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Grendel
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BetaChapters 1-3Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Chapter 1 Summary
An unnamed narrator (soon revealed as Grendel) observes a ram in the distance and compares him to “an elderly, slow-witted king” (5). When the ram ignores the narrator’s orders to leave him in peace, the narrator grows frustrated and wails out loud, scaring himself and freezing the water under his feet. Disgusted, he remarks that “so begins the twelfth year of my idiotic war” (5)—but he does not yet elaborate on this “war.”
The narrator addresses the reader directly, warning the reader not to compare the ram to the narrator. The narrator criticizes the ram for responding to springtime with “the same unrest” (6) that the ram feels every year. The narrator raises his middle finger to the sky and explains that he resents the sky as much as he hates the natural world he observes around him.
The narrator refers to himself as a “[p]ointless, ridiculous monster” (6) who smells of death. He starts to cry and falls to the ground as the sun moves over his head. The signs of springtime remind the monster of the times in the past when he killed humans and ate their corpses. Now in a reflective mood, he ponders the fact that “[i]t was not always like this, of course” (7). A deer runs away at the sight of him, and the monster yells at it, accusing it of being unfairly prejudiced against him as he has never once killed a deer. The monster laments that deer, like other creatures, regard him without really knowing him. He hints that he has something to say about humans but that he is not yet “in a mood” (8) to do that. As the sun passes overhead, his shadow lengthens.
Feeling trapped by “the deadly progression of moon and stars” (8), the monster talks with his own shadow, whom he considers his only companion, as he walks down a path. He observes that the creatures he encounters respond to him with fear. He thinks of his mother, who sleeps poorly in their shared lair, a dry cave at the bottom of a lake (called a “mere”). Noticing more signs of spring as night falls, he feels his anger rise even as he notices that he is glad to be outside under the stars, where he rests.
When the monster wakes up, it is still dark, and he yells into the darkness, suddenly aware of his mortality as he looks over a cliffside. He begins to walk down the cliff, toward “the fens and moors and Hrothgar’s hall” (10), eager to physically express his rage. He thinks again of his mother and her guilt, and the monster links this feeling of guilt to his belief that she must have human ancestry. The monster remembers asking his mother why they exist; she did not tell him, leaving it to the dragon to reveal the truth. While this allusion to the dragon is, at this point, unexplained to the reader, Chapter 5 will recount Grendel’s meeting with a dragon who tells him that his life is meaningful only insofar as it gives purpose to the men who fear him.
As the monster approaches Hrothgar’s meadhall, he sees the lights. He notes that this is his 12th year of intruding upon the humans in the meadhall, eating thanes and terrifying the survivors of his attacks (this clarifies his earlier remark about the “twelfth year of [his] idiotic war” [5]). During the attacks, he hears the humans shout at him and call his name, “Grendel!” (12), lamenting whatever acts they committed to warrant such misfortune. After every attack, the monster leaves the meadhall with a full belly, “sick on their sour meat” (13), and retreats to the edge of the forest where he sees the Shaper and his harp and hears the people praying. After the humans pray, they gather wood for a funeral pyre, on which they burn the remains of their kinfolk. They repair the door to the meadhall. As the fire burns, the people sing as if they were celebrating a victory, causing Grendel to “shake with rage” (14) and run home, nauseated.
Chapter 2 Summary
Grendel reflects on the games of his youth, remembering his explorations of his cave, where he lived with his mother. He remembers the first time he saw moonlight through an overhead door and crawling up for a moment before turning around. He compares his childhood to living “in a spell” (16), a time before he became aware of his separateness. He recalls a specific, formative memory:
One morning, as a child, Grendel caught his foot in a crack where two tree trunks were conjoined. He should not have been out at this time, but he cried for his mother anyway, bleeding copiously. He feared both death and being forgotten, and he spent the night alone and trapped in the tree. In the morning, he begged again for his mother, but only a bull appeared, and Grendel worried that the bull would hurt him to protect the nearby calf. The bull charged the tree, catching Grendel on the leg when he hit the tree, but the impact did not shake Grendel loose, and he remained stuck. At this moment, Grendel realized that the world was “a mechanical chaos of casual, brute enmity on which we stupidly impose our hopes and fears” (22-23).
