119-120). Yet another vital way in which this creature is alienated from the society is through his ancestral ties. He is a descendant of Cain, having been,".spawned in that slime, conceived of Cain/ murderous creatures banished By God." (106-107), and therefore, by definition, is an outcast of society, doomed to roam in the shadows, always from the outside looking in. His whole existence, coming as it were from one of the original sins, is grounded solely in the moral perversion to hate good simply because it is good. Finally is the religious fact that, quite simply, unlike the rest of humanity, Grendel is an enemy of God and can therefore not know God's great love.
Then there is Grendel's Mother, who, like her damned progeny if not even more so, is placed as a being alien to all which is familiar and decent in the world of man. She shares his dark roots and abandonment from the light of both God and humanity, as well as his vicious nature. She, however, is not even given a name or a proper description, an identifier of any kind by which to know her. She remains an amorphous phantom, "that female horror/monstrous hell-bride" (ln.1259-1260), a shape outside of human comprehension. Furthermore, whereas Grendel lived just on the outskirts of civilization in the fens, his mother dwelled in a land of almost surrealistic horror, estranged from anything recognizable as even remotely natural, a cold murky lake in a desolate landscape which is populated by strange beasts and "where the water burns" (ln.1366). For Grendel's Mother, even the natural laws of Human reproduction and love hold no sway, for Grendel is fatherless and has been created abnormally by his mother alone.
Despite all of their apparent separation from the Human race, however, Grendel and his Mother serve as a deeper, almost constant underlying metaphor for the evils, the dark side of the very society which they plague.
