[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 chao...

The plot of Grendel is based on that of the Old English poem Beowulf, though not in an especially straightforward way. The main action of Beowulf breaks into four parts: the Grendel episode …; the subsequent battle with Grendel's mother …; the return voyage …; and the dragon fight…. In the original, each major conflict concludes before the next begins, and a fifty-year successful reign by Beowulf separates his fight with the dragon from his conquest of Grendel and his moth...