Grendel Is Evil Essay

In Grendel by John Gardner, Grendel is widely known as a monster. However, once this novel is portrayed first-person through Grendel’s eyes, it becomes evident that he is not the true beast. The true evil in the novel originates from the humans. The reader interprets Grendel’s thoughts in a new perspective forcing them to realize all of Grendel's actions result from the cruelty of humans acted upon him. He has a fear of being overrun by the evil humans which causes him to act as he does. Grendel is not evil because he simply mocks the interactions he sees from the humans during their wars and towards him during their first encounters all the way to when Grendel is brutally killed by the human Beowulf.

Grendel sat in the top of the trees of the forest and observed the humans. He watched hunters from different bands brutally fight and then return to their camps to tell their stories. He watched these bands grow larger and fight harder in order to gain power. Then the threats got more serious, and the real

wars began. Grendel states, “I was safe in my tree, and the men who fought were nothing to me, except of course they talked in something akin to my language which meant that we were, incredibly, related. I was sickened, if only at the waste of it: all they killed- cows, horses, men- they left to rot or burn” (Gardner 36). On the surface, this seems as if Grendel is just greedy. Nonetheless, it makes the reader realize that humans kill, with no real purpose. They are determined to gain more power, and they do not see anything wrong with this. Grendel kills with purpose, and a plethora of them. He could kill for the absolute fact of food and survival. He grew up this way and doesn’t have any other way to live. He always serves a purpose for the humans. The dragon taught Grendel that the humans need an enemy and Grendel felt like it gave him a reason to be here and that is what he belongs doing. Grendel morality seems to be more legitimate than the humans.
It also becomes apparent that the humans are evil during their first interactions with Grendel.

Grendel is in the tree with an injured ankle which gets exacerbated by the “mechanical” bull charging at him. Then the humans come and Grendel realizes something, “... and suddenly I knew I was dealing with no dull mechanical bull but with thinking creatures, pattern makers, the most dangerous things I’d ever met” (Gardner 27). Grendel encounters humans and discovers that they are not mechanical. This is threatening to Grendel because it seems as if everything he has dealt with thus far has been mechanical. He knows they are dangerous because they are unpredictable, and smart, nothing like the bull he had faced earlier. They have the ability to break out of routine and make new patterns. His hatred of Hrothgar and his people began that night when they attacked him when he posed no threat, he was simply hungry. This initiated Grendel’s relentless obsession with

humans.
At the end of the novel, Grendel is killed by Beowulf, who is human. However Beowulf would not let him die on his own terms. Beowulf slowly tortures Grendel even though he has the ability to kill him quickly. He tears off Grendel’s arm and Grendel screams out for his mom. Beowulf whispers into Grendel’s ear when he is killing him, which illustrates him as the monster. He smashes Grendel’s face against the wall and shows more cruelty than Grendel has ever had. He says “He’s crazy. I understand him all right, make no mistake, Understand his lunatic theory of matter and mind, the chilly intellect, the hot imagination, blocks and builder, reality as stress”(Gardner 172). The fact that Grendel is appalled by the evil of Beowulf shows who the true monster is.
When this story is read through Grendel’s eyes, the reader’s perception of good vs. evil becomes skewed. The fact of the matter is that even though Grendel is recognized as the monster, he is not the real evil beast, the real evil beasts are the humans. Many times throughout the story, Grendel acts in a much more heroic, admirable way than the humans. Reader’s see that humans priorities and actions can be downright cruel. Grendel does eat people, but he does not do this for mere pleasure. The way the humans act is the reason Grendel is the way he is, along with the fact that that is how he was raised. Once looked at in a new way, Grendel becomes the more heroic character.