Joshua Szymanski 2/27/20 Period 2 - Blog #2

2/27/2020 Joshua Szymanski PD2

Aim: How are philosophies of religion and government constructed by the characters in Grendel?

To begin the lesson we started with a discussion about Red Horse, a character in Grendel, and his relations to anarchism. I brought up the fact that he is not only representative of anarchism but more specifically anarcho-communism. He is constantly mentioning the plight of the peasantry in the Hrothgar’s kingdom to Hrothulf. He goes on to say how they are constantly repressed and subjugated by those at the top. This echoes the sentiments held by many people who ascribe themselves to the marxist ideology. However, he does also say that all government will lead to evil. Also that there is no system that will benefit everyone, because there will always be a group of people of higher power who will exploit the lower classes with less privilege. This is a demonstration of how he also represents the anarchist philosophy that the best system, is no system. Red Horse, in this scene, was speaking to Hrothulf, a prince. This brings up the important question as to why someone who believes in such radical notions, such as no government, would say this to a high ranking member of the current government. My theory was that Red Horse believes that they need to start at the top to bring a whole system down. Similar to the saying, cut the head off the snake, if you were to destroy a government at the top, the rest would crumble as well. So Red Horse is trying to bring Hrothulf around to his perspective to try and bring the system down around him.

We then discussed a quote made by Leo Tolstoy, which goes as follows, “Government is violence, Christianity is meekness, non-resistance, love. And, therefore, government cannot be Christian, and a man who wishes to be a Christian must not serve government.” There is an obvious contradiction here about being both a religious and political man. I do not believe that it is that black and white, there are examples of both a prosperous religious government as well as many failing ones. One of the most successful empires in all of history, had a very strong religious backing. I am referring to the Ottoman empire, whose laws were mainly derived from the Islamic faith. They were wildly successful in many different areas, including conquest and governorship. Even our own country of the US has a strong Judeo-Christian presence in our morality, ideology, laws, and culture. Both of these countries have been very successful. However there have also been examples of how the lack of separation of church and state had catastrophic consequences. The Holy Roman Empire which was mainly based in modern day Germany had a lot of corruption due to their religious ties. They also had a very obvious hypocrisy in the style of government they had and their beliefs as christians. They were usually very violent and set out to conquer other lands, a very big contrast to the christian belief, for example “do unto others, as you would have them do unto you.” Another member of the class brought up the good point that ideally these two should be one in the same, church and state. However when they stray from their ideals, such as a government away from it’s people or the church away from god, this leads to corruption and subjugation.

The next discussion was about some of the motifs present in this chapter of the book. One motif was the snow and winter, which in this case represents the apocalypse. As winter comes everything around us seems to die and all the animals seem to disappear. This seems to be an allusion, along with the black sun, to Ragnorok. As when there is a winter that is the length of three winters, Fenrir will swallow the sun, and will turn black. These, and many other motifs in this chapter, either allude to other works or demonstrate the perspective the Grendel has of the world.

We closed out the lesson by taking an online test on our machiavellian qualities. This is relevant to the story of Grendel as throughout the entire novel he explores many different ideologies and philosophies. Machiavellianism is just one of the many philosophies explored throughout the novel. Some others include nihilism and existentialism. All of these different viewpoints help to shape Grendel and his view on humanity up until this point in the novel, and most likely until the end as well.

Joshua Szymanski

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