Word: hereot
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Sallying forth from primordial chaos, Grendel watches the beginnings of human society coalesce in the twilit north: after all manner of killing and cruelty, blood feuds and stolen booty, raw power establishes a kind of order and piety around King Hrothgar's great castle, Hereot. Like Shakespeare's Caliban, Grendel has learned to swear from 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...
...doomed to fail. Grendel lays waste to Hereot, carves lines of care in Hrothgar's face. He reveals the priests as fools and hypocrites. He pelts with apples a futile existential hero who 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...
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