2 of 11

Summary

“I used to play games when I was young.” This tells me that this is a flashback.

He remembers going to the “pool of firesnakes” and staring at their “faceless, eyeless” bodies.

He knows that they are “there to guard something,” so he dives in and discovers a “sunken door” that leads him to the moonlight.

He came back many more times to the outside world to play and explore and would flee back to his lair when dawn approached.

3 of 11

Summary

He says that he lived his early years like a puppy does.
Things on shelves, “old shapes with shouldering eyes. Sat watching him. I am not sure what this refers to right now.
His mother is said to “stare at [him] as if to consume [him].”
She loved him, he was “her creation.”
He notices their “separateness” and he once again feels “alone and ugly.”
He is unable to face those things so he throws himself at his mother and bawls until she would “smash [him] to her fat limp breast as if to make [him] part of her flesh again.”
He feels the burning eyes of strangers and his mother staring and judging him.

Summary

He tells of one morning being out of his underwater cave and getting his foot caught in a tree and he is hanging in the air.
He yells for his mother.
He was out later than usual because he was lured by a newborn calf to smell (not eat yet).
His foot is badly stuck and bleeding and painful.
He “bellows” for help to his mother, the sky, the forest.
The thought of dying alone, with no one coming to help enrages him.
The sun comes up. Is this symbolic?

Summary:

Then a bull comes (the Zodiac allusion).
The bull contemplates him, pawing his hoof at the ground as if considering charging.
The bull charges.
The bull strikes too low and hits the base of the tree head on. Only the tip of a horn tears Grendel’s knee.
Grendel realizes that the bull will strike low each time he charges because he “fought by instinct, blind mechanism ages old.”
He only has to worry about that one horn.
The next time the bull charges, Grendel moves out of the horns way and is fine. He laughs at the bull. His laughter grows “fierce.”

Summary

Hanging there, he understands the emptiness of the eyes back home that stare at him.
He comes to a realization (a philosophy maybe) that the world is nothing. It is a “mechanical chaos of casual, brute enmity” and that he “alone exists.”
He figuratively comes out of his cave with this revelation. That’s an allusion to the video that we just watched.
The bull strikes again, and keeps on charging. Sometimes it would clip Grendel in the knee, sometimes he would simply miss and hit the tree.
Finally the bull leaves as Grendel slept.

Summary

He hangs there through the night. And he sees men.
Waking from sleep at night, still hanging from the tree, he hears men’s voices spoken in his “own language, but spoken in a different way.”
The men look small to him with “dead-looking eyes and gray-white faces.”
When Grendel moves, the men stop speaking and stare at him.
The men think that he is a “fungus” on the tree.
They think that Grendel’s blood is sap from the tree.
The men decide that they must save the tree from the rot (that’s Grendel).
They need to chop the fungus out. (That’s our boy!! Grendel)

Summary

The King says that Grendel is some kind of “oak tree spirit” and they should not mess with it.
One of the men wonders if he is friendly and Grendel tries to answer. But he can not speak. Theme
They simply think that he is hungry and wonder what he eats.
They think that he eats pigs, so the King orders them to go get some pigs.
This made Grendel laugh.
He tried to yell “Pig” but the sound he made scared them.
This scares the men and the horses.

Summary

The King throws an ax that barely touches his skin.
Grendel tries to tell them that they are crazy, but only a moaning sound comes out.
The King tells his men to surround him, and Grendel realizes that he is not dealing with a dumb, mechanical bull. They are the most dangerous things that he has ever met. MEN.
The men throw javelins (spears) and shoot arrows at Grendel. He is hit in many places and would die….

Summary

But mom comes. Screaming like “a thousand hurricanes” and the men flee.
Her smell alone drops the two trees that held Grendel in the air. That’s pretty stinky!
Grendel wakes up back in the cave. He realizes now that it is only his mother and him, the other “eyes” have retreated further from men.
He tries to explain “the meaningless objectiveness of the world, the universal bruteness.”
She is troubled by his noise, since she has forgotten all language (theme).

Summary

Grendel tells his mother that the “world is all a pointless accident” and that he exists, “nothing else.”
His mother pulls him close and he realizes that her “hair is bristly” and her skin “is loose.” And she stinks!
He realizes his life “lacks” many things and the underground river (symbol) calls to him although he has never seen it.