Judith

Contemporary pop culture has embraced superheroes and other larger-than-life figures, male and female, who are uncomplicated by nuance and untroubled by motivation. They are strong and they are good. It is tempting to simplify Judith itself into some kind of Medieval comic book, with Judith, the warrior-virgin wildly underestimated by the forces of darkness who, with superhero cunning, triumphantly brandishes a talismanic “keen-edged sword” (Line 107), decapitates her formidable enemy, and then leads her downtrodden people to an improbable victory in an apocalyptic and very bloody showdown against evil itself.

But Judith is no simple superhero. Her story does not celebrate the heroics of an individual or even the triumph of a long-suffering people. Rather, Judith is an agent. She is weaponized by a righteous and powerful Christian God as part of an unending war against the threat from infidels, atheists, and pagans, a campaign that continued long after Judith held aloft the bloody head of Holofernes and long after the 10th-century Anglo-Saxons, the poem’s intended audience, had survived centuries of terror at the hands of pagan Vikings. Judith is not Judith’s story at all; it is an extended parable designed to reassure a Christian people in crisis, whatever era, that God will not, cannot, abandon them.