Foster, Gavin2026-03-022026-03-022026-02-27https://hdl.handle.net/10222/85824This dissertation examines the processes by which grief becomes identity in medieval and medievalist texts. Where scholars have traditionally read medieval grief through frameworks of consolation, I argue that an alternate tradition exists— one in which grief fundamentally transforms who characters are. Across the Old English elegies, The Wife's Lament and Wulf and Eadwacer, Beowulf, Le Morte Darthur, The Lord of the Rings, and The Silmarillion, as well as contemporary translations by Maria Dahvana Headley and Miller Oberman, I trace how grief operates as an enduring force that remakes identity at three progressive levels: grammatical identity, bodily identity, and inner selfhood. My project begins with grammar. In the Old English elegies, dual pronouns represent the movement of characters beyond normative cycles of grief and mourning into melancholia, as grief is woven into the speakers’ grammatical selves. I establish this framework by close reading the elegies through a Freudian lens, focusing on Freud’s definitions of “melancholia” and the “work of mourning,” and then apply and extend these insights to Sir Thomas Malory and J.R.R. Tolkien, arguing that shifts between “ye” and “thou” and modernized dual constructions are similarly used to signify characters’ turns to melancholia. The project then moves to the body, reading dysphoria— the painful disconnection between internal experience and external presentation— as grief made physical. Again, I develop this framework through one text before extending it. In The Lord of the Rings, Éowyn's transformation into Dernhelm reveals how dysphoric grief reshapes bodily identity, and this lens proves equally revealing when applied to translations from Old English, where characters suffer altered and/or imperfect genders through both Othering and translation processes, and when applied to Malory, where Lancelot grieves his imperfect masculinity and “monstrous” women are Othered. Finally, the project turns to inner selfhood, characterized through instances of performative death. Drawing on theories of performativity (Derrida, Butler, Phelan, Ahmed) and photography (Barthes's Camera Lucida), I examine how characters stage their deaths as the ultimate articulations of grief-as-identity. Gawain and Elaine in Malory performatively write and stage their deaths, and this framework extends to speakers in the Old English elegies and to Tolkien's Elves, revealing grief as a practice of self-making through which texts imagine what it means to remain changed.enMedievalismOld EnglishMiddle EnglishLiteratureJ. R. R. TolkienFantasy