So times were pleasant for the people there
until finally one, a fiend out of hell,
began to work his evil in the world.
Grendel was the name of this grim demon
haunting the marches, marauding round the heath
and the desolate fens.1
Like any reader (and writer) of fantasy, I enjoy a good monster story. Dragons, giants, revenants—these are among the most appealing elements of the genre. In my Medieval Monsters series, I’ve been looking at the medieval origins of many of these familiar figures.
Few works of medieval literature are as central to the “monster canon” or as influential on modern fantasy as the Old English epic Beowulf. The poem offers not one but three monstrous antagonists for its hero to confront. Beowulf is an Anglo-Saxon poem, and while the manuscript dates to the tenth or eleventh century, the story itself is much older, originating as an oral poem from the centuries before English became a written language. Its subject matter reflects this long history: a Scandinavian, pre-Christian setting filtered through a later Christian narrative voice.
In this post, we’ll focus on the first part of Beowulf, which deals with the monster Grendel, a hideous creature who terrorizes the Danish King Hrothgar, slaying his mightiest warriors, until at last Beowulf comes to Hrothgar’s aid, faces Grendel one-on-one, and tears off his arm.
Whenever I encounter a great monster in a book, film, or game, I ask the same question: what makes this creature so compelling? Some of the appeal comes down to sheer “coolness” or aesthetic. But what truly gives a monster weight is what its existence and power reveal about the civilization that imagined it. If a hero embodies a society’s virtues—the manifestation of its ideals, values, and aspirations—then a monster is their inversion, a threat to everything that the culture holds dear.
This is certainly true of the most compelling monsters. And it is true of Grendel.
Grendel is a walking existential crisis, threatening every aspect of the Germanic society to which Beowulf and its audience belong. His immense strength renders the civilized ideals of law and order, as represented by King Hrothgar and his warriors, effectively useless. And his portrayal as both an accursed descendant of Cain and a jötunn drawn from Norse mythology resonates on the levels of both paganism and Christianity—the two belief systems that comprise the poem’s worldview.
Grendel and the failure of the Comitatus
From the outset of the poem, it is clear that Grendel poses an immediate threat to the civilizational order of Hrothgar’s kingdom. Beowulf is replete with gruesome, bloody descriptions of Grendel’s attacks, recounting how the “shadow-walker” sneaks up on the Danish warriors under the cover of night, destroying thirty men in one assault:
Suddenly then
the God-cursed brute was creating havoc:
greedy and grim, he grabbed thirty men
from their resting places and rushed to his lair,
flushed up and inflamed from the raid,
blundering back with the butchered corpses.
The slaughter of these thirty warriors is tragic enough. But what makes it so compelling is the way that it subverts and threatens the Germanic heroic code. These men are not just victims of a monstrous ambush. They are warriors, men whose duty it is to protect their lord and people from harm.
In Germanic cultures—an ethnic category encompassing both Anglo-Saxons and Scandinavians—social cohesion was largely achieved through the comitatus, or warband. The ancient Roman historian Tacitus discussed this phenomenon among the ancient Germanic tribes in his Germania, and it endured well into the Early Middle Ages as a precursor to feudalism.
In this ideal, which permeates Anglo-Saxon heroic literature, warriors find camaraderie and fellowship within the comitatus, and security under the rule of a lord whose duty it is to provide for them.
The Anglo-Saxon scholars Bruce Mitchell and Fred C. Robinson offer a helpful definition of comitatus:
While his lord lived, the warrior owed him loyalty unto death. If his lord were killed, the warrior had to avenge him or die in the attempt. The lord in his turn had the duty of being generous to his warriors. He had to be a great fighter to attract men, a man of noble character and a generous giver of feasts and treasure to hold them.
As Beowulf makes abundantly clear, Hrothgar is an ideal Germanic warlord according to this definition. He is a successful warrior, and “friends and kinsmen flocked to his ranks.” He is generous as well, rewarding his followers handsomely as a “ring-giver,” for, as the poet remarks, he “doled out rings and torques at the table.”
Hrothgar is also a builder, with ambitions to leave his mark upon the world by erecting a great mead hall for himself and his followers—a permanent home for his comitatus:
So his mind turned
to hall-building: he handed down orders
for men to work on a great mead-hall
meant to be a wonder of the world forever;
When Heorot, the mead-hall, is finished, it is indeed a thing of wonder, just as Hrothgar intended. But a terrible doom awaits it:
The hall towered,
its gables wide and high and awaiting
a barbarous burning.
