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Grendel's Idiotic War

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In the first chapter of Grendel, we are presented with a natural philosophy that the world is a constant ongoing cycle, otherwise known as orphic philosophy. At the very beginning, Grendel shares with us that it is “the twelfth year of [his] idiotic war”, and judging by his next sentence, “The pain of it! The stupidity,” he does not seem very happy about it. War is a very repetitive cycle of battle after battle, and from this we can infer that this year of Grendel’s war will not be very different from the prior eleven. One particular element of this war that seems to never change is an old ram. As Grendel confronts the old ram and tries to get him to leave, he becomes angered by the ram’s stupidity and speaks about how it has been like this …show more content…

“I used to play games when I was young… Explored our far-flung underground world in an endless war game of leaps onto nothing, … I nosed out, in my childish games, every last shark-toothed chamber and hall, every black tentacle of my mother’s cave…” (Gardner 15-16). As a child Grendel played by himself in his mother’s cave and had never seen the outside world. This was until he found a way out. “And so I discovered the sunken door, and so I came up, for the first time, to moonlight” (Gardner 16). Little by little, he began to adventure farther out into the world without his mother’s knowing. During one of these adventures, Grendel got his leg stuck “in the crack where to old tree trunks joined”. He begins to yell out for his mother, but she does not come. Instead, a raging bull discovers him and begins to charge at Grendel, tearing at his back leg with its horn tips. While hanging from the tree, Grendel concludes that his mother will not come, no one will come to help him, and he must face the world alone. “I understood that the world was nothing: a mechanical chaos of casual, brute enmity on which we stupidly impose our hopes and fears. I understood that, finally and absolutely, I alone exist” (Gardner 21-22). From this quote we now see that Grendel is being influenced by the philosophy of solipsism. According to the Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy, solipsism is “regarded as the doctrine that, in principle, …show more content…

One night, while Grendel is watching the mead hall, an old blind man with a harp, the Shaper, shows up and plays for Hrothgar, the king, and his people, the Danes. “He would sing the glory of Hrothgar’s line and gild his wisdom and stir up his men to more daring deed, for a price… He sang of battle and marriages, of funerals and hangings, the whimpering’s of beaten enemies, of splendid hunts and harvests. He sang of Hrothgar, hoarfrost white, magnificent of mind” (Gardner 42-43). The Shaper sang of the people’s history and seems to, as Stromme puts it, “create an order out of pointless accident”. This is where Grendel’s solipsism is challenged, he is no longer just thinking of his own existence as the only one that exists, he is now excepting the existence of Hrothgar, the Danes, and the Shaper. “When he finished, the hall was as quiet as a mound. I too was silent, my ear pressed tight against the timbers. Even to me, incredibly, he had made it all seem true and very fine” (Gardner 43). The Shaper sings in a way that mesmerizes the Danes and even Grendel, and he puts the pieces of history together to argue that it was a great and honorable past. What the Shaper represents and how he speaks of the world and things resembles most the philosophy of sophism. “… Sophists… were so skilled at

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