Grendel is the protagonist and narrator of the novel. He is a terrifying monster who kills and eats humans, but he is also a lonely, isolated creature, who craves a friend or companion. Grendel is a relentlessly thinking and questioning character. As he grows and experiences new things, Grendel constantly theorizes about the world and ponders deep questions about time and space, formulating laws and drawing grand conclusions about the universe. Persuaded by the ideas of the dragon , Grendel accepts that the universe is meaningless and mechanical, but he is also deeply frustrated by the stupidity and indifference of nature and its inhabitants, as particularly shown through his interactions with the ram, bull, and goat . It is through Grendel’s eyes that we see the humans, and Grendel’s perspective emphasizes the cruelty and senseless violence of the humans. From Grendel’s point of view, the grandiose ideas of heroism, justice, and religion upon which the humans found their society are simply false, foolish ideas. Unlike his monstrous mother , Grendel has the ability to speak, and although he despises the Danes, he is also to some degree jealous of their community and feels a special bond with them, especially Hrothgar . He takes care not to wipe out all of the Danes, so that he still has people to frighten and toy with.
The Grendel quotes below are all either spoken by Grendel or refer to Grendel. For each quote, you can also see the other characters and themes related to it (each theme is indicated by its own dot and icon, like this one:
Behind my back, at the world’s end, my pale slightly glowing fat mother sleeps on, old, sick at heart, in our dingy underground room. Life-bloated, baffled, long-suffering hag. Guilty, she imagines, of some unremembered, perhaps ancestral crime. (She must have some human in her.) Not that she thinks. Not that she dissects and ponders the dusty mechanical bits of her miserable life’s curse.
Related Characters: Grendel (speaker), Grendel’s Mother Related Themes:
The king has lofty theories of his own. “Theories,” I whisper to the bloodstained ground. So the dragon once spoke. (“They’d map out roads through Hell with their crackpot theories!” I recall his laugh.)
