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Alex Hayes
8 May 2013
Problematic Morality in Beowulf and Grendel
For most people, good and evil are not difficult concepts: they are principles taught and
ingrained at an early age, lost only in moments of moral confusion and crisis. Apart from parents
and mentors, narratives are perhaps the most significant source of moral input in everyday life.
Aesop’s Fables, for example, are a series of parables with didactic intention. But where lessons
learned from human interaction are fairly explicit, messages gleamed from stories are often
subtler and sometimes require the reader to make inferences as to their meaning. These
subjective assessments are heavily influenced by the context of the story and by which character
is cast as the protagonist. The Anglo-Saxon poem Beowulf, written over a thousand years ago, is
a superlative example of the usage of the hero and villain dichotomy. The protagonist and
namesake of the story, Beowulf, is a paragon of positive values and leadership. His fame and
place in history are confirmed by the destruction of Grendel, an antagonist of the people and
representative of ultimate evil. However, more recent imaginations of the story vary in
interpretation. In a 1971 retelling of the story by John Garden, titled Grendel, the roles of hero
and monster are reversed. A postmodern work, Grendel challenges paradigms of good and evil
by telling the story from Grendel’s point of view, which casts Grendel in a much more positive
light while removing the affirmative attitude towards Beowulf’s actions. These contrasting
viewpoints illustrate that the relative values of good and evil are not absolute, but are instead
determined by cultural context.
The original poem champions Beowulf as the epitome of goodness. Beowulf is a “flower
of warriors” (Heaney 1758): “there was no one else like him alive. In his day, he was the
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mightiest man on earth, born high and strong” (Heaney 196-198). When Grendel’s arm is seen
“in the hand of the hero displayed high up near the roof” (Heaney 833-834), Beowulf, a nobody,
becomes a somebody: the archetypal hero warrior. Previously ignored, society now finds in him
someone who risks his life for the greater good and his fellow man. His awesomeness
precipitates his rise to power, where Beowulf's place in history is determined by his success and
benevolence as king, his feats in battle, and finally, the sacrifice of his own life to save his
people. Beowulf is a clear representation of Anglo-Saxon excellence.
Gardner's post-modern account, on the other hand, rejects the notion of Beowulf as the
champion of good. Gardner's story seizes upon the triviality of Anglo-Saxon violence: while war
is an essential part of society in the original tale, Grendel seeks to expose it as meaningless and
hypocritical. Grendel would watch as “twenty feet apart [the thanes] would slide to a
stop…howling their lungs out…things about their fathers and their fathers’ fathers, things about
justice and honor and lawful revenge…it was confusing and frightening…I was sickened”
(Gardner 35-36). By casting violence in derogatory light, Gardner reveals Beowulf not to be a
hero, but instead to be a savage. Given the moral ambiguity of Grendel and its post-modern
sentiments, Beowulf is the closest a character can come to being defined as evil; while his hazy
morality doesn’t allow the reader to label him as evil, he is rendered in a most negative light.
However, Gardner’s casting changes are not complete. By telling the story from
Grendel's point of view, Gardner demonstrates the heroism of the struggle to find meaning in
life. Grendel is a tortured anti-hero, imperfect, self-doubting and flawed, never seen as noble by
those around him. He murders people, struggling to determine if he is horrified or excited by his
actions. But he also displays several strikingly heroic characteristics, particularly in the context
of Joseph Campbell’s monomyth, which strives to identify the major aspects of the heroic
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journey. For example, the expedition into the unknown is an early step in the heroic plotline.
Grendel’s story begins when he leaves his home, searching for something more, a better life for
himself. However, as soon as he set forth on his journey, Grendel immediately diverges from the
heroic monomyth. As he spends more time away from his home interacts more with humans and
the Shaper, a poet with prophetic visions of a bountiful human society, he also becomes more
lonely, and in turn, violent. His struggle drives him to speak with the dragon, which puts him
back on course with Campbell’s monomyth. The dragon, an essentially omniscient being, and the
mentor figure as described by Campbell, tells Grendel that his life has no absolute meaning. The
ensuing discussion causes Grendel to abandon the bright vision of the future the Shaper
promises, and to begin his reign of terror against Hrothgar. The dragon puts the heroism of
Grendel’s actions most clearly:
You improve them, my boy! Can’t you see that yourself? You stimulate them! You make
them think and scheme. You drive them to poetry, science, religion, all that makes them
what they are for so long as they last. You are, so to speak, the brute existence by which
they learn to define themselves. …you are mankind…Scare him to glory! (Gardner 7273)
Grendel’s goodness comes from his evil. Without his darkness to contrast the light, good and evil
lose much of their meaning, and so Grendel’s malevolence is key to the creation of good. Postmodern heroism can accept Grendel as a hero because of his duality, and the ambiguity it lends
him in the role of the hero.
