Grendel

"Grendel is a 1971 novel based on the Old English poem Beowulf , which is thought to have been recited or sung from memory before it was written down. In essence, the story is that a monster called Grendel plagues the great hall of King Hrothgar, a 6th century Danish king. Beowulf, a hero from Götaland in Sweden, comes to kill the monster and also has to face Grendel’s mother and, later in life, a dragon. Grendel is a retelling of the story from the monster’s point of view, and the monster is basically Jean-Paul Sartre . What makes this slim novel so brilliant is that Grendel is a philosopher, but he is also absolutely a monster. He lives in a cave with his blob of a mother and has all the instincts to kill, eat and survive. At the same time, he has a mind that ponders meaning—relentlessly searching for answers, he wants to know what it is all for. “The stories that are passed from generation to generation both express and shape our values ” Grendel is bewildered by the behaviour of humans, who both fascinate and disgust him, and is furious with himself for his need to spy on them. Poetry is the only thing that moves him. In this novel, the character of the Shaper—the storyteller—is more significant than that of Beowulf. The hero, after all, is only as great as the monster he pits himself against. Grendel is a thought-provoking and, at times, funny retelling of the ancient story about the monster that might come and get us at any time, preferably in the dark. Unbound by convention and unconcerned with anachronisms, this novel is not only an energetic and enjoyable take on the well-known monster-slaying tale, but also on our existentialist search for meaning."

"I did Old and Middle English at Oxford, and I did Medieval Studies at Yale. Grendel was published in 1971, and I was absolutely astonished by the idea that you could take a poem like Beowulf and tell it from a different point of view. I know Wide Sargasso Sea came out in 1966, too… but now it’s a commonplace. “Let’s tell Hamlet from Ophelia’s point of view” – people are doing it all the time. But Grendel was an incredibly original idea, to tell the story from the point of view of the monster, not from the point of view of the hero. It was astoundingly original, and I think it really did tip off a lot of writers, just giving them that idea – like James , the retelling of Huckleberry Finn from the point of view of the slave Jim, which is a brilliant novel by Percival Everett. And they become their own works of art, with a different starting point. Grendel, the monster, is a remarkable creation. He’s lonely, and his bloodthirsty nature causes him so much misery and sadness. But he’s also quite casual about eating people. He’s tormented by the mead hall and the light, and he’s always skulking around, peering in through cracks in the wood. As a portrait of loneliness and sadness, it’s just an astonishing creation. He’s still as monstrous as you might expect, but it was just focusing on what it would be like to be that monster whose raison d’etre is going into mead halls and eating people. He likes to talk about philosophy, and he’s moved – terribly moved – by song and music. Like I said, it doesn’t stop him! But the monster as a lonely creature just stuck with his horrible mother is quite a portrait. And the language that he uses… John Gardner was a medievalist. One of the phrases I really liked was that Grendel says, “Morning nails my eyes.” The way he sees the world – it’s so grim, so dark, there is just no light for this monster. I felt sorry for him. His own nature traps him. No, actually, surprisingly. She’s just kind of skulking. She can’t speak, so she’s just lumbering around the cave. I was surprised… I kept expecting the mother to appear because she has a much bigger role in the poem. It’s not sympathizing. It’s more understanding, I suppose. The idea of the mead hall was that there was this little flicker of light and warmth in a world of tremendous darkness – which Grendel is part of, of course. So you have this little tiny bit of shelter and comradeship, and he’s completely excluded from it. It’s very powerful, very unexpected, this portrait of loneliness. But he has no pity, he’s so filled with rage. So it’s about understanding the rage of a monster, and what he’s trying to feed – because however many people he kills and eats, it doesn’t assuage his sorrow or his loneliness. Salka , the Lady of the Lake, is based on the legend of the lady of Llyn y Fan Fach – which is the beautiful lake that they use in every film about Wales. The basic story is the story, essentially, of the Little Mermaid , or the opera Rusalka . It’s a water sprite or fairy who marries a shepherd on condition that he never strikes her three blows. But the blows are not physical blows. In some of the versions, he taps her on the shoulder and says, “What are you doing?”… In no version is it about domestic violence. It’s about him upbraiding her for, basically, being a fairy, because she behaves oddly. I picture her as neurodivergent. She laughs at a funeral, or she’ll cry at a wedding, because she can see into the future, and she is very blunt. Three times he tells her to stop, and she says, “You’ve shamed me for my fairy ways” – and she has to return to the lake forever after the third blow. She takes everything; fairies always bring great wealth, and she removes it. In any collection of Welsh fairy tales, this story appears. It varies – sometimes the challenge is, “You mustn’t ever strike me with iron” – but there’s always an accidental element. For example, in one of the versions, they’re saddling a horse, and he throws the bridle to her, and the bridle touches her arm – and that’s it, he’s touched her with iron, goodbye. Those versions didn’t do much for