Word: beowulf
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Readers who may have wondered ever since freshman English what it feels like to have an arm torn off by Beowulf in Hrothgar's meadhall can now relax. It hurts like the devil. "I bawl like a baby. I am slick with blood," cries Grendel in this splendid fiend's-eye view of an Anglo-Saxon epic. "My heart booms with terror." Yet as Novelist John Gardner retells the story, much of Grendel's pain is pure philosophical chagrin...
...poetic genius who originally shaped Beowulf around the monster and the Geatish champion was busy trying to blend heroism and history, pagan myth and Christian message. He had no time to empathize with the devil's henchman. So Beowulf's Grendel is beastly, God-cursed, a conventional scourge to man. Gardner's Grendel may look like a lump of earth with a hairy pelt, but (conveniently, yet convincingly) he throbs with primal rage, despair, collegiate idealism and existential inquiry. Gardner has also given him a gnawing sense of humor. "I have eaten several priests," Grendel reports. "They...
...listening to men. But he is no premature ecology freak. It is not the way men ravage the land or each other that enrages him but how artfully and pretentiously they lie about it afterward. When Hrothgar's scops and gleemen sing of the past, quoting liberally from Beowulf, all those random bloody deeds are transformed into acts of loyalty, bravery, selflessness, steps to progress, and signs, even, of religious purpose...
...vainly keeps asserting that he can lend life meaning through heroic action. Nothing works. Grendel's victims perversely take these random torments as signs of divine and purposeful displeasure. They obstinately go on fooling themselves that man can shape the world. Years pass. Grendel grows bored. When Beowulf comes, powerfully secure in his delusions and with the grip of a steam shovel, it is almost a relief...
...Olive) when the man-eating Grendel family, monsters from the nearby Black Lake, emerge to lay claim to Hotroes' frontheavy daughter, Princess Boobhilde (Line Caplan). With the kingdom paralyzed and helpless. Bennet the Serf (Dick Boling), a slave and would-be poet, goes out in search of the legendary Beowulf (Christopher Tunnard), whose prowess alone can save Boobhilde from the monsters. Beowulf turns out to be well past his prime, but he and Bennet manage to convince both the Grendels and the Court of his ferocity. The truth comes out in the end, of course, but after the usual reversals...