Rhetoric is the art of speaking or writing effectively and persuasively (Rhetoric, n.d.). The rhetoric of a piece helps readers determine how they feel about the author, characters, and themes that a story portrays. In the case of Grendel, a demon from the Old English poem Beowulf, the reader can get two opposing but complementary rhetorics from the stories Beowulf, translated by Seamus Heaney, and Grendel, by John Gardner. The opposing rhetorics of Beowulf and Grendel develop through the focuses, language, and narration of the publications, but both effectively address the audience of each work and provide two different perspectives of Grendel.
Heaney and Gardner have two different focuses in their publications that affect the rhetoric associated with Grendel. Heaney translated…show more content… As mentioned before, Beowulf is an Old English epic poem translated to Modern English by Seamus Heaney (Heaney, 2001). The translation from Old English means that the poem uses literary devices and vocabulary that a modern reader may not know. This makes Beowulf more of a puzzle for the reader to decipher and learn how to read, making it difficult to interpret the text beyond what is explicitly said. While this is the case with Beowulf, Grendel has a language that is easier for the modern reader to interpret. Grendel uses Modern English, including swear words, but mixed with literary devices (Spraycar, 2008). Modern English is a language that most readers are familiar with, and even literary devices in this form of English would be easier to understand as opposed to literary devices translated from Old English. If the reader is able to interpret the piece in its complex dimensions, then they are able to better understand the rhetoric of the piece. Grendel and Beowulf have different languages that affect the reader's understanding and therefore the
