The Coming of Grendel

A powerful monster, living down
In the darkness, growled in pain, impatient
As day after day the music rang
Loud in that hall, the harp's rejoicing
Call and the poet's clear songs, sung
Of the ancient beginnings of us all, recalling
The Almighty making the earth, shaping
These beautiful plains marked off by the oceans,
Then proudly setting the sun and moon
To glow across the land and light it;
The corners of the earth were made lovely with trees
And leaves, made quickalive with life, with each
Of the nations who now move on its face. And then
As now warriors sang of their pleasure:
So Hrothgar's men lived happy in his hall
Till the monster stirred, that demon, that fiend,
Grendel, who haunted the moorsbarren stretches of land where nothing will grow, the wild
Marshes, and made his home in a hell
Not hell but earth. He was spawnedproduced in that slime,
Conceivedcreated by a pair of those monsters born
Of Cain, murderous creatures banishedsent away
By God, punished forever for the crime
Of Abel's death. The Almighty drove
Those demons out, and their exilesent away was bitter,
Shut away from men; they split into a thousand forms of evil—spirits
And fiends, goblins, monsters, giants,
A brood forever opposing the Lord's
Will, and again and again defeated.

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