The early Anglo-Saxons didn’t demand much from their monsters beyond being big and scary, so John Gardner had  a clear canvas when he wrote Grendel. It is, of course, Beowulf’s most famous villain telling his side of the story in a prequel of sorts. You won’t be surprised by what it is, but rather how well it works. This little novel is a haunting piece of existential writing.

 

Grendel depicted here as a disgruntled cast member of CATS.

Once it gains traction, however. Grendel’s sometimes wonky descriptions  (“[my mother's] smell poured in like blood into a silver cup, filling the moonlit clearing to the brim”) make the initial reading slow-going and frankly obnoxious until he encounters man. Thankfully, he’s not as hilariously eloquent as Frankenstein’s monster– not the cinematic “Fire Bad” version, you see, but the Mary Shelley ”Sirs, I Find Your Threat Of Immolation Distressing” version. Actually, this book functions much in the same way as the latter part of Frankenstein. It seeks not to excuse the monster’s savagery, but rather explain by intimate, sympathetic means how it sprang from human scorn. I dare say it does this even better.

How the Grinch Stole Christians

It’s easier to endear a murderous narrator to the reader when his victims seem like silly, vicious, drunken mooks before you even consider his perspective. Grendel is blessed with speech but cursed with the need to communicate, and while humans are the only ones who might talk back, Grendel’s appearance inspires more javelin throwing than conversation. So he becomes a watcher– amused, disgusted, and fascinated by the struggles of Dark-Age humanity in King Hrothgar’s growing dominion. From humble beginnings, Hrothgar gathers his power over the years, amassing gold and loyal thanes while constructing roads to the corners of his kingdom.

But Grendel’s heart shrank three sizes one day. “The Shaper” arrives at Hrothgar’s kingdom to sing mesmerizing songs of past conquest (“Lies!” as Grendel observes) and preach the gospel. Grendel even finds himself enthralled by the artful storytelling, and when The Shaper references him as a cursed being descended from Cain, Grendel is filled with self-loathing and bitterness: “It was a cold-blooded lie that a god had lovingly made the world and… that brothers had fought, that one of the races was saved, the other cursed. Yet he, the old Shaper, might make it true, by the sweetness of his harp, his cunning trickery.” 

Later Grendel encounters a temporally omniscient dragon that says “Boobies.” And yes, it’s the same one that will eventually slay and be slain by Beowulf. This meeting is one of the high points of the novel, wherein the dragon imparts that he’s witnessed the world’s end and that there’s no purpose to existence, yet he tells Grendel he should just go do as he pleases. The frustrated Grendel asks, “But why?”  

So the heart of the story is Grendel’s being torn between a Christian dogma that explains his existence as an abomination and his uneasy belief that the world is meaningless. This is brilliant considering that Beowulf was a poem theologically at odds with itself, being a story of pagan heroism set down and re-interpreted by a Christian scribe.

Exterminate the Jutes!