Among the questions in the teaching groups that I follow on social media, I often see requests for an essay or short work to tie in with either Beowulf or Grendel. I want to share a short essay that analyzes Grendel by John Gardner, which many high school teachers are tasked with teaching. In her essay, “Grendel and His Mother,” Toni Morrison discusses good versus evil, conflict versus crisis, and spoken versus unspoken. She references the epic Beowulf also, but focuses mainly on the role of Grendel and his victims. She raises questions about the violence, the absence of a father and presence of a mother, and about a mother who is unnamed and cannot speak. I believe that her essay, while complex in thought and language, will provide students with a perspective of Grendel that they have not thought about.
Quotes from the essay:
“But what seemed never to trouble or worry them was who was Grendel and why had he placed them on his menu?”
“…evil has no father, but it should not come as a surprise that Grendel has a mother. In true folkloric epic fashion, the bearer of evil, of destruction is female.”
I do not have the rights to the essay, and so I am not sharing it here. The essay can be found in The Source of Self-Regard, Selected Essays, Speeches, and Meditations, by Toni Morrison; Vintage Books, 2019.
