What Does Grendel's Last Words Mean In Beowulf

The ability for readers to see how Grendel is feeling (through first person point of view) aids in understanding the wickedness of Grendel. Aside from the blatantly evil act of genocide, one of the most gruesome scenes of the novel is Grendel’s idea of killing the Queen. Grendel describes, “I would begin by holding her over the fire and cooking the the ugly hole between her legs. I laughed harder at that… I would squeeze out her feces between my fists.” (Gardner 109). This colorful scenery by Gardner displays the truly sinister side of Grendel. The author continues by calling Grendel’s heart as “inhumanely steady” before he was about to commit his final murderous act on the meadhall. During his excitement of eating man by man, Grendel states that he is “blazing, half-crazy with joy.” Just as the definition of evil states, Grendel has bad character and conduct.

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

Grendel initailly is frightened by him, discovering how the humans must feel in his own presence in the following passage: "My throat convulsed and I tried to get my breath to speak, but I couldn't ... 'Now you know how they feel when they see you'" (59) as their conversation continues they do not make much ground with each other, instead just adding fuel to the fire. Eventually they reach a breaking point in the conversation when Grendel asks, "Why is it fiddlesticks if I stop giving people heart attacks over nothing? ... You improve them, my boy! Can't you see that yourself? ... You are, so to speak, the brute existent by which they learn to define themselves. The exile, captivity, death they shrink from" (72) This sticks with Grendel throughout the rest of the novel.

Grendel must be considered evil, because of his destructive tendencies. In chapter 1 of the novel, the arrival of spring weather allows Grendel to remember the various acts of violence he has committed throughout his realm. “It was just here…..I tore off Athelgards’s head. Here, I killed the old woman with the iron gray hair” (Gardner 7). This shows the readers Grendel’s evil tendencies from

Grendel deserves no sympathy due to his constant assassination of thirty men every night for twelve years. Grendel does not kill because he has to but because he wants to. If Grendel had kill off of instinct rather than emotion, maybe we would deserve

All because he is a monster. Being the monster that he was, he never had it easy. The story states, “‘Surround him!" the king yelled, "Save the horses!"—and suddenly I knew I was dealing with no dull mechanical bull but with thinking creatures, pattern makers, the most dangerous things I'd ever met. I shrieked at them, trying to scare them off, but they merely ducked behind bushes and took long sticks from the saddles of their horses, bows and javelins. "You're all crazy," I bellowed, "you're all insane!’” Here, Grendel is almost about to be killed because of his appearance. The king only thinks of him as a threat because he looks like a monster. Others may say that Grendel had it coming. However, the author’s intentions are clear that he wants the reader to sympathize with Grendel not having a fair chance in life because of how he

Grendel is characterized as a lonely creature who is trying to figure out the meaning of life around him. Grendel is an unhappy soul because he feels useless in society and doesn’t want to accept his given role. Throughout the novel Grendel feels as if he has no friends and nobody else accepts him but his mother. Humans have always been a problem in Grendel’s life and they affect how he lives life each day. Grendel is not an evil creature, he is just unhappy because of the way he is treated. We should sympathize for Grendel because he is suffering on Earth and he does not know what to do about it. The author shows that Grendel is in a place where he needs love and does not get punished because he uses his emotion to escape from his punishment.

In Seamus Heaney’s translation of Beowulf, Grendel is nothing but an evil fiend that needs to be slain, “a fiend out of hell, began to work his evil in the world” (Heaney 9). Grendel is portrayed as an evil monster that has only been wreaking havoc and terrorizing a kingdom for an extended amount of time because it thrives on the pain of others. Seamus states, “Malignant by nature, he never showed remorse” (Heaney 10). Grendel is made out to appear as little more than a monster, “insensible to pain and human sorrow” (Heaney 11). He is portrayed to have little to no human qualities, to be the furthest thing from

The towns people painted a picture of Grendel being a horrible horrific beast when he was just trying to be accepted. Grendel is unhappy in many ways. He wants to be accepted by man but never knew why he was always shunned out of there society. Grendel in the beginning of the book states “And so begins the twelfth year of my idiotic war. The pain of it! The stupidity!” (5). Grendel is hinting to the reader that the fear of the citizens had been a continuous problem in his life and have had a large emotional impact on him as a person. When Grendel shows up the first time in the meat hall he yells “Mercy! Peace!” however no one even gave him a chance when he walked in holding a dead body using it for protection against the drunken men swinging axes and swords at him. They never gave him a chance to explain his reasoning on

Whenever grendel is around people, he has a natural inclination to dislike them because they do not Grendel as he is. Grendel’s mother can speak and understand little amount of the human language and due to the unfair treatment from society, Grendel hates his mother. He thinks she is going to become like society and deep down, feels she will leave him too. This is why he is always picking fights with her, yelling at her, or showing disgust. Due to the isolation he creates, Grendel suffers from attachment issues and a lack of connection. This lack of connection to the public, leaves Grendel with his thoughts and self doubt. He is left alone. “I understand 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. all the rest, I saw, is merely what pushes me, or what I push against, blindly - as blindly as all that is not myself pushes back. I create the whole universe, blink by blink.” ― John Gardner, Grendel

Additionally, Grendel’s misfortune exceeds his dwelling as he encounters aggressive situations in the woods. He is trotting through the greenery when his foot becomes caught between two tree trunks. Unable to budge his limb free, he wails out for his mother. A group of men stumble upon Grendel but do not speak his tongue, “Grendel tries to speak to the men, but they misunderstand him

“An evil person is like a dirty window, they never let the light shine through.” Stated by William Makepeace Thackeray, this idea of “never letting the light shine through” aptly portrays Grendel’s evil and monstrous figure even though Grendel himself is not a person. Living in a world of loneliness, Grendel searches for the meaning of his own life, attempting to discover the “good” aspects that life brings instead of focusing on the evil individual he was predestined to be. Grendel manages to discover and gain knowledge about life’s various “good” qualities from his enemies, the humans. Although Grendel is exposed to these qualities by the humans, he never changes his approach to life, continuing to behave evilly like

Similarly, Grendel in Beowulf was also a creature that was horrific in nature – full of destruction. The contempt towards festivities and joyous music may have derived from the isolation Grendel experiences. After all, he was described as one who is part of “Cain’s clan, whom the creator had outlawed and condemned as outcasts” (9). There was the same reaction of bitterness present in Grendel as in Frankenstein’s creature: both were castaways which led them to be emotionally-driven in anger. Because of his resentment, “the God-cursed brute was creating havoc: greedy and grim, he grabbed thirty men from their resting places and rushed to his lair…blundering back with the butchered corpses” (11). Grendel is nothing more than a misunderstood creature. Having hurt feelings, he too resembles a human being; any person who faces seclusion from his or her friends, family, or society as a whole would be full of frustration, sorrow, anger, and loneliness. This negative response towards emptiness brings out the inner monster in us.

It may be that at one point Grendel was a human much like Beowulf. "Yet, so as to save his life, he left behind his hand, his arm and shoulder" (957-959). He has the appearance of a man and he has a mother, but the humanness of Grendel has disappeared, and what remains is a creature that as the text says, "the Creator had condemned." Instead of saying that Grendel was just a real bad guy, through these descriptions, he has taken on a supernatural or mystical quality. God was even concerned enough to curse Grendel for his atrocities.