The bull continued to charge the tree. Grendel laughed at his predicament and fell asleep. When he woke, the bull was gone and vultures had appeared. Grendel fell asleep again, and when he woke again, he saw and heard men for the first time in his life. The men noticed Grendel in the tree, and they wondered if he was “some kind of a oak-tree spirit” (25). Seeing him move his mouth, they assumed he was hungry; they heard him laugh, and they assumed he was angry. Grendel grew upset and cried again for his mother, and the men threatened him with their weapons. The leader of the men, “the king” (later identified as Hrothgar), threw an ax at Grendel, who howled even louder for his mother. Suddenly, she appeared, frightening and chasing away the men. Grendel felt the trees separate, releasing him, and he returned to his cave with his mother. When Grendel tried to talk to his mother of the incident, she “only stared, troubled at my noise. She’d forgotten all language long ago, or maybe had never known any” (28).
Chapter 3 Summary
Back in the present, Grendel reflects on why he “turned on Hrothgar” (30), denying that Hrothgar’s violence with the battle ax as an explanation for Grendel’s growing hostility toward him. Grendel remembers when groups of men began intruding into the forest, setting up encampments and hunting and protecting themselves from each other. To Grendel, these behaviors were absurd, in part because “[a]ll the bands did the same thing” (32). Grendel explains that at times, the men would send one of their own into the forest, and Grendel would sometimes attempt to befriend the exile. In the end, though, Grendel found these men untrustworthy, so he “had to eat them” (33).
Sometimes, Grendel spied on the men from the safety of a tree. Once, he found a meadhall destroyed, and the livestock dead but uneaten. The people inside had burned to death. After this discovery, “the wars began” (34). Once, while spying on the men inside another hall, Grendel heard a man called the Shaper telling stories about past kings while playing a harp. Grendel noticed that whenever enemies approached a meadhall, the watchdogs barked, and the men emerged from the hall, weapons at the ready. Grendel heard the men raving “about their fathers and their father’s fathers” (35) before the fights began.
Grendel recalls how, as he watched the men, their lives—no matter which side they were on—began to take on a pattern, and Grendel notes that the men would be allies one day, only to turn and “[sneak] into bed with the other group’s wives and daughters” (37) the next day. When Hrothgar began to stand apart as a leader, the other men claimed to stand behind him as his defenders. When conflicts between the men involved gold and Hrothgar’s own men found that the landscape hindered the transport of their winnings, Hrothgar built roads.
Through this system of roads, Hrothgar built his kingdom and erected various meadhalls to give tribute to it, and now his growing band of men desire more and more the gold that Hrothgar uses as a reward for their loyalty. Grendel now tells the reader that all the while, as the men’s kingdom broadened, his anger intensified when he saw that the forest couldn’t “stop the advance of man” (40) and that nature was suffering.
Grendel continues his story, recalling that when a blind harpist appeared at one of Hrothgar’s temporary meadhalls one evening, Grendel crept closer to the hall to hear the conversation between men. The harpist began to recite a poem about a well-respected king, and he sang a beautiful song made up of “the bits and pieces of the best old songs” (42). Grendel recognized this blind man as the best Shaper of all, a Shaper who truly understood what men want and need from life. After the Shaper’s performance, the meadhall was quiet, and Hrothgar’s old harpist left the hall discreetly, knowing that he had been replaced. Grendel left as well, amazed by the beauty of the blind Shaper’s “lies.”
As he traveled homeward over the moors, he felt overwhelmed by the depth of his emotional response to the Shaper’s poetry. It affected Grendel deeply, and he realized that Hrothgar’s power was “vast,” thanks to the new Shaper’s ability to celebrate the king and to convince any listener of the king’s virtue.
