Reflections on border-walking
“How do you fulfill your calling to be a Strider when you’re more like Niggle?”
I attended Southern Adventist University’s Illuminate conference a few weeks back (well worth it, if you’re of a mind! All about art and faith, and with plenty of Rabbit Room + RR–adjacent speakers). One of my favorite sessions was Jonathan Rogers’s plenary, titled “Border-Walking: Contributions from the Margins of Culture and Faith.”
The concept of border-walking stems out of the Anglo-Saxon term mearcstapa, which only appeared (twice) in Beowulf—and to describe Grendel and his mother,1 at that. Translations of mearcstapa vary, naturally, from Seamus Heaney’s “haunting the marshes”2 to Burton Raffel’s “haunted the moors”3 to Lesslie Hall’s “march-stepper.”4
Wait, hold up a minute. We’re channeling a monster?
I’ve been struggling with that question myself—hence this post.
A Reddit poster about to get a tattoo of the term in runes noted:
So I checked with a professor off medieval studies to clarify if this word meant monster, ranger, or something in-between. The word literally means march (border) stepper, but is not a description of Grendel & Co’s relationship to humanity (it doesn't mean monster), but their relationship to civilisation (outsider). In beowulf [sic], it is more a description of where they are than what they are.5
Okay, good, lol, because IDKAU, but I really didn’t want to be channeling a monster.
I much prefer Makoto Fujimura’s example: Strider, in The Lord of the Rings. Fujimura wrote in his book Culture Care that “In the tribal realities of earlier times, these were individuals who lived on the edges of their groups, going in and out of them, sometimes bringing news back to the tribe.”6
Rogers further fleshed out Strider-as-mearcstapa in this excellent blog post.
On the flip side: Beating the bounds
I’m also grateful to a friend who tipped me off to the historic custom of beating the bounds, a practice dating to medieval times that is still performed in parts of England, Wales, and even New England.
Amelia Soth writes on JSTOR Daily:
Before the borders of England’s parishes were definitively mapped, people learned the boundaries of their community by foot. Every year, a few days before the feast of the Ascension, the members of each parish would come together to walk the edge of their common lands.
… the purpose [of beating the bounds] was to create a shared mental map of the parish, to ensure that neighboring communities couldn’t encroach on their land. They carried flags, sang songs, read homilies, and used slender willow-branches to swat the landmarks that separated one parish from another.7
Beating the bounds was also a way to pass information on to the next generation. It was a more formal affair in pre-Reformation Britain, with “Lords of the manor, bailiffs, and other local dignitaries” in attendance—and also young boys, who were paid for their efforts but also literally switched or beaten, so pain would accompany the marker memories.8
The sixteenth century saw significant change as common lands were appropriated for landowners’ exclusive use, at which time the practice of beating the bounds significantly decreased.9 It does still take place—though more often as communal walks than anything official.10
Tolkien even wrote beating the bounds into The Lord of the Rings, with both the Bounders of the Shire and the Rangers of the North:
The Bounders were responsible for policing the borders of the Shire and ensuring that outsiders behaved themselves. This was known as ‘beating the bounds’. The Bounders was the larger of the two branches of the Watch (the other being the twelve Shirriffs).11
Rangers of the North, or simply the Rangers, were the last remnant of the Dúnedain of Arnor who had once peopled the North Kingdom of Arnor. They protected the lands around the village of Bree and the Shire. The Bree-folk did not know anything about their origin and simply called this mysterious wandering folk “Rangers”. The Rangers travelled freely southwards and eastwards of the village of Bree as far as the Misty Mountains.12
Whereas many mearcstapa (mearcstapas? However plurals work in Anglo-Saxon…) operated on the fringes both literally (wilderness) and legally (close to, if not outright, outside the then-law),13 those walking the settled lands and common borders worked within the bounds (no pun intended) of the law.
So what do we do between bounding and mearcstapa-ing?
Rogers’s Illuminate plenary asked a similar question. “How do you live in the tribe, and still bring news from another land? How do you fulfill your calling to be a Strider when you’re more like Niggle?”14
He proceeded to answer: “There’s a difference between being [in] a tribe and tribalism.” Falling into negative partisanship15 is all too easy, but leads to alienation; instead, he encouraged listeners to be the kind of person that relates to people in other tribes. We need people who are telling true stories, and who keep believing we have access to reality (that which continues to be true whether we believe it or not).
