Grendel: A True Monster

In both works, Beowulf and Grendel, Grendel himself is generally given the same connotations. He is given kennings, called names, referred to as the evil spawn of Cain, and even viewed as a monster; but why? Why in both books is he a wicked, horrible, person who is harshly excluded from everyone? After stumbling upon John Gardner's book, it was halfway expected that some excuse would be made for Grendel; that he wasn't really the inexorable monster the thanes in Beowulf portrayed him as. But all it really did was make him worse. What is the message we are being sent about Grendel?

people for only the reason of that they were having a good time, and he wasn’t. He is

He struggles with the thought of being denied and offbeat. He uses violence as a way to wrestle with his feelings. The violence starts when Grendel goes to the Meadhall and kills thirty men on the first night. He says, “I was Grendel, Ruiner of Meadhalls, Wrecker of Kings! But also, as never before, I was alone” (Gardner 80). His main goal was to destroy the Meadhall and all of King Hrothgar’s people. Grendel now feels like he has power and this helps him feel better, but he also hints at the fact that he is still feeling lonely and hopeless. Therefore, he decided to cause more havoc and kill more people to help him deal with the pain. When Grendel hears some men who seem to be happy and having fun, he wishes that he was able to be happy like them. He wants to fill a void of emptiness. This motivates him to keep performing numerous attacks on the Meadhall. The violence and problems he causes lasts for twelve years until Beowulf rips his arm off. Grendel just wants to be able to communicate with someone and feel accepted. He says, "Why can't I have someone to talk to? The Shaper has people to talk to, I said. I wrung my fingers. Hrothgar has people to talk to” (Gardner 53). If he had someone who accepted him and was able to understand him, he may not have felt that he needed to perform his attacks as a way to try to lessen his pain. There would not have been twelve years of

In the novel, Grendel by John Gardener, Grendel is a human-like creature capable of rational thought as well as feeling emotions. Early on in the story Gardener depicts Grendel as being very observant, critical and somewhat spiteful of the world around him. He describes himself as a murderous monster who smells of death and crouches in the shadows. Grendel watches the humans from the shadows of the trees and at first it seems as though they are the real monsters, slaughtering and pillaging all for the sake of their leaders and for power. This light that the humans are put in gives Grendel a certain charisma about him, making him seem like the one to side with in this novel. Later in the story, however, things change. Grendel seeks out the

Like many whom suffer the same disorder, Grendel completely changed his mind, extending from one topic to the exact opposite. He goes against his own ideas as if he were two totally opposing characters. He also always thought the dragon was near. Grendel allowed the ways and beliefs of the dragon to get in his head. He would claim he could “smell the dragon’s scent” whenever something sinister occurred. All of these symptoms, in addition to the isolation from Hrothgar’s people lead to the overall cause in withdrawal from society. Grendel’s emotional disturbances caused him to react completely unreasonable and rather foolish many times within his life.

In contrast to the Danes of “Beowulf”, Grendel searched for his very reason of existence by asking the questions “Why?” and “How?” for answers. Grendel started off in the book struggling with finding meaning in his life while watching the people clearly doing things that gave their lives meaning. He became upset as he saw that he couldn’t deter their spirits no matter what he did and started to feel jealous of their self-found purpose. He realized that through various ways the people attained meaning. In response to his confusion over their self-discovered purpose, Grendel started listening to the Shaper’s words when he spoke to the people shaping their very beliefs which confused Grendel even more on the meaning of life. After listening to the Shaper for a while, readers can see Grendel in a state of contradiction. He started off killing people as a simple, bestial monstrosity but in the end he is shown as quite intelligent and capable of choosing whether to kill or not. Soon, Grendel started seeking answers to his questions from a dragon. The dragon’s very philosophy on life was that there is no meaning of life which started to influence Grendel. Upon Grendel’s persistent questions of “Why?”, the dragon told him “You improve them, my boy! Can’t you see that yourself? You stimulate them! You make them think and scheme…You are, so to speak, the brute existent by which they learn to define themselves

John Gardner’s Grendel is the retelling of the heroic epic poem Beowulf; however, the viewpoint has shifted. Grendel is told from the viewpoint of one of Beowulf’s antagonists and the titular character of Gardner’s work—Grendel. In Grendel, Gardner humanizes Grendel by emphasizing parallels between Grendel’s life and human life. Through Gardner’s reflection of human feelings, human development, and human flaws in Grendel, this seemingly antagonistic, monstrous character becomes understood and made “human.”

