[Creative] vision extends truth, shapes … archetype in its own image, commenting imaginatively (and hence more than logically) upon its archetypal mother. This happens all too rarely, but happen it does in John Gardner's Grendel which illustrates the perfect rapport possible between two workings of a single myth. That it can stand beside the epic Beowulf is no small judgment on the achievement of the novel. (p. 19)
Central to the novel is the confrontation of chaos and order: Grendel sees chaos in all that occurs and indeed insists upon chaos as ultimate principle; man makes order in the unformed void and, immortalizing, the artist remakes reality from the same elements to his own distinct purpose. The world as given is the milieu of monsters: nature, forests, hostile cold, wild storms, the less than benign climate of Scandinavia. In this death wreaking void, man builds houses, groups them and organizes his society, erects kingly halls, fortifications, links his realms by roads. Out of the untamed world monsters invade the tamed and symmetrical world of man, entering the mead hall to leave, together with death and destruction, their chaotic mark upon the ordered universe. Gardner's Grendel sees man essentially as a maker of patterns: "They'd map out roads through Hell with their crackpot theories," he says of them….
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