Grendel
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Important Quotations Explained
1. I
understood that the world was nothing: a mechanical chaos of casual,
brute enmity on which we stupidly impose our hopes and fears. I
understood that, finally and absolutely, I alone exist. All the
rest, I saw, is merely what pushes me, or what I push against, blindly—as
blindly as all that is not myself pushes back.
2. Thus
I fled, ridiculous hairy creature torn apart by poetry—crawling,
whimpering, streaming tears, across the world like a two-headed
beast, like mixed-up lamb and kid at the tail of a baffled, indifferent
ewe—and I gnashed my teeth and clutched the sides of my head as
if to heal the split, but I couldn’t.
3. “Nevertheless,
something will come of all this,” I said.
“Nothing,”
he said. “A brief pulsation in the black hole of eternity. My advice
to you—”
“Wait and see,” I said.
He
shook his head. “My advice to you, my violent friend, is to seek
out gold and sit on it.”
4. I
had become something, as if born again. I had hung between possibilities
before, between the cold truths I knew and the heart-sucking conjuring
tricks of the Shaper; now that was passed: I was Grendel, Ruiner
of Meadhalls, Wrecker of Kings!
But also,
as never before, I was alone.
5. As
you see it it is, while the seeing lasts, dark nightmare-history,
time-as-coffin; but where the water was rigid there will be fish,
and men will survive on their flesh till spring. It’s coming, my
brother. . . . Though you murder the world, transmogrify life into
I and it, strong searching roots will crack your cave and rain will
cleanse it: The world will burn green, sperm build again.
Grendel represents Agnar, son of Ingeld
by beowulfgeek, December 19, 2012
Spent a lot of years working on 'Beowulf' and I reckon that the monsters represent human characters. In my view: Grendel represents Agnar, son of Ingeld; Grendel's Mum represents the daughter of Earl Swerting of Sweden (and the first wife of Ingeld); and the Dragon represents Onela, king of the Swedes. I think that there has been a scribal error right at the beginning of the poem, which has made Scyld's 'bearn' (Modern English, 'bairn') into Beowulf the First. Thus the real parallels of the poem have been lost.
As far as the first tw
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