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.