me. In some, she leaves; in some, he kills himself, he drowns; in some, the children stay, in some they go. I chose the saddest really, where she brings everything and she takes everything. I think there’s also an element of wish fulfillment. He’s a shepherd, and this Goddess has decided that she’s going to marry him. But fairy tales always have a bite in them. She says, “If you strike me three blows, I must leave” – and he says, “I love you. I would never hurt you. I would never hit you.” He sees it as, if you hit me three times – and that’s not what she’s talking about! As always with these things, he doesn’t actually understand what she is saying – which is a theme through a lot of fairy stories. My retelling started life as a cantata, a piece for two voices and orchestra, which I wrote with Gavin Higgins, who I’ve also written an opera with. This was premiered at the Three Choirs Festival and at Aldeburgh, the music festival. Because it started as two voices, that gave me the idea for doing it from different viewpoints, but it happened very organically. I didn’t intend it to be more than one or two voices. I didn’t know how I was going to write it – I thought, maybe it should be third person, or maybe she should tell the story. And what happened, literally, is that his mother got a word in. And so I thought, “Oh, alright, she can say something”. And then the dog decided he wanted to say something. It really did happen like that. And after four voices, I thought, “I’m going to let everybody talk.” The idea of the book, essentially, is the impact that this intense relationship has on this little village: on the girl that he didn’t marry, on his best friend… It makes his friends all question their rather tepid relationships, because they can see this is a very, very hot relationship that he and Salka have. And, of course, Owain and his mother have to hide the fact that Salka’s a fairy. This is not a good thing to be. Fairy is a huge insult. I read a lot of folklore reports, and there are several reports of fights breaking out at fairs when someone accuses someone else of having fairy blood. So we might think it’s charming, but it was very much an insult to suggest that you might be descended from fairies. I find the viewpoints very potent. I’d never told a story from two different points of view, so as a starting point that was a very interesting way of telling the story. But also, I realized pretty early on that if you’re talking about two people who are madly in love, and know they have this thing hanging over them, it’s kind of boring, because it’s very repetitive. Oh, he’s done it one time. Oh my God, the second time… So broadening it out really helped the story along. Her children come in, and they’re having a hard time because people don’t want to play with them because they sense her otherness. That’s a really important theme: how does a society deal with people who are different? Which is quite a modern idea, too. The village just came to life. I was thinking, “Who’s the girl he didn’t marry?”, right? That was obvious. And then the next door neighbour, and the disappointment of not being able to join the farms… the ripples, really, of marrying someone who comes from away. That’s all they say about her, ‘she comes from away’ – because most people never left their village. It’s set when things didn’t change that much, and a lot of people never left – they maybe went to a market, but that’s it. So saying you came from across the water – what does that even mean? Oh, lots of sources. One was an old book of Celtic folklore… The Professor of Welsh at Jesus College Oxford, which incidentally was my college, went round in the 19th century, collecting stories. And it was things like, “I spoke to the blacksmith, and he referred me to the old woman who lives over there, and she told me that her grandmother had told her…” A book which I really enjoyed was Carolyne Larrington’s The Land of the Green Man , which is a journey through the supernatural landscapes of the British Isles. Carolyne just retired, but she was Professor of Medieval History and Old Norse at Oxford, and also very interested in Game of Thrones . Carolyne loves this myth, and I’ve got to know her. One of her areas of study is how myth is used in a modern way. The opera I mentioned writing with Gavin was about Hel, the Norse goddess of the dead, as an angry funny teenager. So the work I do is very much related to Carolyne’s academic work. Yes. The Monstrous Child tells the story of Hel, an angry, lovelorn and funny teenager who happens to be the Norse goddess of the dead. Hel is half-human, half-corpse, daughter of a god and a giantess, who Odin hurls into the underworld and forces to rule the dead. Hel’s story seemed a great way to write about dysfunctional families and the turbulence, passion, and restlessness of adolescence, as well as a way of exploring body image and why so many young girls and women are convinced their bodies are hideous. In the myth, Hel spends eternity lying silent on a putrid bed. I thought this was a striking image of depression – a trapped teenage girl who has painted the walls of her bedroom black and won’t step outside. Why? What happened to her? I wanted to tell Hel’s story. I also wrote a book called Helping Hercules , which was about a girl who finds a magic coin that takes her back to the time of the Greek gods, and she goes along with Hercules. She’s not just helping Hercules – we see things like the judgment of Paris, where she intervened. She offers bubble gum, because there’s no sugar in Greece. Basically she throws all the stories off-kilter, coming up with a lot of the answers and having fun with the Greek heroes. But Salka is really a big one for me. The original cantata was called The Faerie Bride."