Afternoon of Alterity - Nazareth College

imagination, we must first attempt to characterize Grendel, definingwho and what he actually is.The first notable quality that marks Grendel as “other,” andtherefore as monstrous, is the fact that he lives on the outskirts ofsociety. Having descended from the cursed line of Cain – the biblicalmurder who was exiled from Eden by God after killing his brother,Abel – Grendel is also considered an enemy of God and humankindin the world of Beowulf. He therefore does not live among the Danesor participate in the camaraderie that takes place in the grand meadhall, Herot, which represents the hub of medieval civilization withinthe text. Rather, Grendel lives deep in a treacherous, untamed forestset on the boarders of the Dane’s land. The poet of Beowulf describesthe harsh environment that Grendel inhabits, noting that his homeis a swamp whose waters “boil with blood…and hot gore,” are infestedwith “many kinds of serpents [and] strange sea-creatures,” and islocated in “a joyless wood” surrounded by “steep stone cliffs” (Liuzza97). Grendel is not so far removed from Danish society however,that he cannot hear, brood upon, and eventually take violent actionagainst the joviality taking place in the mead hall that he is excludedfrom. He is therefore an inhabitant of the borderlands, neither atrue member of society, nor entirely removed from it. In this way,Grendel defies categorization and calls attention to his monstrosityas Jeffery Cohen, teratology scholar, observes that, “the monster’svery existence is a rebuke to boundary and enclosure…” (Cohen 7).Just as Grendel’s place in society is difficult to clearly define, so ishis very body a hybrid of human and super-human/deformed featuresthat defies easy classification. Interestingly, the poet of Beowulf neverfully characterizes Grendel’s appearance, so readers are left to piecetogether an image of him based on the sparse details that the poetprovides. Such details include references to Grendel as a “giant” and“misshapen…form of a man,” and feature periodic descriptions ofa number of Grendel’s body parts, including his formidable handmaura whitman 3