Grendel by John Gardner

Publisher: Vintage

Year: 1971/1989

Pages: 192

I read Beowulf in high school, as is the case for a great number of young adults, and was unlikely at that time to be able to appreciate it. The book is, after all, critically easy to misunderstand, misinterpret, underappreciate, or otherwise abuse. J.R.R. Tolkien famously wrote that Beowulf‘s importance as a poetic work far outstripped its value as a historical work. Apropos of nothing, I love Tolkien’s succinct, acerbic summary of all Beowulf scholarship to-date:

“Beowulf is a half-baked native epic the development of which was killed by Latin learning; it was inspired by emulation of Virgil, and is a product of the education that came in with Christianity; it is feeble and incompetent as a narrative; the rules of narrative are cleverly observed in the manner of the learned epic; it is the confused product of a committee of muddle-headed and probably beer-bemused Anglo-Saxons (this is a Gallic voice); it is a string of pagan lays edited by monks; it is the work of a learned but inaccurate Christian antiquarian; it is a work of genius, rare and surprising in the period, though the genius seems to have been shown principally in doing something much better left undone (this is a very recent voice); it is a wild folk-tale (general chorus); it is a poem of an aristocratic and courtly tradition (same voices); it is a hotchpotch; it is a sociological, anthropological, archaeological document; it is a mythical allegory (very old voices these and generally shouted down, but not so far out as some of the newer cries); it is rude and rough; it is a masterpiece of metrical art; it has no shape at all; it is singularly weak in construction; it is a clever allegory of contemporary politics (old John Earle with some slight support from Mr. Girvan, only they look to different periods); its architecture is solid; it is thin and cheap (a solemn voice); it is undeniably weighty (the same voice); it is a national epic; it is a translation from the Danish; it was imported by Frisian traders; it is a burden to English syllabuses; and (final universal chorus of all voices) it is worth studying.”

Then, too, the monsters of the story, Grendel and his mother, are more illuminating than the story’s protagonists. My teacher’s emphasis on the rhetorical devices at play (more on this later) are probably a direct result of this intellectual tradition, although we focused rather less on the monsters than Tolkien probably would have liked. These Monsters, according to Tolkien, are critically underappreciated, historically relegated to two-dimensional foils for the heroic acts of the main characters, be they poetic or historical. Rather, monsters represent a fundamental part of the mythos from which the book was written; Tolkien specifically draws parallels between Grendel and the Cyclops of Homer.

Read more…