Lesson 1.3 · Unit 1 · RL.11-12.2, RL.11-12.4
Grendel, and the monster as a reading problem
Grendel and his mother are the poem's two hardest interpretive problems, because the poem keeps giving them qualities that make them legible as people and then withdrawing those qualities. Neither reading survives the whole text.
- Grendel is descended from Cain, which places him inside a biblical frame the pagan material does not have.
- He is driven by the noise of the hall, specifically by the song of creation, which the poem states directly.
- He is repeatedly called a man, in words the poem also uses for warriors.
- He is exiled, joyless and outside the hall, which is the condition the elegies describe as the worst available to a person.
- Grendel's mother acts from feud logic, avenging a son, which is precisely what the human characters do.
- The poem calls her attack less terrible than Grendel's, because it follows a rule.
- The mere is described as an anti-hall, underwater, joyless and roofed with fire.
- The monsters are not allegories with fixed meanings, and the poem's refusal to settle them is deliberate.
Where students lose marks: deciding Grendel "represents" something and stopping. Write about what the poem does when it describes him, which is alternately humanize and expel, and about what that alternation produces.
The text. Beowulf, Gummere translation, 1910. Public domain.
With envy and anger an evil spirit
endured the dole in his dark abode,
that he heard each day the din of revel
high in the hall: there harps rang out,
clear song of the singer.
So ruled the ruler, and revel was theirs,
till the fiend up-sprang, a hellish fiend,
grim demon that haunted the marshes wild,
the moor and the fen.
Step one: read the first passage for what Grendel feels. Envy and anger, and he "endured the dole", meaning he suffered grief. The poem assigns him an interior before it assigns him a shape.
Step two: state what that establishes. Something capable of envy is capable of wanting to be included. The poem's opening account of its monster is a description of exclusion felt from the inside.
Step three: identify what he actually hears. The harp and the singer, and the song is the poet's account of creation. Grendel is enraged by a creation story he is not part of.
Step four: work the second passage's vocabulary. "Fiend", "hellish", "demon". The same creature is now given no interior at all, only origin and habitat, and the words come from Christian theology rather than from the heroic world.
Step five: state the alternation. The poem humanizes him in one passage and expels him in the next, and it does this repeatedly. A reading that picks one and discards the other is tidying the poem rather than describing it.
Step six: turn to his mother. She kills one man, Aeschere, in payment for her son. That is feud logic, the same reasoning every human character in the poem accepts, and the poem says her raid was less terrible than Grendel's.
Step seven: state the difficulty that produces. Grendel is worse because he follows no rule; his mother is less bad because she follows the same rule the Danes follow. The poem has admitted that its monster acts on the society's own principles.
Step eight: state the finding. The monsters mark the edge of what the heroic code can contain, and the poem will not say whether that edge is a boundary of nature or of definition. Writing about the alternation is the analysis; resolving it is not.
Questions 1 to 5 are recall. Questions 6 to 10 ask for reasoning.
- Whom is Grendel descended from?
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Cain
- What specifically enrages him?
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The noise of the hall, and the singer's song of creation
- Whom does Grendel's mother kill, and why?
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Aeschere, in payment for her son
- How does the poem rank her attack against Grendel's?
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As less terrible
- How is the mere described?
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As an anti-hall: underwater, joyless, roofed with fire
- What does assigning Grendel envy accomplish?
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It gives him an interior before it gives him a shape. Something capable of envy is capable of wanting to be included, so the poem's first account of its monster is a description of exclusion felt from inside. A reader who has been told what Grendel feels cannot afterward treat him as pure appetite. It makes exclusion something he experiences
- Why does it matter that he hears a creation song?
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Because it specifies what he is excluded from. Not a party but an account of the world's making that has no place for him in it. The rage is at a story rather than at a noise, which raises the stakes considerably and connects the Cain genealogy to what actually happens in the hall. He is enraged by a creation story he is not part of
- Describe the alternation in the poem's treatment of Grendel.
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One passage gives him envy, grief and an interior; the next gives him only origin and habitat in the vocabulary of Christian demonology. The poem humanizes and expels him in turn, repeatedly. A reading that picks one mode and discards the other is tidying the poem rather than describing what it does. It humanizes him and expels him by turns
- Why is Grendel's mother the harder problem?
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Because she acts on the society's own principle. She kills one man in payment for a son, which is feud logic, and the poem calls her raid less terrible than Grendel's precisely because it follows a rule. The poem has conceded that its monster reasons the way the Danes reason, which makes the boundary between inside and outside a matter of definition rather than of nature. She follows the same feud logic the humans follow
- What is the right way to write about these monsters?
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Describe what the poem does when it describes them rather than deciding what they represent. The alternation between interior and expulsion is the evidence, and the poem's refusal to settle it marks the edge of what the heroic code can contain. An essay that names the alternation and argues about its effect will outperform one that assigns a fixed meaning. Write about the alternation, not about what they symbolize