Chapters 1-3 Analysis
This section of the novel takes place during the season of spring, which, in literature, is often a time of hopefulness, renewal, and rebirth. The typical symbolism of spring is an incongruous backdrop to the reader’s introduction to the protagonist, a creature whose mindset appears to be deeply pessimistic and angry. Chapter 1 also sets up the frame of the novel’s narrative arc, signaling that the protagonist, Grendel, has a story of his own to tell despite the fact that the novel is a retelling of a very old story.
Grendel’s storytelling, however, is highly nonlinear, giving the narrative an unusually complex structure. As the novel opens, the narration is in present tense, and Grendel makes ominous references to such things as a 12-year-long war and a dragon who once told him something vitally important; as he gives these references no immediate explanation, readers may realize that these events will later be illuminated when Grendel’s narration delves deeper into the past. Indeed, most of the novel’s events will be relayed in past tense as the present Grendel shares his recollections, only to intermittently return to the present tense when he wants to make observations about his present situation. The novel opens in the midst of “the twelfth year of [Grendel’s] idiotic war” (5)—“war,” the reader soon learns, meaning Grendel’s ongoing project of terrorizing the Danes—and the first eight chapters are mostly spent revisiting the past and explaining that war. The eighth chapter’s narrative tense structure is more indeterminate, but in Chapter 9, the narrative will “catch up” to the present Grendel and follow him to his undoing.
Though Grendel appears pessimistic and angry, he is not entirely without humor. The first chapter also sets a comic tone with the image of a monster raising his middle finger to the sky. The rude gesture is clearly antagonistic, but it is unclear to whom or what Grendel is cursing in this moment. This moment does foreshadow Grendel’s later revelations, signaling that though the source of Grendel’s anger is unclear at this early stage, the anger is nevertheless a defining characteristic of his experience.
Grendel’s struggle with existential questions and the meaning of life are apparent from the beginning of the novel. He mentions an impulse to follow the moon and the stars, drawing attention to the subtle motif of astrology and the signs of the zodiac that appear in each chapter. Grendel’s ambivalence toward his significance is clear in how the protagonist monster is nameless until the end of Chapter 1, when the Danes (also called the Scyldings) shout his name during an attack on the meadhall. The fact that the humans name Grendel, and that he does not name himself, foreshadows his defining existential anxiety. He has not yet had the experience of understanding his existence as meaningful, so it does not occur to him to name himself or to refer to himself by a name. In contrast, the Danes find Grendel’s existence to be highly meaningful, as it causes them significant terror and great suffering. It is this meaningfulness via the Danes’ experience that turns out to be both Grendel’s relief and his downfall.
In Chapter 2, the story of Grendel’s introduction to the Danes and to their leader, King Hrothgar, sets the tone of Grendel’s relationship with humans and deepens the reader’s understanding of the monster’s vulnerability. He has an unsatisfying relationship with his mother, who cannot understand his language and appears to find his thoughts and questions concerning. Both Grendel’s experience with the Danes and his relationship with his mother introduce an important theme of the novel: isolation and otherness. In both the original Anglo-Saxon epic poem and Gardner’s novel, Grendel is an outcast who must exist on the margins of society. In the novel, Grendel’s loneliness serves in part as an explanation for his anger; he is jealous of the Danes who gather in the meadhall and enjoy each other’s company.
Chapter 3 explores Grendel’s multifaceted reasons for resenting the Danes, and Hrothgar in particular, in more detail. As a resident of the wilderness, he resents the humans’ intrusion and their destruction to nature. He also notices humans’ hypocrisy and cruelty, noting that they cause each other suffering as well. Despite this growing awareness of human shortcomings, which develops the motif of humans and monsters, Grendel’s characterization as a sensitive soul deepens with a description of his artistic temperament: His reaction to the art of the Shaper reveals his sensitivity and depth, he recalls his sense of overwhelm upon realizing that lies (that is, the Shaper’s fictionalizing poetry) can be more beautiful than truth. Grendel’s deeply human responses to art, as well as his insight into the dark side of humanity, call into question the redemptive power of art, another important theme of the novel.
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