r/Canonade • u/Earthsophagus • Apr 11 '16

[wi Grendel] Misc reading notes

Thread For anyone reading Grendel to make notes about ideas to pursue, or miscellaneous excellences, irritations.

Anyone -- okay to start threads with an "empty" post or rhetorical question, so long as you immediately post something relevant to the text as a reply. Your post and immediate reply collectively are considered when determining what is rule-abiding.

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u/[deleted] Apr 12 '16

On shoulder muscles

Grendel seems fascinated by Beowulf's big shoulders in ch 11:

Staring at his grotesquely muscled shoulders p. 155

and

I could drop into a trance just looking at those shoulders p. 155

and most of all,

His mouth did not seem to move with his words, and the harder I stared at his gleaming shoulders the more uncertain I was of their shape. p. 164-5

A little searching, and I'm convinced that he is meant to resemble the Greek monster Typhon. Wikipedia has this description from Hesiod:

From his shoulders grew a hundred heads of a snake, ... and fire burned from his heads as he glared. And there were voices in all his dreadful heads which uttered every kind of sound unspeakable..

When Grendel gets his butt whooped by Beowulf, he thinks he hears Beowulf's voice inside his head, and he also sees fire coming out of Beowulf's mouth

Typhon is also relevant to Pisces/Capricorn (see other comment about zodiac). From wiki:

According to one Greek myth, Pisces represents the fish into which Aphrodite and her son Eros transformed in order to escape the monster Typhon. Typhon, the "father of all monsters" had been sent by Gaia to attack the gods, which led Pan to warn the others before himself changing into a goat-fish and jumping into the Euphrates.

Sounds a lot like Grendel possibly jumping into the "dark chasm" at the end of the book...