Anglo-Saxons, on the other hand, are unaware of Grendel’s importance. They have no
alternate perspective – their opinion of Grendel is black and white. In Beowulf, Grendel is evil
because he is a killer and because he provokes a blood feud, yet no consideration is given to his
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motivations or circumstances. Grendel is the “bane of the race of men” (Heaney 712) and a
“God-cursed brute” (Heaney 121). To his motivations, the poem devotes few scant lines:
“[Grendel] nursed a hard grievance. It harrowed him to hear the din of the loud banquet”
(Heaney 97-98). The lack of alternative viewpoints allows for only one perception of Grendel:
maniacally gleeful as he pictures “the mayhem: … he would tear life from limb and devour
them, feed on their flesh” (Heaney 730-733). The rigid inflexibility of Anglo-Saxon characters
leads to binary views, which may be socially useful and comforting, but restricts the nuances of
morality.
While post-modernism may provide readers with a more nuanced depiction of morality, it
is also problematic due to its extremely malleable treatment of good and evil. Post-modern
heroes can be defined by their suffering and transformation and the ease with which the reader
can relate to their situation. However, post-modern heroes are also defined by the break they
cause in the metanarrative, the archetypal and overused plotline. They flip traditional stories on
their heads, cast doubt upon their morals and rebalance things in a new light. The post-modern
aspect of Grendel succeeds overwhelmingly with the inversion of Beowulf. So far as anyone can
tell, Grendel becomes the hero, Beowulf the villain, and traditional morality is thrown out the
window. However, the plot inversion and anti-heroism of post-modernism have an unfortunate
side-effect: it is difficult to differentiate between the hero and the villain. Grendel is instrumental
in the rise of human society, but he is a murderer. And not only is he a murderer, he frequently
seems to enjoy killing. As the anti-hero doubts himself, so must the reader. How can the reader
place trust in someone who doesn't even trust himself?
Anglo-Saxon definitions are much more straightforward. The Anglo-Saxon hero is a
static warrior, a king so high and distant and un-relatable that no reader could ever aspire to his
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actions, his superlative example of manliness. The Anglo-Saxon definition of evil is less nuanced
as well. They find that good comes from God and evil from the fiery pits of hell. Grendel's
connection to Cain in Beowulf exemplifies the importance of religious aspects of good and evil
to the Anglo-Saxons, a theme that appears in other works of the time, probably due to the recent
adoption of Christianity. The unified front of Anglo-Saxon morality doesn't vary by author,
which greatly simplifies reading their literature and determining their cultural values but restricts
more interesting moral interpretations.
The modern conception of morality, however, is not black and white. The virtue ethics of
post-modernism and the deontological beliefs of Anglo-Saxons each have their place, and certain
characteristics that cross the cultural bounds between the tellings may be more universally heroic
than others. Sacrifice is a leitmotiv in Beowulf as well as Grendel; Beowulf and Grendel give
everything, up to and including their own lives. They live for something larger than themselves,
no matter their moral status. They do things the reader can only dream of. On the other hand,
they are both cold blooded killers, engaging in petty blood feuds. In the end, it is how their story
is told that determines the morality of their actions. In essence, the author determines what is
right and what is wrong. Beowulf is a hero when Hrothgar's scop is the one telling the story, and
Grendel the hero when Gardner orates. The side telling the story validates and justifies their
hero's actions.
Nonetheless, such biased tellings of the story make it difficult to determine who
possesses the moral high ground, and in the end, the reader is responsible for justifying the
actions of Beowulf and Grendel. The narrator of any story is liable to cast their actions, or the
actions of their heroes, in a favorable light, and Grendel and Beowulf clearly disagree about the
identity of the villain. There is no real answer. Beowulf and Grendel can be villains at the same
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time as they are heroes. Their importance is the demonstration of good and evil as subjective
truths, and a simple binary dichotomy is too simplistic for most modern readers. The divergent
views in Beowulf and Grendel give the reader an opportunity to examine morality without some
of their inherent social baggage. They force readers to realize good and evil are biased
constructions, created by those with control over the narrative.
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Works Cited
Anonymous. Beowulf: a new verse translation. Trans Seamus Heaney. New York: W.W. Norton
& Co., 2001. Print.
Gardener, John. Grendel. New York City: Vintage Books USA, 1989. Print.
Campbell, Joseph. The hero with a thousand faces. Novato, California: New World Library,
2008. Print.