Grendel: Chapters 1–3

“No offense,” I say, with a terrible, sycophantish smile, and tip an imaginary hat.

It is true, perhaps, that I feel some trifling dislike of deer, but no more dislike than I feel for other natural things—discounting men.

The cold night air is reality at last: indifferent to me as a stone face carved on a high cliff wall to show that the world is abandoned.

“Missed me!” I say with a coy little jerk and a leer, to keep my spirits up.

Then, with a sigh, a kind of moan, I start very carefully down the cliffs that lead to the fens and moors and Hrothgar’s hall.

I can see for miles from these rock walls: thick forest suddenly still at my coming—cowering stags, wolves, hedgehogs, boars, submerged in their stifling, unmemorable fear; mute birds, pulsating, thoughtless clay in hushed old trees, thick limbs interlocked to seal drab secrets in.

“Don’t ask!” her wiggling claws implore.

“Woe, woe, woe!” cries Hrothgar, hoary with winters, peeking in, wide-eyed, from his bedroom in back.

The thanes in the meadhall blow out the lights and cover the wide stone fireplace with shields.

“Some god is angry,” I hear a woman keen.

“The people of Scyld and Herogar and Hrothgar are mired in sin!”

Then the groaning and praying stop, and on the side of the hill the dirge-slow shoveling begins.

Meanwhile, up in the shattered hall, the builders are hammering, replacing the door for (it must be) the fiftieth or sixtieth time, industrious and witless as worker ants—except that they make small, foolish changes, adding a few more iron pegs, more iron bands, with tireless dogmatism.

They wail, the whole crowd, women and men, a kind of song, like a single quavering voice.

She loved me, in some mysterious sense I understood without her speaking it. I was her creation. We were one thing, like the wall and the rock growing out from it.—Or so I ardently, desperately affirmed.

Thing after thing tried, cynical and cruel, to foist itself off as my mama’s shape—a black rock balanced at the edge of the cliff, a dead tree casting a long-armed shadow, a running stag, a cave entrance—each thing trying to detach itself, lift itself out of the general meaningless scramble of objects, but falling back, melting to the blank, infuriating clutter of not-my-mother.

I seemed to see the whole universe, even the sun and sky, leaping forward, then sinking away again, decomposing. Everything was wreckage, putrefaction.

The next time he charged I kept my eye on it, watched that horn with as much concentration as I’d have watched the rims of a crevasse I was leaping, and at just the right instant I flinched.

Were they my brothers, my uncles, those creatures shuffling brimstone-eyed from room to room, or sitting separate, isolated, muttering forever like underground rivers, each in his private, inviolable gloom?

I understood that the world was nothing: a mechanical chaos of casual, brute enmity on which we stupidly impose our hopes and fears.

“We can’t just leave it rot,” he said. “Start letting the place go to ruin and you know what the upshot’ll be.”

The inside walls would be beautifully painted and hung with tapestries, and every cross-timber or falcon’s perch was carved and gewgawed with toads, snakes, dragon shapes, deer, cows, pigs, trees, trolls.

In time I began to be more amused than revolted by what they threatened. It didn’t matter to me what they did to each other. It was slightly ominous because of its strangeness—no wolf was so vicious to other wolves—but I half believed they weren’t serious.

At times I would try to befriend the exile, at other times I would try to ignore him, but they were treacherous. In the end, I had to eat them.

Every sheep and goat had its wobbly twins, the forest was teeming, and the first crops of the hillsides were coming into fruit.

I remember one of them especially: a lean, aloof, superior man of middle age. He never spoke to the others except to laugh sometimes—“Nyeh heh heh.”

I was safe in my tree, and the men who fought were nothing to me, except of course that they talked in something akin to my language, which meant that we were, incredibly, related.

Hrothgar, who’d begun hardly stronger than the others, began to outstrip the rest.

Hrothgar’s messengers answered with friendly words and praise of the man they’d just plundered, as if the whole thing had been his idea, then whipped up the oxen, pulled up their loaded back-slings, and started home.

The tall, silky grass of the meadows and the paths along the forest would clog the heavy wagon spokes and snarl the oxen’s hooves; wagon wheels sunk in the rich black earth that only the wind had ever yet seeded or harvested. The oxen rolled their eyes, floundering, and mooed.

They pushed at the wheels with long oak poles and slashed at the oxen till their backs were crosshatched with bleeding welts and their noses ran pink foam.

A man on a horse would go after it, slashed by branches, cutting through tangles of hazel and hawthorn, his horse balking at the pain of thorns, and sometimes when the man found the ox he would fill it with arrows and leave it to the wolves.

Sometimes a horse, mired to the waist, would give up and merely stand, head hanging, as if waiting for death, and the men would howl at it and cut it with whips, or throw stones, or club it with heavy limbs, until finally one of them came to his senses and calmed the others, and they would winch out the horse with ropes and wagon wheels, if they could, or else abandon the horse or kill it—first stripping off the saddle and bridle and the handsomely decorated harness.

Then Hrothgar and his neighbors, loaded like ants on a long march, pushed foot by foot and day by day around the marshes and over the moors and through the woods, pressing flat rocks into the soft ground and grass, and packing smaller stones around the rocks’ sides, until, from my watch on the wall of the cliff, Hrothgar’s whole realm was like a wobbly, lopsided wheel with spokes of stone.

They hacked down trees in widening rings around their central halls and blistered the land with peasant huts and pigpen fences till the forest looked like an old dog dying of mange.

I was filled with a wordless, obscurely murderous unrest.

A few minutes later the messenger returned, gave the old man a grunt, and—cautiously, feeling ahead of himself with his crooked bare toes like a man engaged in some strange, pious dance, the foolish smile still fixed on his face—the blind old man went in.

Oft Scyld Shefing shattered the forces
of kinsman-marauders, dragged away their
meadhall-benches, terrified earls—after first men found him
castaway. (He got recompense for that!)

He would sing the glory of Hrothgar’s line and gild his wisdom and stir up his men to more daring deeds, for a price.

He slipped away through fields and forests, his precious old instrument under his arm, to seek out refuge in the hall of some lesser marauder.