We don’t get to decide what our lives mean or what it’s for, Rogers closed; that’s up to God, who made us for magnanimity and largeness of spirit. “It takes courage to stay on the path.”
And Josef Pieper had a few thoughts on courage …
Fortitude is not the absence of fear, Pieper16 said, in “Josef Pieper according to Rogers’s plenary.”
Both fortitude and fear are a function of love—but the trick is to not stay in fear, though it can be fuel for creative actions. Fortitude rescues you from the tendency to love your life so much that you lose it.
A courageous person is patient—and cheerful. We mustn’t leave good cheer out of the equation!
May we be courageous, patient, and cheerful as we dare to cross borders between tribes.
For the Fleet Foxes fans among us, their song “Mearcstapa.”
(Interestingly, the only song titled that on Spotify to date.)
Grendel is introduced with this term in lines 102–05 of the poem, and it’s used again of Grendel and his mum in lines 1345-49. My preferred Beowulf translation, thanks to the Literary Life Beowulf course, is that of Burton Raffel; text is accessible here, or consider the excellent joint-narration effort between Educari Unlimited and Raffel himself: part 1 / part 2.
Halbrooks, John. “Mære Mearcstapa.” Personal Canon Formation, March 25, 2026. https://johnhalbrooks.substack.com/p/mre-mearcstapa-bf3.
Raffel, Burton. Beowulf. Formatted by Andrew Keating. n.d. https://docs.google.com/document/d/1Ad2fID0z9VoUrE0iyEHiKIc9J0cu50gZ-PRjwfsVDMU/edit?tab=t.0#heading=h.gjdgxs.
Hall, Lesslie. Beowulf. Project Gutenberg, n.d. https://www.gutenberg.org/files/16328/16328-h/16328-h.htm.
“Mearcstapa in runes.” Reddit, n.d. https://www.reddit.com/r/anglosaxon/comments/1gm6zws/mearcstapa_in_runes/.
Rogers, Jonathan. “Border-Walking.” The Habit, August 1, 2023. https://thehabit.co/border-walking/.
Soth, Amelia. “Beating the Bounds.” JSTOR Daily, May 7, 2020. https://daily.jstor.org/beating-the-bounds/.
“What Is Beating the Bounds?” St Martin-in-the-Fields, n.d. https://www.stmartin-in-the-fields.org/blog/what-is-beating-the-bounds/.
Soth, Amelia. “Beating the Bounds.” JSTOR Daily, May 7, 2020. https://daily.jstor.org/beating-the-bounds/.
Wilks, Jon. “Customs Uncovered: Beating the Bounds.” Tradfolk, January 21, 2022. https://tradfolk.co/customs/beating-the-bounds/.
“Bounders.” TolkienGateway, n.d. https://tolkiengateway.net/wiki/Bounders. See also J.R.R. Tolkien, The Lord of the Rings, “Prologue,” “Of the Ordering of the Shire.”
“Rangers of the North.” TolkienGateway, n.d. https://tolkiengateway.net/wiki/Rangers_of_the_North. The TolkienGateway entry has plenty of additional info and specific LOTR references for curious readers wanting to know more.
Because National Treasure is probably my second-most-quoted movie after The Lord of the Rings, here we go: “In another life, I've arranged several operations of questionable legality.”—Sean Bean as Ian Shaw.
Learn more about Tolkien’s short story “Leaf by Niggle” at the Tolkien Library. Makoto Fujimura did his own “A Leaf by Niggle” painting after reading the short story; read more about that here.
As Rogers defined it in his plenary, “the tendency to choose a political party (or an identity) based on what you oppose rather than what you approve.”
Per his official website, “Josef Pieper (1904-1997) was a German Catholic philosopher whose work profoundly shaped 20th-century Christian philosophy. Deeply influenced by Thomas Aquinas, Pieper focused on themes such as happiness, justice, leisure, and love, emphasizing the integration of faith and reason in human life.” Two of his most well-known works are Leisure: The Basis of Culture and The Four Cardinal Virtues.