Grendel Key Quotes and Analysis

1. 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 as long as they last. You are, so to speak, the brute existent by which they learn to define themselves. The exile, captivity, death they shirk from—the blunt facts of their mortality, their abandonment—that’s what you make them recognize, embrace! You are mankind, or man’s condition: inseparable as the mountain-climber and the mountain. (Ch 5)

–The Dragon

The dragon speaks these words in an attempt to impress upon Grendel that he (Grendel) is humankind’s chief antagonist. Grendel is disturbed and fascinated by the Shaper’s ability to rewrite history, and the dragon speaks these words to reassure Grendel. He shows Grendel that if humans have to better themselves, they can only do so by pitting themselves against a monster like Grendel.

2. I discover I no longer feel pain. Animals gather around me, enemies of old, to watch me die… They watch with mindless, indifferent eyes, as calm and midnight black as the chasm below me.

Is it joy I feel?

They watch on, evil, incredibly stupid, enjoying my destruction.

‘Poor Grendel’s had an accident,’ I whisper. ‘So may you all.’” (Ch 12)

–Grendel

These are the novel’s final words, and they are as open to interpretation as the rest of the novel. A suicidal Grendel takes in his surroundings after losing a limb and suffering a head injury. He wishes a similar fate for all other animals, and this has two levels of meaning. One, it represents the bitterness and confusion Grendel feels toward other animals; notably, he could not communicate with other animals. and he also thought they were driven by rudimentary desires. Second, as is the case with his encounter with Beowulf, Grendel is able to learn more about himself when he realizes that his wish is a bitter, unpleasant one.

3. I understood that the world was nothing: a mechanical chaos of casual, brute enmity on which we stupidly impose our hopes and fears. I understood that, finally and absolutely, I alone exist. All the rest, I saw, is merely what pushes me, or what I push against, blindly—as blindly as all that is not myself pushes back. I create the whole universe, blink by blink. (Ch 2)

–Grendel

Being stuck between two trees and charged at by a bull, Grendel comes to the solipsistic understanding that he is his own reference point for all things external. Interestingly, Gardner also reveals that this excerpt is based on Sartre’s Being and Nothingness.

Additional Quotes

“Why can’t I have someone to talk to?” I said. The stars said nothing, but I pretended to ignore the rudeness. (Ch 4)

–Grendel

“It was a cold-blooded lie that a god had lovingly made the world and set out the sun and moon as lights to land-dwellers, that brothers had fought, that one of the races was saved, the other cursed. Yet he, the old Shaper, might make it true, by the sweetness of his harp, his cunning trickery. It came to me with a fierce jolt that I wanted it. As they did too, though vicious animals, cunning, cracked with theories. I wanted it, yes! Even if I must be the outcast, cursed by the rules of his hideous fable.” (Ch 4)

–Grendel

“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.” (Ch 1)

–Grendel

“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.)” (Ch 1)

–Grendel and the dragon

“I found I understood them: it was my own language, but spoken in a strange way… They were small, these creatures, with dead-looking eyes and gray-white faces, and yet in some ways they were like us, except ridiculous and, at the same time, mysteriously irritating, like rats. Their movements were stiff and regular, as if figured by logic… We stared at each other.” (Ch 2)

–Grendel

“Then once, around midnight, I came to a hall in ruins. The cows in their pens lay burbling blood through their nostrils, with javelin holes in their necks. None had been eaten. The watch dogs lay like dark wet stones, with their heads cut off, teeth bared. The fallen hall was a square of flames and acrid smoke, and the people inside (none of them had been eaten either) were burned black, small, like dwarfs turned dark and crisp.”

–Grendel

“They hacked down trees in widening rings around their central halls and blistered the land with peasant huts and pigpen fences till the forest looked like an old dog, dying of mange. They thinned out the game, killed birds for sport, set accidental fires that would burn for days. Their sheep killed hedges, snipped valleys bare, and their pigs nosed up the very roots of what might have grown… There was nothing to stop the advance of man.”

–Grendel

“So he sang—or intoned, with the harp behind him—twisting together like sailors’ ropes the bits and pieces of the best old songs. The people were hushed. Even the surrounding hills were hushed, as if brought low by language.” (Ch 3)

–Grendel

“A swirl in the stream of time. A temporary gathering of bits, a few random dust specks, so to speak—pure metaphor, you understand—then by chance a vast floating cloud of dust specks, an expanding universe—” He shrugged. “Complexities: green dust as well as the regular kind. Purple dust. Gold. Additional refinements: sensitive dust, copulating dust, worshipful dust!” (Ch 5)

–The dragon

“What will we call the Hrothgar-Wrecker when Hrothgar has been wrecked?” (Ch 7)

–Grendel