Grendel Essay, Research Paper

From the poem Beowulf i cant tell if the character Grendel is truly evil. I know that he is not good because he kills people yet this does not let me know that his soul is evil.

In the poem Beowulf they state that Grendel is the son of Cain. They tell you that his blood is evil. The first thing most people would think when they hear that someone is the son of Cain is that they must be evil. What i believe is different in the since that ,just because evil is in your blood it doesn’t make you that way. An example is : If for two generations of a family men have been beating woman it does not mean that the third generation must do this to. Another example is that just because someone was the child of two Christian parents this doesn’t make the child a Christian. I believe that living beings determine their own morality.

I also couldn’t determine if Grendel was evil due to the fact that he was an animal. If Grendel is an animal and his source of food consist of humans ,then this would justify him killing them. We kill chickens and pigs to eat and Grendel would kill humans. His need to kill people is primitive.

The book Beowulf though descriptive did not give enough insight into the character Grendel. The book only gives you the aspect of Beowulf and people who fear Grendel.