Excerpted from John Garder’s Grendel:

There he lay, gasping on his belly like a half drowned rat. His face and throat and arms were a crosshatch of festering cuts, the leavings of the firesnakes. His hair and beard hung straight down like seaweed. He panted for a long time, then rolled his eyes up, vaguely in my direction. In the darkness he couldn’t see me, though I could see him. He closed his hand on the sword hilt and jiggled the sword a little, too weak to raise it off the floor.

“Unferth has come!”, he said.

I smiled. He crawled toward me, the sword noisily scraping on the cave’s rock floor. Then he gave out again. “It will be sung,” he whispered, then paused again to get wind. “It will be sung year on year and age on age that Unferth went down through the burning lake-” he paused to pant “-and gave his life in battle with the world-rim monster.” He let his cheek fall to the floor and lay panting for a long time, saying nothing. It dawned on me that he was waiting for me to kill him. I did nothing. I sat down and put my elbows on my knees and my chin on my fists and merely watched. He lay with his eyes closed and began to get his breath back. He whispered: “It’s all very well to make a fool of me before my fellow thanes. All very well to talk about dignity and noble language and all the rest, as if heroism were a golden trinket, mere outward show, and hollow. But such is not the case, monster. That is to say-” He paused, seemd to grope; he’d lost his train of thought.

I said nothing, merely waited. “Even now you mock me,” Unferth whispered. I had an uneasy feeling he was close to tears. If he wept, I was not sure I could control myself. His pretensions to uncommon glory were one thing. If for even an instant he pretended to misery like mine…

“You think me a witless fool”, he whispered. “Oh, I heard what you said. I caught your nasty insinuations. ‘I thought heroes were only in poetry,’ you said. Implying that what I’ve made of myself is mere fairytale stuff.” He raised his head, trying to glare at me, but his blind stare was in the wrong direction. “Well, it’s not, let me tell you. His lips trembled and I was certain he would cry, I would have to destroy him from pure disgust, but he held it. He let his head fall again and sucked for air. A little of his voice came back, so that he no longer had to whisper but could bring out his words in a slightly reedy whine. “Poetry’s trash, mere clouds of words, comfort to the hopeless. But this is no cloud, no syllabled pantom that stands here shaking its sword at you.”

I let the slight exaggeration pass.

But Unferth didn’t. “Or lies here,” he said. “A hero is not afraid to face cruel truth.” That reminded him, apparently, of what he’d meant to say before. “You talk of heroism as a noble language, dignity. It’s more than that, as my coming here has proved. No man above us will ever know that Unferth died here or fled to the hills like a coward. Only you and I and God will know the truth. That’s inner heroism.”

“Hmm,” I said. It was not unusual, of course, to hear them contradict themselves, but I would have liked it if he’d stuck to one single version, either that they would know and sing his tragedy or that they wouldn’t. So it would have been a poem, surely, if Unferth were a character, good or evil, heroic or not. But reality, alas, is essentially shoddy. I let out a sigh.

He jerked his head up, shocked. “Does nothing have value in your horrible ruin of a brain?”

I waited. The whole shit-ass scene was his idea, not mine.

I saw the light dawning in his eyes. “I understand,” he said. I thought he would laugh at the bottomless stupidity of my cynicism, but while the laugh was still starting at the corners of his eyes, another look came, close to fright. “You think me deluded. Tricked by my own walking fairytale. You think I came without hope of winning – came to escape indignity by suicide!” He did laugh now, not amused: sorrowful and angry. The laugh died quickly. “I didn’t know how deep the pool was,” he said. “I had a chance. I knew I had no more than that. It’s all a hero asks for.”

I sighed. The word “hero” was beginning to grate. He was an idiot. I could crush him like a fly, but I held back.

“Go ahead, scoff,” he said, petulant. “Excpet in the life of a hero, the whole world’s meaningless. The hero sees values beyond what’s possible. That’s the nature of a hero. It kills him, of course, ultimately. But it makes the whole struggle of humanity worthwhile.”

I nodded in the darkness. “And breaks up the boredom,” I said.

He raised up on his elbows, and the effort of it made his shoulders shake. “One of us is going to die tonight. Does that break up your boredom?”

“It’s not true,” I said. “A few minutes from now I’m going to carry you back to Hrothgar, safe and sound. So much for poetry.”

“I’ll kill myself,” he whispered. He shook violently now.

“Up to you,” I answered reasonably, “but you’ll admit it may seem at least a trifle cowardly to some.”

His fists closed and his teeth clenched; then he relaxed and lay flat.

I waited for him to find an answer. Minutes passed. It came to me that he had quit. He had glimpsed a glorious ideal, struggled toward it and seized it and come to understand it and was disappointed. One could sympathize.

He was asleep.

I picked him up gently and carried him home. I laid him at the door of Hrothgar’s meadhall, still asleep, killed the two guards so I wouldn’t be misunderstood, and left.

He lives on, bitter, feebly challenging my midnight raids from time to time (three times this summer), crazy with shame that he alone is always spared, and furiously jealous of the dead. I laugh when I see him. He throws himself at me, or he cunningly sneaks up behind, sometimes in disguise – a goat, a dog, a sickly old woman – and I roll on the floor with laughter. So much for heroism. So much for the harvest-virgin. So much, also, for the alternative visions of blind old poets and dragons.