English IV Objectives:  Essential Question:  Learning Target:  Warm-up:Materials:Procedures:Grendel Beowulf  We will compare modernprose to Anglo Saxon poetryHow does considering a character’s point of view enhance meaning?Students will read, compare and contrast, and provide text evidence. In Google Classroom  pdf – Gardner’s GrendelComparison/Contrast Exercise1. Students will read the Grendel excerpt2. Students will compare and contrast Grendel and Beowulf3. Students will provide text evidence4. Students will compare and contrast and 5. Students will explain how their view of Grendel has changed.   Gray Gardner Grendel Excerpt  I sigh, sink into the silence, and cross it like wind. Behind my back, at the world’s end, my pale, slightly glowing fat mother sleeps on, old, sick at heart, in our dingy under-ground room. Lifebloated, baffled, long-suffering hag. Guilty, she imagines, of some unremembered, perhaps ancestral crime. (She must have some human in her.) Not that she thinks. Not that she dissects and ponders the dusty mechanical bits of her miserable life’s curse. She clutches at me in her sleep as if to crush me. I break away. “Why are we here?” I used to ask her. “Why do we stand this putrid, stinking hole?” She trembles at my words. Her fat lips shake. “Don’t ask!” It must be some terrible secret, I used to think. I’d give her a crafty squint. She’ll tell me, in time, I thought. But she told me nothing. I waited on. That was before the old dragon, calm as winter, unveiled the truth. He was not a friend.  And so I come through trees and towns to the light of Hrothgar’s meadhall. I am no stranger here. A respected guest. Eleven years not and going on twelve I have come up this clean-mown central hill, dark shadow out of the woods below, and have knocked politely on the high oak door, bursting its hinges and sending the shock of my greeting inward like a cold blast out of a cave. “Grendel!” they squeak, and I smile like exploding spring. The old Shaper, a man I cannot help but admire, goes out the back window with his harp at a single bound, though blind as a bat. The drunkest of Hrothgar’s thanes come reeling and clanking down from their wall-hung beds, all shouting their meady outrageous boasts, their heavy swords aswirl like eagle’s wings. “Woe, woe, woe!” cries Hrothgar, hoary with winters, peeking in, wide-eyed from his bedroom in the back. His wife, looking in behind him, makes a scene. The thanes in the meadhall blow out the lights and cover the wide stone fireplace with shields. I laugh and crumple over; I can’t help myself. In the darkness, I alone see clear as day. While they squeal and screech and bump into each other, I silently sack up my dead and withdraw to the woods. I eat and laugh and eat until I can barely walk, my chest-hair matted with dribbled blood, and then the roosters on the hill crow, and dawn comes over the roofs of the houses, and all at once I am filled with gloom again.”This is some punishment sent us, I hear them bawling from the hill.My head aches.  Morning nails my eyes.”Some god is angry,” I hear a woman keen.  “The people of Scyld and Herorgar and Hrothgar are mired in sin!”My belly rumbles, sick on their sour meat.  I crawl through bloodstained leaves to the eaves of the forest, and there peek out.  The dogs fall silent at the edge of my spell, and where the king’s hall surmounts the town, the blind old Shaper, harp clutched tight to his fragile chest, stares futilely down, straight at me.  Otherwise nothing. Pigs root dully at the posts of a wooden fence.  A rumple-horned ox lies chewing in dew and shade.  A few men, lean, wearing animal skins, look up at the gables of the king’s hall, or at the vultures circling casually beyond.  Hrothgar says nothing, hoarfrost-bearded, his features cracked and crazed.  Inside, I hear the people praying-whimpering, whining, mumbling, pleading-to their numerous sticks and stones.  He doesn’t go in.  The king has lofty theories of his own.”Theories,” I whisper to the bloodstained ground.  So the dragon once spoke.  (“They’d map out roads through Hell with their crackpot theories! I recall his laugh.)Then the groaning and praying stop, and on the side of the hill the dirge-slow shoveling begins.Image transcription textComparing Grendels Grendel in Gardner’s excerpt Similarities Grendel in Beowulf Differences Differences”Eleven years not and going Ryan was here on twelve i have come up skibetybapumdada’n with this cleanmown central hill, dark shadow out of the woods below, and have knocked politely on the high oa… Show more… Show more Arts & Humanities English ENG 1111