is a fierce scavenger. Although it feeds on carrion, it will not actually attack. Rather, it relies on the kill instincts of the wolf. Once the wolf rips open a carcass, the raven secures its share of the slaughtered animal. That symbiotic relationship suggests what is about to unfold will be death on a dramatic scale. Both starving creatures—the wolf is thin, the raven weak—will be more than sated with the carcasses about to be piled up. Thus, the speaker suggests, even God’s meanest creatures sense that God’s Chosen, the Israelites, “the gallant people” (Line 213) will soon gift these carrion creatures with a “feast of the fated” (Line 214), that is, the bodies of doomed Assyrians.
Beheading
In Part 3 when Judith returns to Bethulia to galvanize the Israelites, she dramatically pulls from her sack “the gory face / On the hated head of the heathen warrior, / Holofernes” (Lines 183-85). Because biblical scholars regard Holofernes as a fictional construct rather than a historical figure, the method selected by the poem’s original author for the general’s death taps into a powerful Judeo-Christian tradition, most familiar in David’s beheading of the giant Goliath and Salome’s beheading of John the Baptist.
First, beheading symbolizes an absolute death and thus total victory. Decapitation is not a survivable wounding. Moreover, the disarticulated corpse and the bloody head in the sack violate the sanctity and gravity of death itself. The general is dishonored, denied the dignity of death on the battlefield. Instead, he is drunk and anticipating raping the virgin Judith, who dispatches him.
Inevitably, however, the severing of Holofernes’s head at the moment he was to deflower what he assumes is a helpless virgin symbolizes his emasculation. The virgin Judith, emerging now as a powerful warrior, destroys this corrupt male authority. In so deliberately slicing off Holofernes’s head (she needs two cuts), Judith ritualistically and symbolically destroys his very manhood.
Alcohol
The first two parts of Judith can read like a morality play cautioning against the careless indulgence of hard alcohol. The Assyrian army, at the feast that Holofernes commands, drinks to excess, downing “bowls large and deep” as well as “beakers and flagons” brought “full to the feasters” (Lines 18-20). They are not celebrating some great victory; rather, they are mindlessly drinking to drink: “[M]addened by mead-drink” (Line 27) and “[d]renched with drink” (Line 30), they carouse carelessly and loudly. Holofernes himself, far from being an exemplum of restraint and dignity befitting his general’s rank, imbibes to the point that he passes out and lays himself open for Judith’s attack.
In the poem, then, alcohol symbolizes gross moral failure. An element of the lore of the invading Viking armies was their reputation for drunkenness. Their brutal battlefield tactics and their willingness to ransack towns stemmed, in the minds of the Christian Anglo-Saxon communities along England’s vulnerable coast, from their drunkenness. Drawing on the wisdom books of the Old Testament with their prohibitions against drunkenness, the author of Judith uses the Assyrians’ weakness for strong drink to symbolize God’s disfavor with them and, in turn, their inevitable defeat. Under the influence of strong drink, the Assyrians, and the Vikings for that matter, become animals, reckless and vulnerable. For that, they are doomed, a message that would surely give courage to the poem’s contemporary readers.
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