Beowulf the Scourge of Hearing Loss?

Hearing loss and sound sensitivity

During education I had girlfriends, who had fathers, who had misgivings about me. Well, not just me, any lad who spent time with their daughters – which I now fully understand. However Margaret’s father, the classics master at the local public school, liked me not for of the purity of my interest but because I enjoyed reading stuff like Greek mythology and Norse sagas.

He introduced me to the epic Anglo-Saxon poem, Beowulf and what a slog it was to get through. One of the ‘monsters’ Beowulf fights is Grendal who popped round to the local beer hall when things got to noisy and ripped the merrymakers apart. Resentment and jealousy have been offered as underlying reasons, but the excessive noise hurt Grendal’s ears, perhaps in this epic we have the first mention of hearing impairment.

Hearing loss can bring periods of hyper-sensitivity to certain tones and pitches, which is cruel when speech becomes inaudible. When Sue went through that stage of hearing loss we avoided busy places because of the dreadful affects the sounds had on Sue. Alarms on cars, most music, the sounds of supermarkets and similar noises could almost knock her over – at home we kept things quiet. It was then when I began alerting Sue to emergency sirens before they reached her. The duration of that sensitive stage varies and should only be commented on by a professional, don’t put off getting advice.

Back to that little tinker, Grendal; I haven’t seen the film but did watch a clip of Beowulf taking care of Grendal, and once again felt ‘the monster’ had been misjudged. It seems that Anglo-Saxons didn’t recognise anti-social behaviour or that someone – admittedly very different, if the description is believed – could have a legitimate medical reason for wanting noise abatement introduced.