Better Watch Whom You Call a “Monster”

Readers of the Old English epic poem Beowulf are asked to accept at face value that the accursed Grendel, the larger-than-life beast who has been terrorizing King Hrothgar’s mead-hall for a dozen years, is a monster.  And most of us easily accept this designation.  After all, Grendel’s pretty darn big and scary, and he’s capable of making a meal out of more than one brawny Dane at a time.  In his 1971 novel Grendel, on the other hand, John Gardner asks readers to take a second look at this so-called “monster” and offers us an opportunity to see the world through Grendel’s eyes.  The result is quite instructive, and it doesn’t take long to see that what really makes Grendel the monster he becomes is not his size or capacity for deadly deeds.  Rather it is the very decision of the men around him that he is monstrous that turns him into the murderous creature we meet in the epic poem.

The very first time Gardner’s Grendel meets humans he is stuck in a tree, and without any provocation, the men end up attacking him.  Curiosity about these strange attackers leads Grendel not to seek revenge but to a near obsession with observing the lives of King Hrothgar and his people.  And their second interaction is even more tragic.  Listening outside the mead-hall to a song by the bard, a song which identifies Grendel with “the dark side,” he rushes into the crowd shouting “Mercy! Peace!” and drops to his knees crying “Friend!  Friend!”  only to be met with spears and battle axes.

The epic poem never shows us Grendel’s perspective; in Gardner’s version, it is the response of society which turns Grendel into the monster they believe him to be.  In other words, Grendel grows into the label that’s been given to him.  Reading this novel with a student recently, I was reminded of reading early on my teacher education courses about a phenomenom called “labeling,” in which students respond to being labeled by conforming to behavior expectations associated with the label.  Not such a bad thing if the label is something like “gifted” or “hard worker.”  But anyone who is raising kids or teaching needs to be mindful every single day of the power we wield in their young lives:  being stuck by parents or teachers with a negative or stigmatized label can be devastating to a child.