Okay, so one thing that I thought was pretty interesting was the differentiation between Grendel and his mother. Grendel, in my opinion, is more of a representation of pure evil than his mother. Grendel terrorized Heorot because he was envious of peoples' happiness and joy. Unlike his mother, he continued to attack the town for a long period of time, at least long enough for word to spread to Beowulf. Grendel's mother only attacked the town once, and in doing so she reclaimed her child's detached arm. To me, that is more of an honorable thing than an evil one. We see these kinds of actions in Greek epics and other war stories where the warriors or soldiers go and collect the bodies or amour of the fallen. She also was also aggravated for an understandable reason. Her son was killed. To me, even though she may have represented as a more primordial evil than Grendel, I feel as if she was less evil. She was more like a "Mama-bear" with a vengeance sort of character. Having this almost lesser-evil character in mind, I feel as if she had a little too much hype around her. In order to reach her, one had to go through what can be imagined as almost pure evil and survive a whole bunch of other beasts who infested the area. Her lair became brighter when she had been killed which means that the darkness of the environment was attributed to her evil presence there.
What are your thoughts about this? Am I missing something, did she really just not seem as evil as Grendel?
P.S. I commented on Abbie Hedden's and Madalyn Dillard's posts
I see what you mean by seeming less evil. I am not completely sure how I think about this. However, I would say we do not know all that she has done or what she does. We can, as you said, see that darkness surrounds her. So, her darkness has to come from somewhere. That somewhere is evil. She was also born out of evil so she has to be evil. But, if she is less evil is still in question.
ReplyDeleteYou know, now that you say it I'm beginning to shift my perspective of Grendel's mother's attack. Initially I viewed it as an angry monster's revenge on a town and nothing more, but now it's obvious to me that her attack was more heartfelt than anything. She wanted to avenge and honor her son, which she did by retrieving his arm, and also, it's true that Grendel was the one terrorizing the town; Grendel's mother had seemingly backed off from that kind of behavior.
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