Grendel, or Anxiety? In today’s society, we face many monsters that cause us to become fearful and weak when faced with a challenge. In the epic Beowulf translated by Burton Raffel, Grendel is a miserable monster who causes pain upon faultless people, and is motivated by their pain. Today’s monsters may not be actual creatures, but they do cause the same terrifying effects on people, symbolizing evil in our society. Anxiety, like Grendel causes you to feel alone, attacks innocent people, and creates jealousy of others happiness. Grendel has been isolated into darkness, causing him to be miserable. For example, “A powerful monster, living down in the darkness, growled in pain,” he chooses to isolate himself from all people because he is a coward (lines 1-2). Grendel represents that Anglo-Saxon theme stating that without companionship, one cannot survive. When confronted in a battle with Beowulf, he becomes fearful, weak, and …show more content…
In Beowulf, it says “their ears could not hear his praise nor know his glory,” this is a connection to God in this epic, but in modern society, people with anxiety don’t hear praise they receive from others because they don’t believe it (lines 97-98). Grendel can’t help who his ancestors are, but he can help himself instead of living down to their expectations. In The Monster Called Anxiety, it says “The inside of my head is a loud place. Something is constantly bouncing around. I think about things I said or did years ago, about how ‘stupid’ I was,/ Anxiety makes me a difficult person to be friends with” (Ann). Grendel needed a friend to keep him alive, he was always thinking about what his people did years ago when that’s irrelevant to him now. To overcome anxiety, you need companionship, but you also need to learn to love yourself so you can create a more confident, happy, and healthy lifestyle for