Abstract
This paper was presented at the New York Tolkien Conference.
Baruch College; New York, NY, June 15, 2024.
J.R.R Tolkien wrote his essay, Beowulf: The Monsters and the Critics, in response to claims that the Anglo-Saxon poem was too simple and focused too much on the monsters. The essay defends the epic poem as a myth about Christian ideals set in a pagan world and decries its reputation as a historical document instead of the work of art it deserved to be. Tolkien’s motivation to rehabilitate Beowulf can be understood as a dual mission to defend his own work. When The Lord of the Rings was originally published in 1954, critics perceived the plot as a simplistic conflict between good and evil and the characters as drawn in black or white fashion. From Tolkien’s point of view, the legitimacy of fantasy itself as a worthy literary genre was at issue. In his essay, “On Fairy-Stories,” delivered at St. Andrews University in 1939 while writing The Lord of the Rings, he argues that fairy-stories allow the reader a different perspective on one’s own world. He uses the term “recovery” as the opportunity for the reader to question assumptions that are made about the world in order to gain a better understanding of it. With this in mind, Tolkien might have had particular interest in John Gardner’s 1971 novel, Grendel, which portrays the monster as an anti-hero who tells his story from his own perspective. Readers are able to look again at Grendel, not only as an ogre who was hostile to humanity but as a creature who arguably manifested what theorists from Freud to Caruth have conceptualized as a response to trauma. In this regard, Grendel’s repetitive acts of aggression may be understood as an example of the repetition compulsion and the psyche’s means of managing unpleasant feelings associated with a past unclaimed experience that has been repressed. Without excusing Grendel’s (or his mother’s) behavior, this companion novel to Beowulf forms the basis for an argument that the epic poem’s focus on the monster is defensible from a narrative point of view and is consistent with Tolkien’s own Christian’s ideals of compassion, redemption, and his optimistic view of mankind. It also reflects Tolkien’s insistence on re-considering the ways in which the modern world was viewed, including those regarded as monsters.
Recommended Citation
Levitt, Jonathan
(2024)
"Pathways of Grief: A Contextualized View of the Life of Grendel,"
Journal of Tolkien Research: Vol. 19:
Iss.
1, Article 5.
Available at:
https://scholar.valpo.edu/journaloftolkienresearch/vol19/iss1/5