Symbolism Of Grendel's Majestic War In Beowulf

It is the twelfth winter of Grendel’s “idiotic war” and the monster finds himself weighed down by a sense of foreboding (5). Though he knows it would be wiser to sleep away the season of death, restlessness keeps him up and eventually leads him back into Hrothgar’s village. There, he sits in the center of the “ring of gods, musing on them, pursuing some thought that [he] cannot make come clear” (129). When a blind elderly priest called Ork approaches the ring, Grendel reveals himself to the priest as the “Great Destroyer” rather than his true identity as the enemy of the Scyldings. Despite every initial intention of murdering the priest, Grendel becomes so bewildered at the emotional testimony of Ork’s metaphysical theory regarding the Destroyer

Grendel states that he watches “one of Hrothgar’s bowmen pursue a hart. The man, furred from his toes to his ears, walks through the moon-and-snowlit woods, silent as an owl, huge bow on his shoulder, his eyes on the dark tracks” (126). In Grendel, the ninth zodiac sign can be seen manifesting in multiple forms. Arguably the most obvious form is the archer that Grendel stumbles upon one night during a restless walk. The monster soon becomes enraptured as the hunter “incredibly, through the pale, strange light the man’s hand moves...toward the bow, and grasps it, and draws it down, away from the shoulder and around in front” (127), noting the contrast between his own frenzied raids and the bowman’s patient and cautious hunt. “Suddenly time is a rush for the hart...he jerks, his front legs buckling, and he’s dead….The image clings to my mind like a growth, I sense some riddle in it” (127). Grendel’s analyzation of the animal’s death reflects an important trait of the Sagittarius, the ability to zero in on details and find deeper meaning where others will not look twice. The bowman’s sharp eye and hunter instinct is distinctly reflected in the chapter of the