Word: hrothgar
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...That business about Beowulf, the courageous young prince of the Geats, pulling off Grendel's arm and lopping off Grendel's head sounds familiar--and quite justified, in a rough sort of way, I think, since Grendel, a thoroughly unpleasant monster, had been abducting and snacking on King Hrothgar's warriors for years. But I may be thinking of scenes from those Saturday-morning cartoons I used to watch with my kids years ago when we were looking for something educational...
...behind Coolidge Bank, where the Sikhs serve up wholesome health food on the You-Can't-Fool-Mother-Nature principle. Especially good are the avocado and alfalfa sprouts sandwich, and the generous salads. In the same area, Sails serves tuna with good taste Charlie. At Grendel's next door, Hrothgar isn't welcome, but Beowulf comes anyway, for the chocolate fondue and salad...
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...
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...