The most obvious motive for Grendel's attack
is envy and a sense of exclusion. He hears the laughter in the mead-hall, hates the Danes and
their merry-making from which he is excluded, and resolves to kill them. Even slaughtering
thirty does not satisfy him and he returns night after night to drown his misery in blood. Since
he is always an outcast, however, the misery remainsno matter how many he kills.
I think, however, that this question and my answer above (as well as any other answers
which invoke psychology and personality) would be equally incomprehensible to the poet or poets
who composed . For them and their audience, Grendel behaves monstrously
because he is a monster: motiveless as a howling gale or a storm at sea. Grendel exists purely
as an evil thing for the hero Beowulf to overcome. He attacks the mead-hall because the story
demands that he should do so.
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