Although women are rarely direct combatants in the vengeance feuds that feature in so much early Northern literature, they are often portrayed as having an active interest in such violence. The “Frisian Slaughter” episode in Beowulf is a dramatic instance of this, as it breaks with the larger poem’s masculine warrior perspective to adopt the point of view of a mother made bereft from combat. The episode is all the more interesting because it is performed by a fictional poet for the heroes as part of the narrative, offering a viewpoint the challenges their own that they nevertheless receive with approval. Drawing on Judith Butler’s idea of gender as performance and Slavoj Zizek’s notion of ideology as an internalized phenomenon, I aim to show that the masculine warrior culture demonstrated in the poem can be conceived of as a performance on the part of the characters, which they are able to negotiate with the feminine perspective that they encounter in the opposing performance of the episode. Although the episode and its performance ends up functioning as a “fantasy screen” (Zizek) that allows the characters to appropriate the feminine voice to corroborate their hypermasculine performance, I shall point to the resulting tragedy as evidence that the Beowulf poet expects a different outcome from the real-life audience. In so doing, I hope to add my voice to those complicating the notion that medieval writers and audiences acted under a stable, non-negotiable acculturation that led them to portray the society around them uncritically.