Hrothulf the Evil

In reading the most recent chapters in Grendel by John Gardner, especially chapters 8 and 9, I couldn’t help but to feel that Hrothulf is a very bad, almost evil, character. He just gives off a bad vibe that may not have been noticed by others, but struck me very strongly. From the moment he is introduced as a character that had come out of “orphan’s woe” to Heorot. I don’t know about you, but coming to something out of woe is never a good thing. Grievous distress, which is a fancy term for woe, can cause a person to great things, in a good and bad way, and Hrothulf seems destined to do terrible things, great but terrible. Every time he is brought up in chapter 5, he is associated with blood, flesh, or weapons. In his first conversation with Wealtheow, he is described as “Hrothgar’s flesh and blood.” Not really a bad thing, but the images of blood keep popping up leading me to believe that it is not just a coincidence, but it could just mean that I am seeing things that don’t exist, which is a real possibility. Then at the end of the scene when he is introduced, he is described as a “sweet scorpion” who sits and “cleans his knife.” This is freaky and clearly seems to foreshadow some type of disaster that will occur with Hrothulf being in the center of it all. Chapter eight continues with Hrothulf being described as very quiet and he has the Danes fooled that he is merely a quiet fellow who has been hurt by his father, Halga the Good, which is an ironic name considering how evil I think Hrothulf is, dying because of some type of attack. Although he is quiet, he is really scheming and not grieving or thinking as the people of Heorot believe. He has accomplished the most complete deception as everybody thinks he is nothing, but he is really a sneaky force to be reckoned with, sneaky being the key word. Every time I think about Hrothulf, images of Smeagol/Gollum from J.R.R Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings keep popping up. Smeagol wasn’t really evil, but was definitely a schemer as he tried to kill Frodo by leading him to the giant spider always trying to get his own hands on the ring. Now that I think about, a lot of parallels can be drawn between Hrothulf and Smeagol especially because of what they are willing to do to get what they want. Hrothulf secretly schemes to get the throne, after having the trust of Hrothgar’s men, and Smeagol schemes to get the ring, after having the trust of Frodo. Going back to the way Hrothulf is regarded in the novel, even his mentor is called Red Horse. Blood is Red, an observation that I wanted to point out that I fell augments Hrothulf’s bad image. This may not have been what Gardner was trying to get across but it is what I noticed. Hrothulf may not be evil in many people’s eyes, but the way I see it, he is more evil than Grendel himself.