Essay Comparing Beowulf And Grendel

Since both Beowulf and Grendel, by John Gardner, provide similar facts but different descriptions of Beowulf, he is portrayed as a hero in one story and a villain in the other despite the fact that he clearly possesses superhuman strength in both stories.

Beowulf has superhuman strength in both Grendel and Beowulf. In Grendel, Grendel recognizes Beowulf’s enormous strength when he gets his arm torn off by Beowulf, “Nowhere on middle-earth, I realize have I encountered a grip like his… I feel the bones go, ground from their sockets, and I scream again” (Gardner 168-9). Beowulf has much more strength than the average soldier in Grendel. While none of Beowulf’s kinsmen can even harm Grendel, Beowulf single-handedly tears off his arm with seemingly

little effort. The folk epic Beowulf similarly portrays Beowulf as a “freak of nature” due to his unnatural strength, such as when he is able to use the giants’ sword:
Then he saw, hanging on the wall, a heavy / Sword, hammered by giants, strong / And blessed with their magic, the best of all weapons / But so massive that no ordinary man could lift / Its carved and decorated length.

He drew it / From its scabbard, broke the chain on its hilt, / And then, savage, now, angry / And desperate, lifted it high over his head / And struck with all the strength he had left (Raffel 530-8)

Beowulf is the only human who is able to yield the mighty weapon, which shows that he contains superhuman strength in the epic Beowulf as well as in the novel Grendel.

One of the major differences between Grendel and Beowulf is that Beowulf is portrayed as the villain in Grendel while he is the apparent hero in Beowulf. In Grendel, John Gardner describes Beowulf in great detail when he first arrives:

Voice of a dead thing, calm as dry sticks and ice when the wind blows over them. He had a strange face that, little by little, grew unsettling to me: it was a face, or so it seemed for an instant, from a dream I had almost forgotten. The eyes slanted downward, never blinking, unfeeling as a snake’s… Staring at his grotesquely muscled shoulders – stooped, naked despite the cold, sleek as the belly of a shark and as rippled with power as the shoulders of a horse… He was dangerous. (Gardner

154-5)
These qualities make Beowulf seem like a villain. He shows very little emotion, appears to look rather strange but powerful, and seems to be a threat to Grendel. He is also dangerous and has “snake eyes”. On the other hand, Beowulf is portrayed as a hero in the folk epic Beowulf.