This “barbarous burning” comes in the form of Grendel. When their lord is attacked, Hrothgar’s warriors are expected to defend him, fulfilling their duty as members of his warband. And they understand this duty well. Later in the poem, Hrothgar recalls how they swore to uphold their oaths:
When the goblets passed
and seasoned fighters got flushed with beer
they would pledge themselves to protect Heorot
and wait for Grendel with whetted swords
But when dawn broke and day crept in
over each empty, blood-spattered bench,
the floor of the mead-hall where they had feasted
would be slick with slaughter. And so they died,
faithful retainers, and my following dwindled.
A recurring theme in the heroic literature of the Anglo-Saxons and other Germanic peoples is that boasts made in the mead hall must be honored in battle. A warrior who enjoys his lord’s hospitality in peacetime must be prepared to die for him in war.
But while Hrothgar’s warriors attempt to make good on their beer-fueled boasting, they are ultimately too weak to overcome Grendel. Despite their loyalty and valour, they cannot defeat this “fiend out of hell.”
This, then, is one reason why Grendel is so terrifying. The kingdoms of early medieval Europe were a far cry from the centralized states of the modern West, with their standing armies, judicial systems, and police forces—or even the recent (for the Anglo-Saxons) example of the Roman Empire, whose ruins still dotted the European landscape. In the world in which Beowulf was composed—and especially that in which the poem is set—power was localized in the chieftains and kings who ruled through their host of loyal retainers. It was the comitatus that protected the warlord and his people, defending and policing the realm.
Without the protection of the warband, Hrothgar and his people must flee their home. The mighty Heorot stands deserted every night for twelve whole years. As the poet laments, “the greatest house in the world stood empty, a deserted wallstead.”
Culture, order, security—all are made vulnerable by Grendel’s night-time attacks and the failure of the comitatus to stop him. Early medieval kings such as Hrothgar lived under the totalizing shadow of the Roman Empire, its ruins an ever-present reminder of the fragility and temporality of even the greatest civilizations.
Grendel as heathen giant and son of Cain
A significant reason Grendel is so terrifying is that he emerges from pagan Germanic folklore while also operating within a distinctly Christian framework of evil.
As J. R. R. Tolkien observes in his landmark essay, “Beowulf: The Monsters and the Critics,” the poem links Grendel to the “eotenas and ylfe” through his descent from Cain. Eotenas is cognate with the Norse jötunn, a creature often seen in the sagas and poetry of Norse literature, a monstrous category encompassing both troll and giant.
The poem’s descriptions of Grendel’s physical appearance reinforce this association with the jötunn. He is humanoid, but far larger and more terrifying than any human. As the poem describes both Grendel and his mother:
Two such creatures
prowling the moors, huge marauders
from some other world. One of these things,
as far as anyone ever can discern,
looks like a woman; the other, warped
in the shape of a man, moves beyond the pale
bigger than any man, an unnatural birth
called Grendel by country people
in former days. They are fatherless creatures,
and their whole ancestry is hidden in a past
of demons and ghosts. They dwell apart
among wolves on the hills, on windswept crags
and treacherous keshes, where cold streams
pour down the mountain and disappear
under mist and moorland. (1347-1361)
Beowulf generally offers only hazy descriptions of what Grendel looks like, perhaps because all of his attacks take place under cover of night. This ambiguity only heightens the terror surrounding Grendel and lends the narrative a horror-like quality. When Beowulf finally tears off Grendel’s arm, we are granted a close-up of part of this “man-shaped” creature—an arm that is recognizably humanoid, yet unmistakably inhuman:
Every nail,
claw-scale and spur, every spike
and welt on the hand of that heathen brute
was like barbed steel.
Grendel, then, is best understood as a jötunn, a troll or giant akin to those we find in Norse mythology. This aligns him with the Anglo-Saxons’ pagan ancestry and sets him in opposition to the Christian worldview of the poet.
Unsurprisingly, Grendel is presented as hating God and all things holy. This aversion to the sacred is established as his original reason for attacking Heorot:
Then a powerful demon, a prowler through the dark,
nursed a hard grievance. It harrowed him
to hear the din of the loud banquet
every day in the hall, the harp being struck
and the clear song of a skilled poet
telling with mastery of man’s beginnings
how the Almighty had made the earth
a gleaming plain girdled with waters.
Grendel, we are told, is disturbed by the sounds of merriment coming from Hrothgar’s hall. But his true grievance—the one on which the passage dwells at length—is not the “din of the loud banquet” but the content of the poet’s song: God and his creation.
