Word: grendel
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...GRENDEL by John Gardner. 174 pages. Knopf...
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...
...monsters and monster-slayers, Grandy's book offers no more and no less than the formulaic plot on which Padding productions usually hang their gags, lyrics, and kick-line. Crisis strikes the oversexed and overhung court of King Holroes the Horney of Denmark (Jack 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...
...Reckford, the bibliophile, also directed; Walt Jewell produced. Marshall Moriarty as Weber coughed exceedingly well, and Emilie Rahman as his daughter was enticing. Reckford, as Hobbes; Charles Bevard as Locke, and Judd Conway as Rousseau were properly raucous. Jack Henrikson made a bellowing Beowulf; Mary Doyle, a grucsome Grendel's mother; and Alan Horsley, a mushy Mathiez...