The Punishment In Grendel's Fall From Evil In Beowulf

Like Grendel, Frankenstein’s Monster requests for his creator to lighten the ‘punishment’ (the punishment in question being the creatures’ existence and subsequent negligence) by creating a mate. Some academics have related Grendel 's ancestry from Cain to monsters and giants, such as David Williams, who in Cain and Beowulf: A Study in Secular Allegory, where he related Grendel, as well as the dragon, to being the servants of the Cain ideology and embodiments of the very idea of Cain and his fall from grace by acting as the physical manifestations of the consequences of his actions (Williams, 1982). In the original bible story, Cain was left to wander the world, aimless and groaning, shaking upon the earth. Even the Exegesis has Cain suffering from body tremors (Byron, 2011). Grendel has this curse, the so called ‘mark of Cain’. Described as ‘Grendel who haunted the moors, the wild, Marshes, and made his home in a hell. Not hell, but hell on earth. He was spawned in that slime, Of Cain, murderous creatures banished, By God, punished forever for the crime, Of Abel 's death.’ The Beowulf-poets’ analogy of ‘not hell but hell on earth’ is directly symbolic of the wandering nature of Cain, doomed to stalk the land forever. However, the reference to Cain in the actual text is, like most of the aspects of the poem, very short and undetailed. The following passage reflects the ambiguous tone presented by the author (with most of the words translated by myself to clarify the