82 pages • 2 hours read
John GardnerGrendel
Fiction | Novel | Adult | Published in 1971A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more. For select classroom titles, we also provide Teaching Guides with discussion and quiz questions to prompt student engagement.
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BetaChapters 4-6Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Chapter 4 Summary
His narration returning to the present, Grendel points out that the Shaper now sings more somberly, after years of the men enduring Grendel’s fatal attacks. While there might be more exciting places for the bard to sing his poetry, he remains with Hrothgar out of pride. Grendel disdainfully looks upon the Danes’ most prized meadhall, and he recounts how it came into being and how his war with humans began:
Inspired by the poetry of the Shaper, Hrothgar planned to build a new meadhall: The Shaper sang about an extraordinary meadhall, one “whose light would shine to the ends of the ragged world” (47). As Grendel listened to the songs, he could not reconcile the truth with the beauty of the Shaper’s words; while Hrothgar was destructive, the poetry glorified him. Despite Grendel’s awareness of Hrothgar’s violent capacities, his “heart was light with Hrothgar’s goodness” (48). Men continued to arrive from afar to hear the Shaper’s songs, and Grendel noticed that the Shaper changed the poems to meet the desires of his changing audience. This realization caused Grendel to feel that his own efforts to “[transform] the world with words” (49) were futile.
Distracted from the Shaper’s song, Grendel argued with himself; while he believed the Shaper had the right to do what he was doing, Grendel could not tolerate the fact that the Shaper’s motivations involved monetary rewards and adulation. Grendel tried to blame art itself for the situation—“If the ideas of art were beautiful, that was art’s fault, not the Shaper’s” (49)—but he was unsuccessful. Suddenly, Grendel felt a presence nearby, but it disappeared as suddenly as it arrived.
Grendel left his hiding place, and as he observed a pair of lovers in the clearing, he stumbled across a dead body—a man whose throat had been cut and his clothes stolen. Grendel picked up the corpse as he heard the Shaper begin singing again, this time about two brothers who fought and “split all the world between darkness and light” (51). Grendel heard the Shaper say that he, Grendel, was on the side of evil—and Grendel, though indignant, believed the Shaper. Upset by this revelation, Grendel staggered towards the meadhall, making noises and carrying the corpse. As men streamed out of the meadhall with their weapons, Grendel tried to tell the men that he was their friend, but they attacked him anyway. Grendel fled after throwing the corpse at his attackers, cursing in their language and realizing that he did not even have curse words of his own to use when he was emotional. When he calmed, Grendel lamented his loneliness but cheered up when he realized that men’s greedy natures guaranteed that they were all “doomed.”
Grendel now confesses that after the ordeal at the meadhall, only two days passed before he returned to hear more poetry, to which he felt “addicted.” The Shaper’s songs were full of lies about fights between Grendel and brave warriors who lived in the past, and Grendel became angry. He again sensed something nearby, a presence that he felt may be “evil inside myself pushed out into the trees” (54), but nothing appeared. He returned home to his cave and saw his mother, who whimpered as though attempting to speak. Grendel fell asleep and woke up suddenly, sensing something nearby. It did not respond when Grendel spoke, so he left his cave and walked out to the moor, where he went “blank” and headed “toward the dragon” (56).
Chapter 5 Summary
The fifth chapter presents Grendel’s vivid memory of the dragon, who greeted him as he entered the dragon’s “treasure-hoard” at the top of a mountain. Fire escaped from the dragon’s mouth as he talked to Grendel. The dragon was enormous, and he patted Grendel’s head with his huge paw as Grendel tried to calm his own fear. Inside the dragon’s cave, Grendel was unable to speak, and the dragon could not stop laughing at Grendel’s terror. He pointed out to Grendel that the men feel similarly when they see Grendel. The dragon’s laughter offended Grendel, so he picked up a large emerald from the cave floor, intending to throw it at the dragon in fury; the dragon shouted at him for touching the jewel and then settled on a pile of treasure, “old-womanish” and irritated.
