Beowulf and Grendel are both characters in literature. Each of them have their own stories about certain events that occurred between them. If ever an event occurs between two people, there are three sides to the story. What one person says happened, what another person says happened, and what really happened. We see this statement play out within our reading of both perspectives of the heroes of their own novels.
In Beowulf, we read about the cocky character of Beowulf, an epic hero of sorts that boasted about his recent achievements in killing other monsters that had been causing problems. The monster that Beowulf was to fight was Grendel, who had according to the Danes been lurking around their land causing trouble and trying to kill them. When Beowulf heard of this monster he left his own land and crossed the sea to save Hrothgar and the Danes. Within our reading though, we do not hear the opinions of Grendel, we only hear one side of the story. Which sometimes is never as clear cut as it may seem.
In Grendel on the other hand, we realize that Grendel is a sad soul. He is the only person of his kind existing in the world. He is lonely and has no one to talk to about his thoughts and feelings of growing up in the era that he is. His mother is his only support system, yet, she can only seem to make random sounds, as she is so old that she has lost her sense of language. Grendel always seemed to keep his cool throughout his own novel. He would watch the Danes, and they annoyed him that they killed things just to eat them. He seemed to be very intelligent, something that Beowulf did not know. Grendel had certain reasons for wanting the Danes gone, yet, Beowulf just wanted to again be the "hero".
When Grendel and Beowulf fought, of course Beowulf was the winner in both novels. Yet, in Beowulf, it is stated that Beowulf beat Grendel with hardly a fight, and that the monster went down. Yet, in Grendel, Grendel states that he actually slipped, and that is when Beowulf was first able to capture his hand. So, both characters experienced the same thing, and told the same story, but the reader was obviously not there to see it. We have to choose what side to believe, or which side is more true. This decision though, is all up to the imagination of a reader that gets lost in time and the paper of a novel or two.
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MORGAN.
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