In effect, the novel lets life’s inherent wound speak for itself in the brutally cynical voice of a murderous monster, a fiend borrowed from an epic poem who distrusts and fears poetry’s power to comfort and create.
The Dark Ages. Gardner based the main characters and some of the incidents in Grendel on material from the Old English epic Beowulf (also in Literature and Its Times). The monster Grendel, the novel’s protagonist and narrator, is a man-eating humanoid who preys on the followers of Hrothgar, the sixth-century king of a Danish tribe known as the Scyldings. The hero-savior Beowulf, a Geat from what is now southern Sweden, comes to Denmark to rid the Danes of the menace, and succeeds. Grendel becomes the first of three monsters that Beowulf slays by the end of the poem.
The exact date of Beowulf’s composition is uncertain, with estimates ranging from the late seventh century to around 1000 C.E., around the time the sole surviving manuscript copy of the poem was written. Whatever the precise date, Beowulf was composed in the early Middle Ages, a period popularly known as the Dark Ages. The latter term describes the relatively impoverished state of our knowledge about the Dark Ages; the term also offers a value judgment about the period, seen to have lost or squandered many of the achievements of prior antiquity.
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