Beowulf was a recited pagan folklore where the people of that time period believed in gods, goddesses, and monsters. Its significance lies in an oral history where people memorized long, dense lines of verse. Later, when a written tradition was introduced, they began to write the

The story of a race of demonic monsters and giants descended from Cain. It came form a tradition established by the apocryphal Book of Enoch and early Jewish and Christian interpretations of Genesis 6:4, “There were giants in the earth in those days, and also afterward, when the sons of God had relations with the daughters of men, who bore children to them” (Holland Crossley, 15). Many of Grendel’s appellations are unquestionable epithets of Satan such as “enemy of mankind,” “God’s adversary,” “the devil in hell,” and “the hell slave.” His actions are represented in a manner suggesting the conduct of the evil one, and he dwells with his mother in a mere which conjures visions of hell. The depiction of the mere is the most remarkable because it is a conceptual landscape made fearsomely realistic by the poetry. The closest parallel with Grendel and his mother’s mere is from the vision of hell in sermon 17 of the tenth century Blickling Homilies. This scene is based on the apocryphal vision of St. Paul, where the saint visits hell under the protection of St. Michael. The similarities to the mere are italicized: “But now let us ask the archangel St. Michael and the nine orders of holy angels that they be a help to us against hell-fiends. They were the holy ones that receive men’s souls. Thus St. Paul was looking toward the northern part of this middle-earth, where all the waters go down under, and there he saw a hoary stone over that water, and north of that stone the woods had grown very frosty, and there were dark mists, and under that stone was the dwelling of nickers and outlawed creatures. And he saw that on that cliff many black souls were hanging on the icy trees with their hands bound, and the devils in the likeness of nickers were seizing them as does the greedy wolf, and the water was black underneath the cliff. And between the cliff and the water there was the distance of twelve miles, and when the branches broke off then souls that were hanging on the branches plunged downward, and the nickers seized them. These, then, were the souls of those who here in this world had sinned unrighteously and would not repent of it before their life’s end. But let us now earnestly ask St. Michael that he lead our souls into bliss, where they may rejoice in eternity without end. Amen” (Morris, 209-11). These remarkable verbal parallels show that the landscape of the mere symbolizes hell. It is a garden of evil, in which one of the race of Cain dwells in freezing sin. The

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