With such weight of erudite Anglo-Saxon and medieval literary study pressing firmly down on this novella (such as Caliban upon Setebos by Robert Browning The Sea and the Mirror, Part III, by W H Auden) it is easy to get caught up in the need to label each chapter of Gardner’s mellifluous prose with statements like: “Gardener’s guiding light in this novel is not sword and sorcery, but Sartre and existentialism” (Adam Brown’s Introduction to the 2004 reprint). Analysis of the 1971 novel by the late American John Gardner often goes hand in hand with an literary need to shape his anthropomorphizing of the monster, Grendel, to the philosophy of Icelandic sagas, Shakespeare’s ‘The Tempest’ and any other codex of human thought on the nature of duality where the latter is a battle between good and evil, savage and civilised.
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