Grendel Vs. Beowulf

Grendel meets Beowulf. The scene we’ve all been waiting for.  We’ve either dreaded or awaited it eagerly, depending on how much we enjoyed reading the novel… Personally, I feel as if I was ready for Grendel to die, and I do not think he minded it much himself, yet a little part of me did feel sad to see baby Grendel go. Beowulf, his undoing, is seen with such a heroic and arrogant light in the epic from Anglo Saxon times, yet John Gardner’s Grendel tells a completely different story.

 Meeting Beowulf is quite the scene. The amount of foreshadowing and irony presented in chapter 11 is incredible and Gardner portrays the hero, or perhaps villain, in a new “twisted” light. Let’s just take a minute and address the admiration with which Grendel looks at Beowulf and the almost infatuated state of mind he was in. He was entranced with his body… stating that he could “drop into a trance just looking at those shoulders” (Gardner 155). The glorification of Beowulf’s body is extremely ironic since it is these beautiful shoulders that will be tearing his shoulder from its socket, leading to his demise. With his “cold eyes” and his dramatic arrival as “gray wind teased lifeless trees”, Beowulf does not seem the least bit heroic or even “good” (Gardner 152). His lifeless stares and boasts that hinder others are evil, and Gardner illustrates the tone towards him very clearly using diction. Everything in the chapter is “gray”, “dark”, and Beowulf is described as “grotesque” more than once, a word which brings back memories of a small miserable town in Ohio. The connotations of the words used to describe the scene are not very favorable, connoting horrible evilness. As Beowulf physically tortures Grendel he decides it is not enough and decides to psychologically infest Grendel’s mind to prove a point. What point? What was Beowulf trying to say? Also noteworthy and similar to Winesburg, Ohio are the allusions to the Garden of Eden. All throughout the chapter Gardner describes objects as twisted, and as Grendel stares at his enemy he gets a glimpse of a memory of “twisted roots, an abyss…” (Gardner 164). This could connect to the tree of knowledge in the Garden of Eden, as a truth is also mentioned throughout the chapter. “They were like trees, those strangers”, just like Hrothgar in the ruling of his kingdom, yet the roots are twisted because of the injustice found in the base of the society. The evil that is the foundation of it all. However, if the Anglo-Saxon society were the true evil and Beowulf/Hrothgar were antagonists within the story, it would make Grendel the true hero of the novel, which would make sense since he is our protagonist.

When looking at Chapter 11 we can see that Gardner truly emphasizes the gray, antagonistic qualities within Beowulf, a very different perspective from that of the much older epic- yet it all makes sense, because all along we’ve wanted to know that Grendel was truly “good”, a protagonist, and a fulfillment of our expectations of what a main character should be like.