Grendel

For other uses, see Grendel (disambiguation).

An illustration of Grendel by J. R. Skelton from Stories of Beowulf. Grendel is described as "Very terrible to look upon."

Grendel is a character in the Anglo-Saxon epic poem Beowulf (AD 700–1000). He is one of the poem's three antagonists (along with Grendel's mother and the dragon), all aligned in opposition against the protagonist Beowulf. Grendel is feared by all but Beowulf. Grendel is described to have descended from the lineage of the Biblical figure Cain, from Genesis 4 of the Bible, and is usually depicted as a monster or a giant, although his status as a monster, giant or some other form of supernatural being is not clearly described in the poem and thus remains the subject of scholarly debate.

In John Gardner's book Grendel (1971), Grendel has more human qualities and the book is narrated from his perspective.

Story

Grendel is originally found in the poem Beowulf, which is contained in the Nowell Codex. Grendel, being cursed as the descendant of the Biblical Cain, is "harrowed" by the sounds of singing that come every night from the mead-hall of Heorot built by King Hrothgar which describe the "Almighty's" creation of the earth. He is unable to bear it anymore, and attacks Heorot. Grendel continues to attack the Hall every night for twelve years, killing its inhabitants and making this magnificent mead-hall unusable. Beowulf hears of these attacks and leaves the Geats to destroy Grendel. He is welcomed by King Hrothgar, who gives a banquet in celebration and afterwards 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, the reader discovers that Beowulf is that second warrior. He has chosen not to use a weapon because he heard Grendel fights without one; this choice is what wins him the battle because Grendel has a charm that protects him from every weapon. 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.

Scholarship

Tolkien

In 1936, J.R.R. Tolkien's Beowulf: The Monsters and the Critics discussed Grendel and the dragon in Beowulf. Tolkien argues that "the evil spirits took visible shape" in Grendel and the dragon; however, the author's concern is focused on Beowulf. He points out that while Grendel has Christian origins as the descendant of Cain, he "cannot be dissociated from the creatures of northern myth." He also argues for the importance of Grendel's role in the poem as an "eminently suitable beginning" that sets the stage for Beowulf's fight with the dragon: "Triumph over the lesser and more nearly human is cancelled by defeat before the older and more elemental." 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. Tolkien wrote his own translation of Beowulf entitled, Beowulf: A Translation and Commentary together with Sellic Spell between 1920 and 1926.

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, warped

in the shape of a man, moves beyond the pale

bigger than any man, an unnatural birth

called Grendel by the country people

in 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 spike

and welt on the hand of that heathen brute

was like barbed steel. Everybody said

there was no honed iron hard enough

to pierce him through, no time proofed blade

that could cut his brutal blood caked claw

Alfred Bammesgerber looks closely at line 1266 where Grendel's ancestry is said to be the "misbegotten spirits" that sprang from Cain after he was cursed. He argues that the words in Old English, geosceaftgasta, should be translated "the great former creation of spirits."

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

Main article: List of artistic depictions of Grendel

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!"
• Grendel was featured in the 2007 film Beowulf where it was motion-captured and voiced by Crispin Glover. This version is a grotesque humanoid who is revealed to have been born from a tryst between Grendel's mother and Hrothgar.
• Grendel appears in Once Upon a Time in Wonderland, a spin-off of Once Upon a Time, portrayed by Steve Bacic. This version of Grendel is a half-beast half-human man who captures Alice and the Knave of Hearts as they approach his home. They are seeking the Forget Me Knot, a magical rope that when placed over an area, will show the viewer the last thing that happened there. They were informed of its location from the Caterpillar. He ties them up as they witness the Grendel talking to a woman in a scene inside the Forget Me Knot. As they escape, they run into a Bandersnatch, a monstrous wild boar-like creature who Alice has battled before. The two successfully kill the beast with the Forget Me Knot and The Grendel thanks them for saving his life. He then reveals to them that The Grendel used the rope to remember his late-wife. He further explains that he stole the rope from the Red Queen. For his crime, she transformed him into the beast. He gives Alice and the Knave the Forget Me Knot as it is useless to him now that the vision of his wife has been over-written. He is later visited by Jafar and the Red Queen who promise to bring back his wife in return for him telling them who killed the Bandersnatch. He agrees, though Jafar tricks him by re-uniting him with his wife....only through killing him.
• In the Once Upon a Time episode "Ill-Boding Patterns," Beowulf faked a Grendel sighting and killed some people in order to frame Rumpelstiltskin for their deaths and reclaim Hrunting.
• In Neil Gaiman's 2003 short story The Monarch of the Glen, set in the world of Gaiman's American Gods, Grendel appeared as the monster protagonist Shadow Moon was forced to fight in Scotland. Like most mythological beings in this world Grendel could hide in plain sight as a slightly peculiar human. In this case, Grendel hid as an unusually large and hairless man with his mother as a simple old woman.

References

• Jack, George. Beowulf : A Student Edition. Oxford University Press: New York, 1997.
• Jensen, S R. Beowulf and the Monsters. ARRC: Sydney, corrected edition, 1998. Extracts available online.
• ----. Beowulf and the Battle-beasts of Yore. ARRC: Sydney, 2004. Available online.
• Klaeber, Frederick, ed. Beowulf and the Fight at Finnsburg. Third ed. Boston: Heath, 1950.
• Kuhn, Sherman M. "Old English Aglaeca-Middle Irish Olach". Linguistic Method : Essays in Honor of Herbert Penzl. Eds. Irmengard Rauch and Gerald F. Carr. The Hague, New York: Mouton Publishers, 1979. 213–30.
• Tolkien, J.R.R. Beowulf, the Monsters and the Critics. (Sir Israel Gollancz Memorial Lecture, British Academy, 1936). First ed. London: Humphrey Milford, 1937.
• Cawson, Frank. "The Monsters in the Mind: The Face of Evil in Myth, Literature, and Contemporary Life". Sussex, England: Book Guild, 1995: 38–39.
• Gardner, John. "Grendel". New York, 1971.
• Thorpe, Benjamin (trans.). The Anglo-Saxon Poems of Beowulf: The Scôp or Gleeman's Tale and the Fight at Finnesburg Oxford University Press. 1885.
• Heyne, Moritz. Harrison, James A. Sharp, Robert. Beowulf: An Anglo-Saxon Poem, and The Fight at Finnsburg: a Fragment Boston, Massachusetts: Ginn & Company, 1895.