Beowulf/Grendel

Chris Neiberger

Beowulf essay



Unlike William Shakespeare I don’t see the monsters of Beowulf as symbolizing human emotions. Like how William Shakespeare called jealousy a green eyed monster, I don’t see jealousy as being a monster because jealousy is a human emotion and to characterize it as being inhuman would simply be to deny an ugly but important aspect of the human condition. To understand what Gardner meant Grendel and his Mother to symbolize you must look at them as children of Cain. While being some kind of freakish mutation of the human genome caused by Cains fall from grace the still are human or at least part human by lineage alone. This is illustrated in Beowulf page 24 lines 19-21 “He was spawned in that slime conceived by a pair of those monsters born of Cain”. The Dragon however does not apply to this, or at least know one mentioned it making him a representation of something inhuman either above or beneath our human society or some aspect of an in...