Grendle
Grendel is one of the most misunderstood dudes in English literature. He was the demon who terrorized Beowulf and the warriors in the Mead Hall. He brutally ripped apart the sleeping warriors in the middle of the night and left carnage in his wake in the great Beowulf saga which is one of the first great sagas of English lit. (8th Century) I have read all 3000 lines of that amazing Epic in translation, of course, since I don’t speak Old English. I came away from the read with a funny feeling. Grendel is not inherently evil although that’s his place in the great imaginary world of English lit. He is the dark side of the sleeping warriors who were celebrating their victory in battle. They had left the field of battle with hundreds of men torn apart and dead just as Grendel left them. This amazing mythic tale confronts the violence of the way the word was then. (Still is.) The hero, Beowulf, confronts the demon and kills him but must then battle the mother of Grendel under sea (the subconscious) and live on to his own tragic victory and death complete with dragons and hordes of gold. The great psychologist Carl Jung found this a gold mine of understanding the drama that is acting out between our conscious self in which we live and the great sub-conscious which is always acting just beneath our reality. Our epidemic of gun violence is Grendel showing us that we have not yet learned to respect life. We bury our dead and morn...and wait for Beowulf. This is my interpretation. The old myths have much to say to us. I don’t know what the answer is. But I have woke in the middle of the night and had to confront my dark side. Struggled and waited for the Dawn. I never lost faith in the Dawn. “Hark, What light through yonder window breaks.”
