Can you Compare Grendel and Melkor?

[Tolkienfan2007]

okay,

i'm just curious if anyone can compare Melkor to Grendel (from "Beowulf") and if not how are they different from each other?

 

[Hammersmith]

Melkor didn't have a mother, he wasn't destroyed by the prowess of humanity or indeed by natural ability and as far as we know, he couldn't swim.

 

[Lhunithiliel]

okay,

i'm just curious if anyone can compare Melkor to Grendel (from "Beowulf") and if not how are they different from each other?

And I would ask back:

What made you think that they are similar?

Hammersmith,

I best liked the "mother" and the "swimming" parts!

 

[Walter]

Yeah, live must be a b..ch when you can't swim and your mother lives under water...

But the gigantic foes whom Beowulf has to meet are identified with the foes of God. Grendel and the dragon are constantly referred to in language which is meant to recall the powers of darkness with which Christian men felt themselves to be encompassed. They14 are the 'inmates of Hell', 'adversaries of God', 'offspring of Cain', 'enemies of mankind'. Consequently, the matter of the main story of Beowulf, monstrous as it is, is not so far removed from common mediaeval experience as it seems to us to be from our own. . . . Grendel hardly differs15 from the fiends of the pit who were always in ambush to waylay a righteous man. And so Beowulf, for all that he moves in the world of the primitive Heroic Age of the Germans, nevertheless is almost a Christian knight.16

Beowulf - The Monsters and the Critics

Thus, it appears, Tolkien seems to see a few parallels as well...

 

[Lhunithiliel]

Amazingly, yet another similarity:

"He is a man, and that for him and many is sufficient tragedy." (ibid)

Urrr ... are we still speaking about Grendel/Melkor ?

 

[Walter]

Amazingly, yet another similarity:

"He is a man, and that for him and many is sufficient tragedy." (ibid)

Urrr ... are we still speaking about Grendel/Melkor ?

Probably not...

Beowulf is not, then, the hero of an heroic lay, precisely. He has no enmeshed loyalties, nor hapless love. He is a man, and that for him and many is sufficient tragedy. It is not an irritating accident that the tone of the poem is so high and its theme so low. It is the theme in its deadly seriousness that begets the dignity of tone: lif is læne: eal scæseð leoht and lif somod. So deadly and ineluctable is the underlying thought, that those who in the circle of light, within the besieged hall, are absorbed in work or talk and do not look to the battlements, either do not regard it or recoil. Death comes to the feast, and they say He gibbers: He has no sense of proportion.

Beowulf - The Monsters and the Critics

 

[Ithrynluin]

Hello Tolkienfan2007,

Grendel seems to be a 'primitive' monster, relying only on instinct and impulse when he goes a-hunting down to Heorot. In contrast, Melkor is an entity of vast intelligence who sought to rule the earth itself and make all its inhabitants into his thralls.

 

[Walter]

Often enough the gods of a previous mythology end up as the 'primitive' monsters of the succeeding mythology. Melko, can be compared in that respect e.g. with Kronos or with Phosphoros/Lucifer, the biblical Leviathan bears some resemblances of Tiamat, the Babylonian Chaos-dragon and primeval goddess.

It may well be that Grendel - and especially his mother - also respresent such a parallel...