Is Grendel supposed to be one of the last surviving Neanderthals? I read somewhere that this might be the orgin of the Scandinavian troll myth, that they lingered on in the remote corners of Europe long after going extinct elsewhere.
shareThat could be a possibility, why not? It's a longshot, but we don't know everything.
But than you would have to consider the poem as an adaptation of older Scandinavian and Saxon folklore. Modern day scholars usually tend to look at the poem as it is in it's surviving form, and if you do so, there is no way to be certain what the origin of the monster is, only that it is a descendent from Cain.
I myself tend to believe that every story must have an origin. So maybe one day, long long ago, there was a monster or a crazy person, or a wild beast, or maybe even a giant, that was terrorising a village or a tribe somewhere in the North of Europe.
The film had it that Grendel suffered from deformities, hence the hairy body and freakish srength. That he lived apart from society also contributed to his 'monstrous' status. I think the Neanderthal idea is more Michael Crichton's.
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"Is Grendel supposed to be one of the last surviving Neanderthals? I read somewhere that this might be the orgin of the Scandinavian troll myth, that they lingered on in the remote corners of Europe long after going extinct elsewhere."
Wow, really interessting thesis. Where do you read that?
Sounds more like Eaters of the Dead's postulate than like any scientific hypothesis to me...
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Well the troll-myth is popularly believed to stem from man's encounters with the last living neanderthals 10,000 years ago, but with Beowulf being set in 500AD it is highly unlikely that Grendel was a neanderthal. Grendel -if the poem is based on fact- is likely to have been a deformed man, as someone above stated but locals thought he was a troll, from their folklore.
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at the beginning i thought grendel was a deformed man but then at the end wasn't he a dragon and the sea hag was his mother, right?
shareIn the directors comments he said maybe grendel was a Neanderthal but the thing is Neanderthal were short but very strong in the upper body
shareAccording to cryptozoologist Loren Coleman Grendel belongs to a race closely related to the North American Sasquatch.
Josh
The writer mentions this on the commentary track...initially the Grendel of this movie was concieved as a Sasquatch like creature (the pissing on the door scene..and the awful smell, are taken straight from some Bigfoot/Sasquatch stories), but they ended up making him more human\neanderthalish in the end.
shareOh yeah. I remember reading about that on the screen writers blog. Completely forgot about it until you brought it up.
Josh
A Neanderthal man would make an interesting physical opponent. They were more hunters than gatherers, living nomadic lives following the herds of prey - a harsh life almost constantly on the move.
As I understand it the average Neanderthal (though slightly shorter than 'modern' man) was as physically strong as an Olympic power-lifter of today.
So the stronger Neanderthals were.... You get the picture.
I think there is a grain of credibility to this idea. I can imagine the idea of Grendel being a race memory that hung around for a long time before it was immortalized in the poem.
The "Flores Man" of the Indonesian islands was discovered only recently, but interestingly the people of that place have legends of "creatures" who fit that description and in a documentary I saw there was this islander saying that these things only disappeared a hundred years ago.
Personally, I'd like to think that Grendel and his father were actually not pure Neanderthals, but are rather Neanderthal/Cro-Magnon hybrids. This would explain why neither were as short as an Neanderthal, but were still stocky and freakishly strong, not to mention nomadic. Now as for Grendel's Mother, on the other hand, could someone explain what was her deal? She's clearly not a human nor a Neanderthal and is instead more like some sort of nixie or a sea troll/jotun. What do you think of her?
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She's my only problem with the movie... I can't understand why, in a realistic movie which seems to me to fall into the category of "the real story of..." they decided to include one, just one, supernatural element. I really don't know what to make of her...
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shareIn this particular film, yes, Grendel is supposed to be part of a race of relict Neanderthal who various human kingdoms had hunted down.
Is it the origin of the myth? Absolutely not. The last Neanderthal in the region died ca. 40,000 years ago. Some may have survived in the Gibraltar area until 24,000 years ago, and when their remains were found, interest in relict Neanderthal living into the historical age began heavily in fiction. Crichton's book Eaters of the Dead mentions this at the beginning, but it is intended as a joke to enrichen the myth he's telling (he makes lots of other references in the bibliography as humorous asides, such as to H.P. Lovecraft).
But no Neanderthal lived into the Neolithic, much less the Iron Age. Nor are they the origin of Germanic monster myth, as the Norse were still part of the Indo-Europeans and living in southern Russia for the whole Neolithic period.
There is something I read years ago along the line of: "Of course there are giants! Great, hairy, towering monsters with loud, booming voices. Every small child has looked up and seen them."
That has always struck me as a true origin of giants, stories of which are across all cultures. Even the thing that a giant is often said to be "twice as tall as a man" or even three times as tall fits with a small child in comparison to an adult.
So....perhaps we don't need Neanderthals.
Mind you, Google an image of a male hippopotamus skull and you will see a definitive source for a dragon!
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