Smithsonian article about GRENDEL

Evildoer
The Beowolf monster is a thousand years old, but his bad old tricks continue to resonate in the modern world

By Matthew Gurewitsch


What a giant Grendel must be. For supper he scoops up sleeping warriors 30 at a crack. Imagine the width of his jaws. Yet Beowulf the Avenger brings him down in single combat. Stripped of armor, Beowulf rips the monster’s arm off at the shoulder with his bare hands. Yet the hero is just a human being. Where does he get the leverage?

As invoked in the untitled, thousand-year-old manuscript from which we know him, Grendel has a voice to scream with, but no language; a presence to strike the heart with dread, but no clear form; a lineage going back to Cain, but no place in the fellowship of man. Dying, he escapes into the night. Later, it takes four straining warriors to carry his severed head. The blade that struck the blow melts like an icicle in Grendel’s boiling blood. His reign of terror has lasted a dozen years.

Who weeps for Grendel? Not the Old English bard who composed Beowulf around the eighth century, two centuries or so before two West Saxon scribes set it down. (The dates are hotly disputed.) The moral universe of the age was black and white. But to John Gardner, a novelist in the 20th century, it was natural to view the ogre with some empathy. After Shakespeare’s Richard III, Macbeth and Caliban; after Milton’s Satan; after the Monster of Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, Gardner’s attitude was hardly outlandish. After Robert Louis Stevenson’s Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, to say nothing of Dr. Freud of Vienna, moral relativism is the air we breathe. Beneath the glamour of the Alien or the transgressive romance of the Villain lurks someone we need to know. In the immortal words of Walt Kelly, creator of Pogo: “We have met the enemy and he is us.”

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