Monsters and their Sympahties -- Meda Wright

In older texts, monsters are just monsters. They don't have complex motivations, they just do things mindlessly, like a wolf hunting a deer. The wolf isn't malicious towards the deer, or has any kind of ulterior motive for killing the deer--he needs to eat, and the deer is prey. Much is the same for monsters and humans--the monster kills the human because he is a monster and they are a human, not out of any sort of revenge. However, one-dimensional villains like this can be...boring. Sure yes, they're killing people--oh no! But modern audiences want to know why they're killing people. "It's their nature" is no longer a viable reason.

                Beowulf, one of the oldest stories written down in the English language, has monsters that are monsters for the sake of being monsters. Grendel, the first monster, has no real motive to kill the inhabitants of Herot than “they’re loud”. His mother has a more compelling reason to kill the people, being that they killed her son. But she was killing people long before they killed her son—the death of Grendel was just a reason to invade the hall itself. The dragon, the very last monster fought, was only doing typical dragon things. Protecting its hoard, stealing, and burning down towns. He doesn’t have complex motivations for what he does. It all really boils down to “he’s a dragon.” Dragons hoard things, and don’t appreciate being stolen from. They kill people much the same as a person kills a mosquito—they’re annoying pests that are better off dead.

                It’s no wonder that in modern adaptations of Beowulf, with audiences’ changing expectations of monsters, they changed up the motivations of the monsters in the ancient story. Grendel’s mother has an interesting bastardization—in two separate film adaptations, she’s turned into a strangely sexy antagonist, seducing the heroes as they attempt to kill her. In the two film adaptations we covered in class, she had seduced Hrothgrar, and Grendel was their son. I suppose it was something added for shock value, to make the story seem more fleshed out. It really only served as a “???” moment, but was certainly a surprise. In these stories, she’s a dangerous seductress, breeding monsters and influencing kings. In John Gardner’s Grendel, however, she is nearly the opposite. A speechless creature, the only real things she says are “dool-dool” and “warovvish”. She has any real power stripped away from her, and Grendel himself compares her to a child.

                Grendel himself has his motivations changed, as well. In the animated film, his motivations are much the same as the original story—he has sensitive ears, and the loud sounds of the mead hall aggravate them. He is still a monster in a sense, and it his mother who becomes the dangerous seductress. In the Gardner novel, however, he has a significant change of character. He isn’t a mindless beast, acting on impulse to destroy the noise that’s bothering him. He is intentionally malicious—edged on by the dragon, he becomes the monster the humans see him as.