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David Gómez

Marina Caloca

English 12th

September 2, 2022

Villain: Changing point of views

The hero in one story is the villain in another story, but commonly, we only get to know

one part of the story, the one where the hero is the protagonist, and does good things and the

villain is the antagonist and does dreadful things. This is something that we have seen since

ancient times, and even from the beginning of literature, so we could attribute it to human nature,

a way of people from a civilization to share their thoughts and environment, and today we can

analyze this to understand their culture. What hadn’t been done, is to tell a story where the

villain’s story is explained with the purpose of seeing the two sides of a coin, not just one, which

is a result of centuries and centuries of stories of traditional hero stories, with a convenient

depiction for the hero, and living in the modern world, it was only likely that someone tried to

change the formula of a hero story.

A common example of this is Gardner’s Grendel, where we get to see the story through

the villain’s perspective. Gardner’s purpose was for the reader to sympathize to Grendel’s story

and depict Beowulf with another perspective, trying to subtly change the role of hero and villain.

About the first thing, sympathizing with Grendel, Gardner achieves this through a story focused

on the development of Grendel as a character, starting with his childhood, troubles, and seek for

a purpose in life; the latter is a universal theme which forces the reader to sympathize with

Grendel’s resolution of setting his life purpose in destroying Hrothgar’s men by a series of

logical thoughts, the part of the logical thoughts leads us to the subtle depiction of Grendel as a
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kind of hero: Grendel starts despising Hrothgar’s men because a long time ago when he got stuck

between two trees, Hrothgar’s men arrived with him and hurt him for no good reason. Asides

from this, he started realizing from going to the real world that people were evil because they

killed their horses, fought against each other, wasted resources, and killed for the sake of killing.

That is why from Beowulf’s original story depiction of Grendel as an evil, heinous, and horrible

monster, Grendel may seem like a hero because of his resolution of trying to take the evil off the

world, which Grendel thinks is humans and especially Hrothgar’s men because they hurt him

unreasonably.

This point of view in the story places Grendel as an ultimate good that goes beyond the

“good” ideals of humans and defends nature as the best way of justice there is, and his way of

doing this is through killing, which may take us to the famous quote of: “The means justifies the

ends.” That is why Grendel being a hero is a subtle message, because it leaves the conclusion to

the reader whether killing justifies the idea of a greater justice of Grendel. This idea of justice in

Grendel leads to him enjoying killing people, which may appear more cynical than logical, but

the answer lays on Grendel’s development: Grendel, as any human in real life, struggled for the

search of a meaning of life, a purpose, and during his childhood when he found Hrothgar’s men,

he found his purpose in killing them for justice and for the first time felt joy when he first

attacked the mead hall, and each time he did, which can be relatable to the anyone that has gone

through childhood and found a purpose in life.

Grendel fought for his justice alone, which is another thing that sets him apart from the

normal hero. A normal hero like Beowulf in the original story knows a river of people, has

countless friends or comrades, his fame reaches big, adjacent territories and indirectly or directly
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preaches his fame; whereas Grendel is not known by anyone, died without anyone knowing

about his “heroic” deeds, and without anyone supporting his ideals.

With all of this information, I personally still think a villain can be a hero or vice versa

depending on the context, since it all depends on the culture that made a hero; in the case of

Beowulf and Grendel, we can see an old civilization portraying their idea of a hero traditionally,

and in the case of Grendel we can see the modern intent of trying something different as a

consequence of all the evolution in literature. In the case of Grendel, the author succeeds in

making the reader sympathize with Grendel but leaves the debate open about whether what

Grendel did was right or wrong, which shows the author’s purpose of mocking a hero’ ideal and

teaches a lot about heroism, good and evil.

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Works Cited

Gardner, John. Grendel. 1971. Digital