Beowulf and Grendal Comparison

Beowulf and Grendal Comparison Essay
Beowulf and Grendal are both excellent examples of each respective genre, Beowulf of a traditional epic, Grendal of the deconstructive piece. Each of these stories has the same characters and plot, the differences are subtle but it still makes for two vastly different stories. In Beowulf, he is painted as the hero risking his life to save the Danes. The Grendal story is different because the monster is telling his side; the Grendal story also pokes fun at the Epic Beowulf tale, as a deconstructive quality. These stories are told from different view points and have many similarities and differences which make them each valuable in their own way.
Beowulf is the original epic hero tale and as such employs all of the traditional epic devices. The conflict between good and evil is especially prominent, with Grendal being painted as the evil villain, someone who has no emotion and is as inhuman and as unnatural as he could be the story calls him “a monster, a demon and a fiend, someone who lives within the depths of hell and is from the line of Cain and so it punished forever by God. We are not meant to feel any mercy for this loathsome creature. Until the very end when the authors words convey pity and sadness as he falls to his death. Another classic device used by Beowulf would be Epic boasting done countless times by Beowulf; he is cocky but in this story seems to have a reason to be so. He boasts about his swimming match with Brecca he also is sure of his victory against Grendal even before he has met the monstrous beast. Beowulf is also a story which has many mentions of God and the Bible and how they play into the story. Grendal is a decent of Cain and is said to live in hell, Beowulf is also compared to God multiple times within the story.
Grendal is a deconstruction of the Beowulf story; it follows all of the guidelines and is written from another point of view. This story is written by ____ and we see the same