Grendel 2

"Then the harp began to play. The crowd grew still.
The harp sighed, the old man sang, as sweet-voiced as a child...
The harp turned solemn. He told of an ancient feud between two brothers which split all the world into darkness and light. And I, Grendel, was the dark side, he said in effect. The terrible race God cursed.
I believed him. Such was the power of the Shaper's harp! Stood wriggling my face, letting tears down my nose, grinding my fists into my streaming eyes, even though to do it I had to sqeeze with my elbow the corpse of the proof that both of us were cursed, or neither, that the brothers had never lived, nor the god who judged them. "Waaa!" I bawled.
Oh what a conversion!
I staggered out into the open and up towards the hall with my burden, groaning out, "Mercy! Peace!" The harper broke off, the people screamed. (They have their own versions, but this is the truth.) Drunken men rushed at me with battle-axes. I sank to my knees, crying, "Friend! Friend!" They hacked at me, yipping like dogs. I held up the body for protection..."

I love this bit for many reasons. First of all, I think this illustrates what a tragic combination of human and animal Grendel is. He looks like a really horrible animal (I picture him like a bear, only with claws and fangs and horns,) but his emotions are very real, and his thoughts, perhaps more than human. He isn't simple at all, and so befriending animals or plants or the sky is out of the question. This is (I believe) the only time he attempts to talk to the humans, but I really think that deep down he is lonely and needs a friend. He is 15 years old in the book, and I think he acts a lot like a lonely, abandoned child. At this point in the story, he hadn't killed anybody, but the humans had already labeled him a fiend, one of "Cain's clan," or, as he says, "the terrible race God cursed."

"...the corpse of the proof that both of us were cursed, or neither, that the brothers had never lived, nor the god who judged them..."

Lovely!

This line was a really powerful moment in the book for me. Think about this logically: Someone tells Grendel that because he eats dead people off the war-sites, he will burn in Hell. Grendel carries the corpse with him, the same way a human might carry a ham sandwich they were about to eat, but who is the killer of this person? The people that claim Grendel is the cursed one! So if Grendel is doomed because he cleans up the already-dead, shouldn't the killers have the same, if not a worse, fate? So, Grendel considers this, and decides that this unfairness isn't right, that it couldn't have been planned by the gods watching over the people, because where does that leave Grendel? The only logical conclusion is that God must not exist. It makes perfect sense to him. But the humans' willingness to believe anything makes Grendel furious, and that's really what started his quest for the truth, and, ultimately, his murders. So I think it can all be traced back to the humans.

I started Beowulf today and I really like it. It's very strange...
One more thing! Does anybody know what John Gardner's views on religion were? I don't know much about him, but in this book he seems to be trying to make a point about religion; I just can't figure out what it is.