"Grendel" by John Gardner, Chapters 9–12

The priests approach them, carrying torches, their shaggy white heads bent, obsequious. “Great spirit,” the chief of the priests wails, “ghostly Destroyer, defend the people of Scyld and kill their enemy, the terrible world-rim-walker!”

When they came out in the morning and saw what I’d done, no one was especially bothered except the priests. They lamented and tore their hair, the priests, as fraught and rhetorical as they were when they prayed, and after a few days their outcries made people uneasy.

When they came out in the morning and saw what I’d done, no one was especially bothered except the priests. They lamented and tore their hair, the priests, as fraught and rhetorical as they were when they prayed, and after a few days their outcries made people uneasy.

Unferth sleeps fitfully, guarding the meadhall; and the Shaper, in his big house, tosses and turns.

He has a fever. He mumbles a few inchoate phrases to someone who is not there.

Then, suddenly impish—at times I cannot resist these things: “Tell us what you know of the King of the Gods.”

He rolls his blind eyes, figuring the odds, snatching through his mind for doctrines.

“For no reason can be given for just that limitation which it stands in His nature to impose. The King of the Gods is not concrete, but He is the ground for concrete actuality. No reason can be given for the nature of God, because that nature is the ground of rationality.”

Ork is now weeping profusely, so moved that his throat constricts.

O the ultimate evil in the temporal world is deeper than any specific evil, such as hatred, or suffering, or death! The ultimate evil is that Time is perpetual perishing, and being actual involves elimination.

The nature of evil may be epitomized, therefore, in two simple but horrible and holy propositions: ‘Things fade’ and ‘Alternatives exclude.’

If a man hankers for visions, he should do it in public, where it does us some good.

The theory’s ridiculous. Idle speculation.

Merely rational thought—forgive me for preaching, but I must, I must!—merely rational thought leaves the mind incurably crippled in a closed and ossified system, it can only extrapolate from the past.

Merely rational thought—forgive me for preaching, but I must, I must!—merely rational thought leaves the mind incurably crippled in a closed and ossified system, it can only extrapolate from the past.

The absurd, the inspiring, the uncanny, the awesome, the terrifying, the ecstatic—none of these had a place, for you, before.

He lifts his head, considers me, then lowers it again to keep an eye on crevasses and seams, icy scree, slick rocky ledges—doggedly continuing.

On the rocky cliffs looking out to sea, Hrothgar’s watchmen, each man posted several stone’s-throws away from the next, sit huddled in furs, on their horses’ backs, or stand in the shelter of an outcropping ledge, rubbing their hands together, stamping their feet.

At the house of the Shaper, people come and go, solemn faced, treading softly, their heads bowed and their hands folded for fear of sending dreadful apparitions through his dreams.

She is a lady I have watched with the greatest admiration. Soul of fidelity, decorum.

The Shaper’s assistant, cradling the old man’s polished harp, sings of Hoc and Hildeburh and Hnaef and Hengest, how Finn’s thanes fought with his wife’s dear kinsmen and killed King Hnaef, and a terrible thing ensued.

End of an epoch, I could tell the king.

That beat—steady, inhumanly steady; inexorable.

The wooden keel struck sand and cut a gouge toward the boulders on the shore—a forty-foot cut, half the length of the ship—and then, quick as wolves—but mechanical, terrible—the strangers leaped down, and with stiff, ice-crusted ropes as gray as the sea, the sky, the stones, they moored their craft.

He scolded and fumed and demanded their lineage; they listened with folded arms.

At last the coastguard’s voice gave out—he bent over the pommel, coughing into his fist—and the leader answered.

I found myself not listening, merely looking at his mouth, which moved—or so it seemed to me—independent of the words, as if the body of the stranger were a ruse, a disguise for something infinitely more terrible.

It was unreal—insubstantial as spiderweb-strands blowing lightly across a window that looks out on trees.

A man with a wife and seven children, a carpenter with a fair reputation as wise, not maddened by passions, not given to foolishness—regular of habit, dignified in bearing, a dedicated craftsman (no edge unbeveled, no ragged peg, no gouge or split)—once crept from his house at the edge of the town while his family slept, and fled down snowy paths through woods to the house of a hunter away in search of game.

I have set her aside—gently, picking her up by the armpits as I would a child—and so have proved that she has no power but the little I give her by momentary whim.

For the world is divided, experience teaches, into two parts: things to be murdered, and things that would hinder the murder of things: and the Geats might reasonably be defined either way.

They’d been saying for years that the ghostly Destroyer would take care of things in time. Now here were these foreigner upstarts unmasking religion!

My old friend Ork sat shaking his head in dismay, saying nothing, brooding, no doubt, on the dark metaphysical implications.

Theology does not thrive in the world of action and reaction, change: it grows on calm, like the scum on a stagnant pool.

Theology does not thrive in the world of action and reaction, change: it grows on calm, like the scum on a stagnant pool.

Only in a world where everything is patently being lost can a priest stir men’s hearts as a poet would by maintaining that nothing is in vain.

Keep them from wasting their much touted skills on one another.

Thus we swam for five nights, and then a storm came up, icy wind from the north, black sky, raging waves, and we were separated. The turmoil stirred up the sea-monsters.

Frost shall freeze, and fire melt wood;
the earth shall give fruit, and ice shall bridge
dark water, make roofs, mysteriously lock
earth’s flourishings; but the fetters of frost
shall also fall, fair weather return,
and the reaching sun restore the restless sea.

Animals gather around me, enemies of old, to watch me die. I give them what I hope will appear a sheepish smile.