Theme: Disaster Bringing a Sense of Community. Just as natural disasters in the real world bring people together, the terrifying raids that Grendel inflicted on the Danes brought them together in song. "They wail, the whole crowd, women and men, a kind of song, like a single quavering voice...The song swells, pushes through the woods and the sky, and they're singing now as if by some lunatic theory they had won."(Gardner 14)