Twelfth Year

by Blake Carpenter

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Author’s Note/Reflection:

            Oh, Grendel… the guy who wandered a wretched world, the one Hrothgar and family had terrorized for generations, and the guy who’d been overpowered and outclassed by Beowulf. That’s not to mention how Grendel (our guy) was Beowulf’s easiest battle of the three in his heroic poem. To reroute a bit, Grendel is one of three monsters (though a harsh title to have), and the first main obstacle for the arrogant hero, Beowulf, from the longest epic poem in Old English. Beowulf, author: unknown, has many translations, rewrites, and renditions, where sympathy is shown for “lonely” Grendel, but rarely do they draw from Grendel’s suffering, and rarer do they describe him in a positive light.

            The purpose of Twelfth Year was to not only paint Grendel in a more compassionate view, but to ultimately ‘de-monsterfy’ the character. So, what better than to write a poem about his hardships? First, I needed inspiration – to canonize and better realize Grendel and his experiences. This led me to a novel, aptly named Grendel, by John Gardner, a book of twelve chapters, each being a year in Grendel’s war with Hrothgar.

            Originally, Twelfth Year was going to follow the whole twelve-year journey of Grendel’s struggle, but my persistence in formatting the poem to emulate the same rhyme and meter as The Faerie Queene, another English epic by Edmund Spencer, proved to be quite the challenge given the interest of timely due dates. So, a compromise was made: instead of the planned twelve stanzas (each for one year), I decided to draft, scrap, and redraft three stanzas revolving around Grendel’s final encounter with Hrothgar, still akin to The Faerie Queene’s eight lines of iambic pentameter with a final alexandrine (6 iambic feet) and [ABABBCBCC] rhyme scheme (Glossary of Poetic Terms).

A nice summation of Gardner’s Grendel here: https://mseffie.com/assignments/grendel/grendel_overview.html

            With that, a proper dissection of my poem is in order. Twelfth Year is a reimagining of Grendel’s story from Beowulf, specifically the last (twelfth) year in Grendel’s war with Hrothgar – with the objective of making Grendel not only a victim of royal terror, but to also prop Hrothgar (and subsequently, Beowulf) as the true demon(s).

“The Shaper came to Hrothgar’s hall, sightless, / yet paragon for painted words. The glee / in which he sang his letter seemed righteous / of ware – a warning fare.”

            The “Shaper”, mentioned more in Gardner’s Grendel, is a blind harpist/poet who performs for the king. I rewrote the Shaper as Grendel’s messenger, a foil to the original where the poet, instead of idly gushing about the king and the ‘great’ Beowulf, is now galivanting for Grendel and warning Hrothgar of Grendel’s arrival.

“To what degree…’ / (quote Shaper) ‘does my King, perceive the sea? / And who have you witnessed in searing mire – / traversing borders you uprooted?”

            What the Shaper is asking is if Hrothgar has studied the horizon lately, and if he sees a figure, the “who”, coming from boiling swamps, and the very same land Hrothgar decimated. The “(quote Shaper)” is a nod to The Faerie Queene’s heavy use of “(quote he)”. The “searing mire” refers to the Burning Lakes from myth, and Grendel’s home – commonly seen as an allegory for Hell, ironically due to Hrothgar’s meddling.

“Beastly, / the King’s appearance bore. His shire / expelled the same disgust and killed the harping ‘liar’.”

            The king, now angry, sees this warning only as a bluff and has his men kill the Shaper – accentuating Hrothgar’s brutality.

“But there he was, the glorious Grendel, / who strode along the moors and blighted plain, / who spared the dragon-kin, Unferth, with gentle / discourse, and who, aside his glamor mane, / had come to share a mark: the calm of Cain.”

            The Shaper didn’t lie. Grendel had come, and as another nod to class-related literature, our version of Beowulf is a new-age translation by Maria Dahvana Headley that paints Beowulf as this, well… glorious being. Headly writes him as near-mythical, and so I wanted to give Grendel a similar treatment. The rest is about his accolades mentioned in Gardner’s Grendel: his journey through his homeland, now destroyed, his rivalry and humble victory over Unferth the dragon, his glamorous looks (rather than the typical unsightly description), and his curse mark. The biblical story of Cain is attempting to be flipped here, not so much a vile curse, but rather a blessing in disguise and key to this Grendel’s “gentle” nature.

“Our guy was wronged, and King’s to blame. At first, / for royally fucking the earth – the reign / had sought a fell, and then, the shire outburst / that laid a corpse beneath Grendel, the Ever Cursed.”

            This explains how Hrothgar’s to blame for the destruction of Grendel’s home and family, now with the Shaper’s lifeless corpse at his feet. “Our guy” and “fucking the earth” are both nods to Headley’s Beowulf, where Beowulf is constantly referred to as “our boy”, “the boldest”, “the man”, etc., and how Grendel had been forever “fucked by fate” respectively. Grendel is getting the tragic hero treatment in these lines.

“This scene would wither hearts less wise, such grief / was common folk, “and not of kings!” thought Hrothgar. / And so he spoke, “My poor scale-born, the thief / you seek is dead afoot. For thieves give not, / and I, my son, have much to give in Heorot.”

            The “common folk” feel guilty for literally killing the messenger, but Hrothgar stays firm. In Beowulf, Grendel goes on a stealthy slaughter, killing many and scaring the rest into hiding while Grendel makes a home in the iconic mead hall, Heorot. Since my story depicts Grendel as not a rampaging monster, he is offered Heorot so the king can rectify the wrongs made to Grendel’s land. Hrothgar has a catch however, he deems the thief to be the Shaper as he often contorts his words, and presents Heorot as a peace offering.

“The men around had sorrow show the ache / of bloody spills. Grendel forgave, begot / beyond erosive kings, and freed his hate, / but kings are never just, as they meddle with fate.”

            Grendel is understandably furious and baffled, but mostly tired of this one-sided war and accepts Hrothgar’s offer. Peace is thought to have been made, but Hrothgar has different plans, and Heorot is just a decoy – a bide for time, as Grendel’s unknowing end comes near, because Beowulf has arrived, and much to fear.