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SparkNotes: Grendel: Chapter 1

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The contrast is especiallyattractive because when Shelley wrote she knew nothing ofGrendel, since had not yet been rescued byscholarship from its profound obscurity.Appropriately enough, Grendel inhabits a mist-shroudedborderland, and his appearance is not distinctly visualized,although his habitat is hauntingly evoked.

Mysterious is the region They live in -- of wolf-fells,wind-picked moors And treacherous fen-paths; a torrent of waterpours down dark cliffs and plunges into the earth, anunderground flood.

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Students today are part o a global world. With a few keystrokes, a young person can be communicating with another student in France; he can go online and read about the latest developments in the Middle East; she can study an economic structure in a third world country that hinges on the economy of first world nations and whose choices affect the global environment. Yet, for all the swiftness of that connection, gulfs in knowledge of other histories, cultures and customs exist. Literature can take us to new vistas; it allows us to “travel” to other lands, to see, perhaps even for a brief moment, into the heart of another, to experience what his or her world is like.

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Grendel,in fact, concretizes the intermixing of Christian and pagancultures which as a whole so superbly dramatizes,so superbly that scholars continue to quarrel violently over thedialectical clashing. Suffice it to say here that noother poem enables us to feel more keenly how diverse culturescan combine, thereby reminding us that most societies in factsupport "impure" cultures consisting of layerings of distinctways of life. Indeed, if one has ever wondered, as I have, howChristianity could so successfully have imposed itself on thevigor of Germanic peoples, may be especiallyilluminating, its final lines for example epitomizing theprocess:

They said that he was of all the world's kings the gentlest ofmen, and the most gracious, the kindest to his people, thekeenest for fame.

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Even if they [monster and mate] were to leave Europe and inhabitthe deserts of the new world, yet one of the first results ofthose sympathies for which the demon thirsted would be children,and a race of devils would be propagated upon the earth who mightmake the very existence of the species of man a conditionprecarious and full of terror.