Beowulf: Why Are Vampire Families So Close?

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Why are vampire families so close? Because blood is thicker than water. In the epic poem Beowulf, Grendel is the first antagonists that Beowulf encountered during his journey of helping Heorot. He is also a descendant of Cain and is described as an evil, destructive, angry monster who continues to wreak havoc on Heorot because of his anger towards the people. Although, we tend to see Grendel only as a monster we never identify what kind of monster he is ,and it is possible that he holds qualities such as of a vampire. When writing a literary onomastics study about Grendel and Cain descendants, Thalia Feldman wrote that Grendel's “behavior has been contaminated by his ogreish Germanic kin, his remains in essence a descendant of Old Testament Cain, a man, a vicious, feral, degenerate, who murders men and cannibalizes them in their hall” (Feldman 4). This presents the fact that Grendel was in fact a man yet because of his birth from Cain's emotions due to him being exiled from killing his brother, Grendel is seen as a monster …show more content…

The poem emphasizes the brutal death of a warrior when Grendel “bit into his bone-lappings, bolted down his blood” (Heaney 741). This brings up the question of why did Grendel drink his blood instead of just ripping them apart, killing more people to eradicate them if he dislikes them so much since he continues to go back to the hall every single night for months. Vampires as well completely drain their victims of their blood before moving to the next so that the person can't report what happened to them and rat the vampire out. The poem also reads that when Grendel attacks the mead-hall he rips open “the mouth of the building, maddening for blood” (Heaney 724). This reveals that he had a thirst for blood such as a vampire would have and needs to refill with blood in order to quench it and remain alive, so that's why he keeps

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