Just as with the revenant Glam, whose paganism is closely tied to his monstrosity, Grendel is consistently aligned throughout the poem with all that is un-Christian—hell, Satan, the heathenism of pre-Christian Germanic belief, as well as Cain, the first murderer in the Bible.
Grendel’s association with Cain is of great significance. The poet devotes considerable attention to sketching Grendel’s origins as a descendant of Cain:
So times were pleasant for the people there
until finally one, a fiend out of hell,
began to work his evil in the world.
Grendel was the name of this grim demon
haunting the marches, marauding round the heath
and the desolate fens; he had dwelt for a time
in misery among the banished monsters,
Cain’s clan, whom the Creator had outlawed
and condemned as outcasts. For the killing of Abel
the Eternal Lord had exacted a price:
Cain got no good from committing that murder
because the Almighty made him anathema
and out of the curse of his exile
there sprang ogres and elves and evil phantoms
and the giants too who strove with God
time and again until He gave them their reward.
By presenting Grendel as a descendant of Cain, the poet finds a way to syncretize Germanic folklore and Christian doctrine. As Tolkien writes, describing this Christian poet looking back on a pagan past, “At this point new Scripture and old tradition touched and ignited.”
These heathen monsters—“ogres and elves and evil phantoms and the giants”—are not part of the good creation celebrated in the poet’s song. They belong neither to the human race, descended through Adam (and his son Seth), nor to the animal world. Rather, they are the offspring of accursed Cain.
Here the author of Beowulf diverges from and adds to Biblical history, for Cain’s (human) descendants are listed in the Book of Genesis and do not include any ogres or elves. Instead, the poet seems to draw on a broader interpretive tradition, partly rooted in the New Testament’s portrayal of Cain as an archetype of hatred and murder. This is how Cain appears in the First Epistle of John:
We must not be like Cain who was from the evil one and murdered his brother (3:12)
Beowulf also appears to draw on extra-testamental traditions. In some strands of Jewish thought, Cain is portrayed not as the son of Adam, but as the offspring of a demonic figure. Philo of Alexandria argued that Cain was the adulterous child of Eve and the archangel Samael. Later Christian writers, such as Tertullian—drawing on both Jewish tradition and John’s phrasing of “from the evil one”—suggested that Cain was a son of Satan, while others argued he was one of the Nephilim.
Within this broader interpretive context, it makes sense that Cain becomes the progenitor of the monstrous. The first murderer, and possibly a son of Satan himself, Cain is transformed into the father of all that is twisted—resentful and murderous, locked in perpetual enmity with humanity.
Perhaps this is why Grendel is so enraged by the poet’s song. He has no part in “man’s beginnings,” cannot rejoice in hearing how the “Almighty had made the earth.” Like Satan, he dwells in darkness, watching with envy as God’s creatures enjoy his blessings, and longing for their destruction. And like Cain, he is accursed, bearing the mark of his monstrosity upon his body.
In this way, the author of Beowulf syncretizes pagan Germanic myth with Biblical history. The result is an unusually terrifying monster. Grendel resonates with what Jung would later call “psychic residue”—the ancestral fear of the jǫtnar that the Anglo-Saxons carried with them from their pagan past—while also embodying the moral horror of Christianity. He is born of the first murderer, Cain, seething with hatred and malice toward his brother and toward humanity itself.
In Grendel, we have a perfect example of how the greatest monsters compel us, even centuries later. They are not merely powerful beings to be slain, but symbols of all that a culture fears—forces that threaten to bring civilizational order to ruin.
I hope you enjoyed this final instalment of the medieval monster series. If you haven’t already, check out the previous entries (links at the end of this post).
Andrew LiVecchi
If you enjoyed this post, consider checking out my epic fantasy series, The Lays of Athewain. It builds on a lifelong love of mythology and literature and engages with a lot of the themes I explore in my Substack posts.
Five of the best medieval monster stories:
I am citing Seamus Heaney’s brilliant translation, Beowulf: A New Verse Translation published by W. W. Norton & Company.
It gets weirder when you think about Grendel as a cannibalistic wild man/sasquatch type. (Well, weirder for this cryptid fan. Sorry, I know the main point is theological here!)
Great article! Years ago I taught Beowulf (using Heaney's powerful translation) as part of a British Lit course for homeschooled high school students (who were into Tolkien), and they loved it :). A vital work for any Western fantasy writers (and readers) to know. Thanks for sharing.