Summary
At home in the mere, his underground realm, the monster
Grendel watches an old ram stand stupid and inert at the edge of
a cliff. Grendel yells at the creature, stamps his feet, and throws
stones at it, but the ram refuses to so much as acknowledge Grendel’s
presence. Grendel lets out a howl so terrible that it freezes the
water at his feet, but the ram remains unmoved. The ram’s stubborn
stolidity reminds Grendel that spring has arrived in a similarly
undeniable fashion.
The commencement of the growing season marks the beginning of
the twelfth year of Grendel’s war with the humans, a conflict he derides
as stupid and pointless. Grendel is further disgusted by the fact
that the arrival of warm weather has awakened the ram’s mindless,
animalistic sexual urges. He rhetorically asks the sky why the idiotic
animal cannot discover any dignity, but the sky, like the ram, refuses
to respond. Grendel responds with an upturned middle finger and
a defiant kick. He admits, however, that he himself is no nobler
than any of the brainless animals, calling himself a pointless, ridiculous
monster who stinks of death. As Grendel walks through his realm,
he notices the signs of spring all around him and also notes places
where he has committed various acts of violence. Grendel’s presence
frightens a doe, and he claims the reaction is unfair—he has never
done anything to harm a deer.
Passing the sleeping body of his fat, foul mother, Grendel
swims through firesnake-infested waters up to the surface of the
earth. His seasonal journey up to the world of men is just as mechanical
and mindless as the ram’s springtime lust, and Grendel laments the
necessary repetition. When he reaches the edge of his territory,
he stands at the edge of a cliff and stares down into an abyss.
He yells into the chasm and is surprised by the volume of his own
voice. Grendel continues down the cliffs and through the fens and
moors on his way to the meadhall of Hrothgar, king of the Danes.
As he makes his way to the meadhall, Grendel thinks of his mother,
who continues to sleep in their underground haunt. She is wracked
by guilt for some unnamed, secret crime. She has lost the ability
to speak, and so is unable—or unwilling—to answer Grendel’s questions
about the nature of their existence.
Grendel arrives at Hrothgar’s meadhall and coldheartedly
ravages the human community. This is the twelfth year of Grendel’s raids,
and he calmly, laughingly anticipates the reactions of the men. They
turn off the lights in an attempt to confuse Grendel, but Grendel
can see in the dark, and he easily bests the humans. In the chaos that
ensues, Grendel sacks up several dead bodies and retreats to the woods,
where he eats them and laughs maniacally. When dawn comes, however,
the sour meat of the humans sits heavy in his stomach and he is
filled with gloom once again.
Grendel listens as the Danes attribute the attack to the
whims of an angry god, and he watches as the slow process of rebuilding
the meadhall begins. A funeral pyre is erected, and as the corpses
burn, the Danes throw golden rings, swords, and helmets onto the
fire. The crowd sings a song together, and to Grendel’s ears the
song seems to be one of triumph. Nauseated and filled with rage,
Grendel flees for home.
Analysis
The first few pagesof Grendel echo
the beginning of Geoffrey Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales, a
work that features one of the most famous openings in the English
canon. In that fourteenth-century work, the arrival of spring and
its fresh, sexual vigor prompts a group of English pilgrims to undertake
a long journey to visit the martyr of Canterbury. The presence of
the ram is a direct link to Chaucer’s poem, for Chaucer’s pilgrims
are said to set off when the sun is halfway through the cycle of
the Ram, or Aries. The poet T.S. Eliot, like Gardner in Grendel, parodies
Chaucer in the first stanzas of his poem The Waste Land (1922).
In the poem, Eliot transforms Chaucer’s optimistic imagery into
a sad and brutal scene, describing spring rising over a desolate,
mechanized modern world. Here, in Grendel, Gardner
appears to be drawing from Eliot’s imagery when he has Grendel describe
the grasses poking through the ground as “the children of the dead.”