Grendel was sure that he would not be able to “learn anything from him now” (60), as the dragon appeared to be in a bad mood. As Grendel thought about the men’s fear, he decided to stop scaring them. The dragon, who was omniscient, read Grendel’s mind, becoming even more irritated with what he found there, and Grendel apologized, which annoyed the dragon more because he already knew “everything.” The dragon understood that Grendel wanted to learn about the Shaper and his power, and he explained that though dragons know everything there is to know, they do not cause things to happen; in fact, dragons accept that free will does not exist. Grendel did not respond verbally, knowing that his words were redundant.
The dragon talked about men, noting that Grendel appeared to understand men very well. He criticized men for their many shortcomings, including their “crackpot theories” and their tendency to generalize. These shortcomings, the dragon explained, are what make men vulnerable to the Shaper, who gives men “an illusion of reality” (65) that allows them to believe in God and Heaven. The dragon went on to talk about matters of nature, time, and space, confusing Grendel with philosophical jargon. He interrupted himself as Grendel’s mind wandered, accusing Grendel of boredom. Grendel defended himself, and the dragon changed tack, using a golden jug to demonstrate the complexity of nature and its tendency to organize itself. Grendel couldn’t follow the dragon’s comparisons, and the two reached an intellectual impasse when Grendel couldn’t accept the meaninglessness of life.
The dragon, his omniscience bearing clairvoyance into the future, nonchalantly suggested to Grendel that nothing lasts or is truly meaningful, and he then told Grendel that he, the dragon, will even be slain by a man. Grendel protested these fatalistic predictions, but the dragon asserted that Grendel’s understanding covered only the “ripple in Time’s stream” (71) that marked Grendel’s own existence.
Grendel defied the dragon by claiming that there is value in his hopes for self-improvement. The dragon was unimpressed, then frustrated with Grendel, and then pitying. He explained that Grendel’s presence is motivational to the men he terrifies and that Grendel leads men to consider their own mortality. If Grendel were to stop scaring the men, the dragon asserted, another monstrous creature would simply take his place and fulfill his role of “brute existent.” Stubbornly resisting the dragon’s words, Grendel started to tell the dragon about the Shaper’s song, but the dragon covered his ears and mocked Grendel for believing there is a reason behind existence. The dragon advised Grendel to “beware of strangers” and to “seek out gold and sit on it” (74).
Chapter 6 Summary
Grendel acknowledges that something of his conversation with the dragon stayed with him, like an “aura.” He remembers discovering that the dragon had given him a special power and that weapons no longer injure him. Grendel says that at first, he believed his invulnerability was a positive, but he soon learned that the dragon’s charm had destroyed whatever relationship Grendel had with the men, as they could no longer even engage in battle with each other.
Grendel remembers the evening he realized that weapons no longer had the power to cut him. It was summer, and harvest time was approaching. That evening, he had approached the meadhall and heard the Shaper’s song about God’s benevolence during the harvest time. He felt anger instead of sadness, irritated by the song’s hopefulness and the men’s stupidity for believing it. A guard saw Grendel and attacked him with his sword, but no wound appeared, surprising them both. Laughing at the men who streamed out of the meadhall, Grendel ran away with the guard in his arms and bit the guard’s head off in front of the horrified audience. A few nights later, Grendel raided the meadhall for the first time, killing seven men in their sleep and eating them.
Grendel reflects on his loneliness during this time, recalling more raids. He remembers the words of encouragement the men would shout at each other as they fought, thinking they would be remembered as heroes. Grendel laughed at these men, whom he believed idiotic. One night, while he was again terrorizing the hall, a man called Unferth challenged him directly. When Grendel responded to the challenge, Unferth treated him less like an animal, recognizing that Grendel was using language to communicate. Grendel berated Unferth, mocking him for trying to be a hero, and Unferth grew upset as Grendel threw apples at him. Grendel left the meadhall to return to his cave. Looking back on the encounter, Grendel now thinks to himself that he “got more pleasure from that apple fight than from any other battle in my life” (86).
Grendel shares that three nights later, he woke up to find out that Unferth had followed him: Grendel’s mother paced inside the cave, excited by the smell of a human. Unferth, exhausted and cut up from his trek, lay panting on the cave floor, whispering to himself about the songs that would be sung about him, the hero who pursued and died in battle with the terrible fiend Grendel. Hearing this pathetic rhapsodizing, Grendel realized that Unferth was waiting for Grendel to kill him. Not wanting to give Unferth this satisfaction, Grendel merely sat down and watched him in taunting silence; Unferth, taking this silence as an insult, became more emotional, protesting Grendel’s “nasty insinuations” about the falsity of glory and the absurdity of poetry. He talked about “inner heroism” and the inevitability of death when one tries to be heroic. Grendel then spoke, dismissing “heroism” a way to avoid boredom, and Unferth was indignant. When Unferth finally fell asleep, Grendel picked him up carefully and carried him back to the meadhall. He left Unferth at the door, unharmed, but killed two guards.
