Chapter 3: The Rise of Man

Chapter 3: The Rise of Man

Hrothgar's Power Grows

They Adapt and Overcome

Grendel is Confused

Why Hrothgar

It wasn't because he threw that battle-ax that I turned on Hrothgar. That was mere midnight foolishness. I dismissed it, thought of it afterward only as you remember a tree that fell on you or an adder you stepped on by accident, except of course that Hrothgar was more to be feared than a tree or snake. It wasn't until later, when I was full-grown and Hrothgar was an old, old man, that I settled my soul on destroying him--slowly and cruelly. Except for his thanes' occasional stories of seeing my footprints, he'd probably forgotten by then that I existed.

He'd been busy. I'd watched it all from the eaves of the forest, mostly from up off the ground, in the branches.

The moors their axes had stripped of trees glowed silver in the moonlight, and the yellow lights of peasant huts were like scattered jewels on the ravendark cloak of a king. I was so filled with sorrow and tenderness I could hardly have found it in my heart to snatch a pig!

Thus I fled, ridiculous hairy creature torn apart by poetry--crawling, whimpering, streaming tears, across the world like a two-headed beast, like mixed-up lamb and kid at the tail of a baffled, indifferent ewe--and I gnashed my teeth and clutched the sides of my head as if to heal the split, but I couldn't.

And now when enemies from farther out struck at kings who called themselves Hrothgar's friends, a messenger would slip out and ride through the night to the tribute-taker, and in half an hour, while the enemy bands were still shouting at each other, still waving their ashspears and saying what horrible things they would do, the forest would rumble with the sound of Hrothgar's horsemen. He would overcome them: his band had grown large, and for the treasures Hrothgar could afford now to give them in sign of his thanks, his warriors became hornets. New roads snaked out. New meadhalls gave tribute. His treasure-hoard grew till his meadhall was piled to the rafters with brightly painted shields and ornamented swords and boar's-head helmets and coils of gold, and they had to abandon the meadhall and sleep in the outbuildings.

As the bands grew larger, they would seize and clear a hill and, with the trees they'd cut, would set up shacks, and on the crown of the hill a large, shaggy house with a steeply pitched roof and a wide stone hearth, where they'd all go at night for protection from other bands of men. The inside walls would be beautifully painted and hung with tapestries, and every cross-timber or falcon's perch was carved and gewgawed with toads, snakes, dragon shapes, deer, cows, pigs, trees, trolls. At the first sign of spring they would set out their shrines and scatter seeds on the sides of the hill, below the shacks, and would put, up wooden fences to pen their pigs and cows.

Gardner's View of Humans

A Penchant for Violence and Waste

The Humans Start

Then the wars began, and the war songs, and the weapon making. If the songs were true, as I suppose at least one or two of them were, there had always been wars, and what I'd seen was merely a period of mutual exhaustion...It was confusing and frightening, not in a way I could untangle. I was safe in my tree, and the men who fought were nothing to me, except of course that they talked in something akin to my language, which meant that we were, incredibly, related. I was sickened, if only at the waste of it: all they killed--cows, horses, men--they left to rot or burn. I sacked all I could and tried to store it, but my mother would growl and make faces because of the stink.

In the beginning there were various groups of them: ragged little bands that roamed the forest on foot or horseback, crafty-witted killers that worked in teams, hunting through the summer, shivering in caves or little huts in the winter, occasionally wandering out into the snow to plow through it slowly, clumsily, after more meat. Ice clung to their eyebrows and beards and eyelashes, and I'd hear them whining and groaning as they walked. When two hunters from different bands came together in the woods, they would fight until the snow was slushy with blood, then crawl back, gasping and crying, to their separate camps to tell wild tales of what happened.

Meanwhile, those who paid tribute to him were forced to strike at more distant halls to gather the gold they paid to Hrothgar--and a little on the side for themselves. His power overran the world, from the foot of my cliff to the northern sea to the impenetrable forests south and east. They hacked down trees in widening rings around their central halls and blistered the land with peasant huts and pigpen fences till the forest looked like an old dog dying of mange. They thinned out the game, killed birds for sport, set accidental fires that would burn for days. Their sheep killed hedges, snipped valleys bare, and their pigs nosed up the very roots of what might have grown. Hrothgar's tribe made boats to drive farther north and west. There was nothing to stop the advance of man. Huge boars fled at the click of a harness. Wolves would cower in the glens like foxes when they caught that deadly scent. I was filled with a wordless, obscurely murderous unrest.