Grendel

Story

The poem Beowulf is contained in the Nowell Codex. As noted in lines 105–114 and lines 1260–1267 of Beowulf, Grendel and his mother are described as descendants of the Biblical Cain. Beowulf leaves the Geats to destroy Grendel, who has several times killed those asleep in the mead-hall of Heorot, after having been disturbed by the noise of the drunken revellers. Beowulf and his warriors bed down in the mead hall to await the inevitable attack of the creature. Grendel stalks outside the building for a time, spying the warriors inside. He then makes a sudden attack, bursting the door with his fists and continuing through the entry. The first warrior Grendel finds is still asleep, so he seizes the man and devours him (gory detail is given). Grendel grabs a second warrior, but is shocked when the warrior grabs back with fearsome strength. As Grendel attempts to disengage, he and the reader both discover that Beowulf is that second warrior. A battle ensues, with Beowulf's warriors attempting to aid in the melee. Finally Beowulf tears off Grendel's arm, mortally wounding the creature. Grendel flees but dies in his marsh-den. There, Beowulf later engages in a fierce battle with Grendel's mother, over whom he triumphs. Following her death, Beowulf finds Grendel's corpse and removes his head, which he keeps as a trophy. Beowulf then returns to the surface and to his men at the "ninth hour" (l. 1600, "nōn", about 3 p.m.). He returns to Heorot, where a grateful Hrothgar showers him with gifts.

Tolkien

In 1936, J.R.R. Tolkien's Beowulf: The Monsters and the Critics discussed Grendel and the dragon in Beowulf. This essay was the first work of scholarship in which Anglo-Saxon literature was seriously examined for its literary merits – not just scholarship about the origins of the English language, or what historical information could be gleaned from the text, as was popular in the 19th Century.

Debate over description

During the following decades, the exact description of Grendel became a source of debate for scholars. Indeed, because his exact appearance is never directly described in Old English by the original Beowulf poet, part of the debate revolves around what is known, namely his descent from the biblical Cain (who was the first murderer in the Bible). Grendel is referred to as a sceadugenga – shadow walker, night goer – given that the monster was repeatedly described to be in the shroud of darkness.

Debate over Grendel's nature

Some scholars have linked Grendel's descent from Cain to the monsters and giants of the Cain tradition.

Seamus Heaney, in his translation of Beowulf, writes in lines 1351–1355 that Grendel is vaguely human in shape, though much larger:

... the other, warpedin the shape of a man, moves beyond the palebigger than any man, an unnatural birthcalled Grendel by the country peoplein former days.

Heaney's translation of lines 1637–1639 also notes that Grendel's disembodied head is so large that it takes four men to transport it. Furthermore, in lines 983–989, when Grendel's torn arm is inspected, Heaney describes it as being covered in impenetrable scales and horny growths:

Every nail, claw-scale and spur, every spikeand welt on the hand of that heathen brutewas like barbed steel. Everybody saidthere was no honed iron hard enoughto pierce him through, no time proofed bladethat could cut his brutal blood caked claw

Peter Dickinson (1979) argued that seeing as the considered distinction between man and beast at the time the poem was written was simply man's bipedalism, the given description of Grendel being man-like does not necessarily imply that Grendel is meant to be humanoid, going as far as stating that Grendel could easily have been a bipedal dragon.

Other scholars such as Kuhn (1979) have questioned a monstrous description, stating:

There are five disputed instances of āglǣca [three of which are in Beowulf, lines] 649, 1269, 1512 ... In the first ... the referent can be either Beowulf or Grendel. If the poet and his audience felt the word to have two meanings – monster and hero – the ambiguity would be troublesome; but if by āglǣca they understood a fighter, the ambiguity would be of little consequence, for battle was destined for both Beowulf and Grendel and both were fierce fighters (216–217).

O’Keefe has suggested that Grendel resembles a berserker, because of numerous associations that seem to point to this possibility.

Sonya R. Jensen argues for an identification between Grendel and Agnar, son of Ingeld, and suggests that the tale of the first two monsters is actually the tale of Ingeld, as mentioned by Alcuin in the 790s. The tale of Agnar tells how he was cut in half by the warrior Bothvarr Bjarki (Warlike little Bear), and how he died with his lips separated into a smile. One major parallel between Agnar and Grendel would thus be that the monster of the poem has a name perhaps composed of a combination of the words gren and daelan. The poet may be stressing to his audience that Grendel ‘died laughing’, or that he was gren-dael[ed] or "grin-divid[ed]", after having his arm torn off at the shoulder by Beowulf, whose name means bee-wolf or bear.

Grendel in film, literature, and popular culture

Grendel appears in many other cultural works. Here are a few examples.

Grendel appears in the speech Harold E. Varmus gave for winning the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine for his work on oncogenes, at the Nobel Banquet, December 10, 1989. He stated a cancer cell is "like Grendel, a distorted vision of our normal selves".

In The Wolf Among Us by Telltale Games, Grendel is magically disguised as a normal-looking human yet possesses the attributes in the main story. Gren (short for Grendel) has the ability to transform into a white, giant-like creature at will, resembling the giant in Beowulf. After a drawn-out fight, the player character, Bigby Wolf (the Big Bad Wolf himself) has the option of ripping off his arm, as a nod to his original Beowulf appearance.

In John Gardner's novel Grendel (1971), the titular character tells his side of the epic poem Beowulf. The novel goes deep into the philosophies of existentialism and nihilism, which philosophies Gardner challenges by juxtaposing them against the heroic values that are held by those in Hrothgar's kingdom, which give people of the kingdom meaning in life. Grendel is constantly torn between the philosophies he is forced to live by in his isolation (existentialism and nihilism) and the heroic values the people live by. Gardner proposes that these heroic values are innately human, and though Grendel is descended of man, they are unattainable for him due to his exile from society and perceived monstrosity. The novel was nominated for the 1972 Mythopoeic Award for best novel. Similar to this is the Marillion song Grendel, the B-side of Market Square Heroes, in which Grendel is shown as a creature which is actually more moral than the average human and attacks the humans out of vengeance, accusing them of "placing the killer's blade in my hands" and being disgusted at him for killing humans when they've killed enough of their own kind anyway. As Grendel puts it in the song: "Why should I feel pity when you kill your own kind and feel no shame? [...] Well I've had enough of all your pretty, pretty speeches. Receive your punishment, expose your throats to my righteous claws!"