After recounting this story, Grendel confides in the reader, “[Unferth] lives on, bitter, feebly challenging my midnight raids from time to time […]” (90). Now during his raids, Grendel infuriates and shames Unferth when he takes special care to spare Unferth and to kill everyone else around him.
Chapters 4-6 Analysis
These chapters cover the three summer months of any given year, and in Chapter 4, Grendel recalls the Danes taking advantage of summer’s long days by constructing the meadhall, which functions in the novel as an important symbol of the Danes’ community and optimism. When Grendel spied on the meadhall’s inhabitants, he overheard another of the Shaper’s magnificent songs, but this one concerned Grendel himself and his supposed ancestor Cain. Cain and Abel are two brothers who appear in the Book of Genesis in the Hebrew Bible; after God seemed to show more favor to Abel than to Cain, Cain killed Abel in a jealous rage. Cain paid for his crime against his family and God by living apart from society for the rest of his life, a situation with which Grendel can identify. The Shaper’s song foreshadows fraternal relationships elsewhere in the novel, and it draws attention to the ties of kinship as well as the potential for murderous competition. In particular, the song foreshadows an event in Chapter 12: a fight between the Stranger (Beowulf) and Grendel, during which the Stranger will address Grendel as “my brother” as he kills him. Brotherly relationships complement the theme of humanity and monstrosity; as the Stranger is the murderous brother, then it must be he who is the descendant of Cain; he, not Grendel, must be the true monster. This exploration of the nature of evil reflects one of the more prominent themes of the novel.
Though the dragon plays a major role in Grendel’s life, he is a minor character. The introduction of the dragon as a presence or an intuition suggests that he exists in abstraction, but the reality of his existence becomes terrifyingly concrete in Chapter 5, when Grendel recounts responding to a mysterious unspoken summons and traveling to the dragon’s lair. The dragon’s impenetrable philosophical and academic style of communication reinforces his mystical quality; he is incomprehensible for many reasons. Grendel’s confusion during his audience with the dragon further humanizes Grendel, as many readers can relate to his bafflement.
In Chapter 5, Grendel remembers earnestly responding to the dragon’s pretensions and even attempting to throw a jewel at him—an act that, though juvenile and rash, was authentic and spontaneous. This recollection appears at the center of the novel both in terms of character arc and chapter location; the news that Grendel received from the dragon marks the psychological climax of the novel. It is at this point when Grendel learned that he is on earth primarily as an existential accessory to the Danes’ lives and that he is completely replaceable. While this knowledge intensifies his existential crisis, it frees him to behave however he likes, as his actions appear meaningless in the grand scheme of things.
The dragon advised Grendel to indulge his greed and to find gold; such gold-seeking would be to behave like both the dragon and humans, whose destructiveness is driven by their desire for gold. To the erudite dragon, greed was the single unifying feature of living creatures; to Grendel, who at the time imagined that something more benevolent had the potential to unite individuals, the dragon’s words had a nihilistic edge. Grendel’s nature became edgier, too, in response to the dragon’s message. In Chapter 6, when Grendel recounts learning that the dragon had made it so that weapons could do Grendel no harm, he relays that this invulnerability only added to his experience of the world as a senseless place. Moreover, Grendel’s encounter with Unferth, who sought a hero’s death, irritated Grendel because of the senselessness of Unferth’s dogged pursuit of redemption and immortality.
In this section of the novel, the nonlinear structure becomes even more apparent as the reader must follow Grendel’s own personal chronology of events. For example, the reader knows that Grendel has been raiding the meadhall for years, but it is only in Chapter 6 that Grendel finally shares a memory providing detail of the first raid and the feelings of otherness and isolation that contributed to his decision to terrorize the Danes. Within the next section of chapters, the nonlinear storyline will again shift when the past-tense narrative catches up to the present Grendel.
