Who Was Grendel in Beowulf?

By Dena Bain Taylor

Grendel is the first of the three monsters killed by the great hero Beowulf in the epic Anglo-Saxon poem Beowulf. Here’s how the story goes:

Heorot, the magnificent hall of the great Danish king Hrothgar, is being terrorized by the monster Grendel.  Night after night, Grendel swoops in from the misty moors to slaughter Hrothgar’s thanes (warriors) where they lie sleeping on benches around the hall. The devastating attacks go on for twelve long years until word of Hrothgar’s plight comes to his young kinsman Beowulf. With his band of 14 loyal thanes, Beowulf travels by sea from the land of the Geats on the west coast of Sweden. He swears to Hrothgar that he will battle Grendel in single combat, spurning weapons to fight the monster hand-to-hand.

The night’s feasting ended, Beowulf and his men push their mead-benches against the wall and lie down to sleep. In off the moors comes the monster and rips the door off its iron hinges, mad for the blood of the sleeping men. He mauls one of the men and heads for Beowulf who is feigning sleep. Just as Grendel reaches to grab him, Beowulf locks him in a handgrip so strong that when Grendel tries desperately to escape, his arm is torn off at the shoulder. The poet comments, with the dry wit so beloved of those times, that it was the worst trip the terror-monger had taken to Heorot. The monster skulks back to his lair in the fens to die a terrible and lonely death while the hero remains to be feted and rewarded by Hrothgar and his Queen Wealtheow.

It turns out to be convenient that Beowulf, whose name means ‘bear,’ wants to fight the monster with nothing more than his own physical strength. It comes out when his men attack Grendel with their swords that Grendel is demonically protected from injury by mortal blade. But more than that, it’s a choice that reveals Beowulf’s true nature. Here I’m moving beyond the Beowulf poem to the hero’s analogues in Scandinavian sagas, where he emerges as a shape-shifter who is transformed in battle by his bear spirit.  

But back to Grendel. The poet describes Grendel as “a powerful demon, a prowler through the dark” [l.86]. More, he is described as one of the many banished monsters (think ogres and giants) descended from Cain, outlawed and condemned by God as outcasts. The image of satanic malice raised by his descent from Cain would automatically have been understood by the poet’s Anglo-Christian audience. But there are plenty of bad guys in the Bible—why choose Cain? 

Surely it’s because Cain’s particular crime was to kill his own brother. What greater act of disloyalty can there be than to kill your brother? And in this way Grendel represents a cultural malevolence that predates the arrival of Christianity. He is the warrior who turns on his own companions, the outcast who abandons his oath to his king and despises the social norms of generosity and fidelity. Even more than his demonic descent, that is what makes Grendel a monster.