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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Isolation and Otherness
In both the Anglo-Saxon epic poem Beowulf and the novel Grendel, Grendel is characterized as an outsider. He lives in isolation on the edge of the wilderness, within earshot of the celebration at the meadhall but excluded from its warmth and community. Both literary works suggest that it is this sense of isolation that causes Grendel the acute anger and frustration that manifest in his violence against the Danes.
In the original epic poem, the explanation behind Grendel’s monstrosity primarily concerns his evil nature, his inherited corruption as a descendant of Cain, and his separateness from God. In Gardner’s novel, however, Grendel’s behaviors are a response to tragic alienation: Hostility and misunderstanding characterize his dealings with humans, and he grows up in an isolated environment. In fact, Grendel recalls that when the Shaper sang about Grendel’s ancestors and their link to his terrifying behavior, he was indignant before ultimately submitting hopelessly to the Shaper’s story. To Grendel, this fiction was unjust, and the Shaper’s beautiful song allowed the Danes to feel no responsibility for Grendel’s wrath.
One of Grendel’s defining characteristics is his sensitive nature. He learned about the pain of rejection and fear when he first met humans (a memory shared in Chapter 2), and this first meeting sets the unfortunate tone for all his future dealings with humans. From the frightening experience in the tree, the young Grendel learned that he was, unexpectedly, terrifying to humans, and this realization led to an acute sense of loneliness. He still notices how other creatures in the forest regard him fearfully, and he wonders what he has done to deserve such isolating treatment.
Otherness is the quality of being different from others, and this sense of otherness exacerbates Grendel’s psychological isolation. His closest friend and relative is his mother, and her inability to speak means that Grendel cannot communicate with her about his thoughts, feelings, and experiences, though he sometimes feels he can somewhat interpret her nonverbal cues. His intellectual loneliness exists alongside his sensitivity to art and beauty; he has no one with whom he can share his experience, and this worsens his experience of being different.
The Redemptive Power of Art
The Shaper’s songs, though they are lies, have the power to move Grendel as well as the humans, and Grendel’s sensitivity to the Shaper’s song and to other expressions of beauty reveal art’s power to impact lives and to shape one’s understanding of the world. Grendel is not only sensitive to the Shaper’s creative powers, but he is also sensitive to the fact that the Danes are completely taken with the Shaper’s stories. Though Grendel criticizes the humans for their susceptibility to such artistic lies, he has empathy for the situation as he, too, feels the power of the Shaper’s words.
Grendel’s own talent for wordplay and his skill with language reflects his own artistic potential and the redemptive power of art to challenge definitions of monstrosity. Throughout the latter chapters, Grendel communicates his thoughts in verse as well as in script form. These linguistic experiments demonstrate a creative impulse that counters Grendel’s reputation as merely a destroyer. Further, they draw attention to Grendel’s ambivalence towards the idea of truth. He knows that the Shaper can incorporate lies into a beautiful story, so it is possible that he, too, toys with untruths to learn about the power of art from the perspective of an artist.
Though Grendel’s specific response to the Shaper illustrates the thematic significance of artistic power, the novel as a whole also represents the theme in a broader sense. Thanks to the creative power of the author, readers are able to question their own assumptions about their world; like the character of the Shaper, the novel’s author creates a world in which certain ideas and feelings make sense, offering readers a community of their own with which they can decipher the confusions of being alive and curious about life and existence.
The Nature of Evil
By centering on the inner world of a monster whose sensitivity and intellect battle his violent tendencies, the novel questions the nature of evil and examines the ways in which humans can enact evil and themselves become monsters. In the original epic poem from which the novel draws, the character of Grendel is predominantly monstrous. In Grendel, however, it is his complexity that defines him, which suggests that morality is more complicated than can be accommodated by old moral systems that divide behavior into good or evil.
According to Christian tradition, evil describes the state of separation from God. Various Bible stories illustrate the concept; for example, Adam and Eve lose their communion with God when they are expelled from Eden for their sin of pride. It is only in this “fallen” world that Cain, Adam and Eve’s firstborn, can indulge the next sin of envy—and then murder, the gravest sin for such people as the Anglo-Saxons, whose sovereignly organizing virtue is kinship. Cain, from whom Grendel is presumed to have descended, provokes God’s curse and is sent into exile as a wanderer because, in his jealous murderous rage, he spitefully embraces and willfully manifests his fallenness, his spiritual separation from God. Cain is thus left to live alone, alienated from community. Grendel’s evil, and his consequent isolation, appears to be inherited, not earned; he has done nothing to become evil, unlike his ancestor, a fact that calls into question whether he deserves the treatment he receives. (Indeed, even Cain is eventually given divine protection against others’ murder, while Grendel is slain.)
Alongside the thematic significance of this ambiguity around the nature of evil lies the question of nature versus nurture. The narrative’s events and Grendel’s characterization invite questions concerning the influence of Grendel’s experiences and environment on his nature. Was he born violent, or do his circumstances nurture a healthy aggression and instinct to defend oneself through violence? Gardner leaves these questions unanswered, leaving it up to the reader to decide what defines the nature of evil and what doesn’t.