The poem does not give this insight of what happens before, or from Grendel's point of view. Seeing this scene in the movie gives the audience a better understanding of why Grendel and also his mother attack the Danes. Later in the movie Beowulf says, "He's no more human than you and I", which is true. If the Danes didn’t kill Grendel's father, the outcome of the story could have possibly been changed because Grendel would have had a different life and not seek revenge on the Danes, specifically the one who Grendel had seen kill his father. In the poem Grendel fights Beowulf, rather than avoiding Beowulf most of the time in the movie. In the poem, Grendel is seen as an evil monster that kills and eats the Hrothgar warriors and cannot be penetrated by weapons, rather than just human, or troll, like the movie. When the battle with Grendel occurs in the poem, it is said that Beowulf had cut off his arm to defeat him. While in the movie, Grendel finds himself stuck hanging, and must cut off his own arm to escape from Beowulf and his men. Both the movie and poem result in the death of Grendel, eventually leading to the revenge of his mother.

In the story, Grendel reminisces about the time before he became a monster. His tone is almost nostalgic. The story reads, “I used to play games when I was young—it might as well be a thousand years ago. Explored our far-flung underground world in an endless wargame of leaps onto nothing, ingenious twists into freedom or new perplexity, quick whispered plottings with invisible friends, wild cackles when vengeance was mine.” Grendel is remembering the childhood that he had. His tone indicates that he misses his childhood; the time before he was a monster. The opposing side may think that Grendel’s flashback to his childhood may not mean anything; that it doesn’t show any reason to sympathize with him. However, this quote clearly implies

This passage helps to develop the character of Grendel at the beginning of the novel to show his mental state at the beginning of the book as well as his character as a whole. This quote is used to show that Grendel is alone and he recognizes his only true companion is his shadow because it can never leave him. This allows the reader to get a grasp of how Grendel is as a character and shows his mental thought processes to lead him to the thoughts he does have. This passage contributes to the theme of finding one’s purpose in the world by showing that Grendel has no purpose in the world at the moment and he hasn’t found anything to keep him grounded therefore he is alone and lost.

"The mountains are what I define them as.... What I see I inspire with usefulness... and all that I do not see is useless, a void." [28-29] Grendel then sees that the world is how he views it, and his senses make up everything: reality is dynamic. This important conclusion leads him to begin to look around him and form thoughts and opinions on all that he sees, as well as placing him at the first step down the road of the cynical death he suffers. His first impressions

In a world of chaos, he who lives, lives by his own laws and values. Who is to say that the death of millions is any worse or better, for that matter, than injuring a cockroach. And in the case of an existing power in the form of God, who is presumed to be all which is good, presiding and ruling an organized universe, why then does evil exist? The prosaic response of “without evil, there is no good” no longer holds any validity in this argument as the admitted goal of good is to reach an existence without evil. So even if a God does exist, I think it is fair, at this point, to say that he is the embodiment of both good and evil. And if humoring those who would answer the previous question with the response that there can be no good

After his fatal battle with the stranger, Grendel runs off with one less arm to the edge of a cliff where he was before. As he stands by the edge of the cliff, Grendel becomes numb and no longer feels pain. As animals gather, Grendel speaks his last words. He says,”Poor Grendel’s had an accident… So may you all.

Anyone who defends Grendel or his behavior is guilty of agreeing with a terrible crime and sin in the sight of many. Grendel had but one mission and one purpose: to terrorize and murder. He fulfilled it well.

“The state is an organization of violence, a monopoly in what it is pleased to call legitimate violence (Gardner, 119)." Grendel is monster that first appears in the epic poem Beowulf. Gardner later takes the character on for his own adaption. In Grendel the monster Grendel struggles with humans and his own inner demons throughout the whole book. Throughout history, people have been forced to use violence as a solution; But even in those instances, there was a negative force that required the use of violence. Humans have adapted their instincts to access a situation and do what they think is right. However we are flawed so we don’t always make the right decisions. Gardner’s views on man were correct. In the history of man; there has