ABSTRACT
The monster Grendel’s final assault on the meadhall is often called the most terrifying scene in B eow ulf. Three separate passages describe the killer striding from the moors toward Heorot. In each he grows closer and larger, until finally, his eyes burning in the darkness, he bursts into the room where the warriors sleep and where Beowulf — and we — await him. A critic has called the effect of these passages cinematic; visual details are precisely rendered as a long shot progressively becomes a close up (B eow u lf 306). But if this scene chills us, there may be another reason, one that has less to do with precision of art than with its ambiguity. Throughout the telling of the Grendel story, the poet makes it difficult for us to name precisely the terror that is coming and to distance ourselves from it. Sometimes Grendel is called a fiend and sometimes a man; sometimes a monster and sometimes a warrior. At times he kills with claws, at other times with hands. Perhaps we are meant also to wonder in that dark room whether those fierce eyes are inhuman or human. Perhaps we stand closer than we think to this creature whom the poet calls “bereft of joys” and who lives only to kill. Should he be one of us, then of course our terror is greater and this dark poem, darker.
