Grendel and the Man Who Was Eaten First

A hall built under a shadow

Beowulf opens with the Danes, and with Scyld, a king who came to them as an infant drifting alone on the sea. He left them the same way. They laid him in a ship heaped with weapons and jewels and let the current carry him off. In Lesslie Hall's 1892 translation the poet admits that men "are not able / Soothly to tell us" where that ship landed.

Scyld's son is named Beowulf. He is not the hero. The poem has two men called Beowulf, and this one gets a few lines before the line of kings passes to Healfdene, then to Healfdene's son Hrothgar. Hrothgar wins so much glory in war that he decides to build a mead-hall greater than anything men have heard of. Workers come from many peoples. He names it Heorot, and it stands "High and horn-crested, huge between antlers."

In the very next breath the poet says the hall will burn. Before Grendel even appears, Heorot's end has already been announced.

The listener in the fen

Out in the dark, something hears the noise. Every day there is laughter, the harp, and a singer. What the singer performs matters: the creation of the world. The Almighty made the earth, set sun and moon to shine, and gave life to every kindred under heaven. Then the poet names the one listening outside.

Grendel lives in the moor-fens. The poet calls him a march-stepper, a walker of the border country, and traces his line straight back to Genesis. He is of the kindred of Cain, whom God banished for the murder of Abel. From that line, Hall's text says, came "Elves and giants, monsters of ocean."

The Old English also calls Grendel an eoten and a þyrs. Wikipedia's article notes that these words match the Norse jötunn and þurs. Tolkien, in his 1936 essay, argued that Grendel "cannot be dissociated from the creatures of northern myth" even though he descends from Cain. So Grendel is a northern giant with a pedigree from Genesis, and the poem never treats that as a conflict.

Thirty thanes and twelve winters

When the sun goes down, Grendel goes to the hall. The Danes are asleep after the feast. He takes thirty of them and goes home "Leaping and laughing," in Hall's words. The cry goes up at dawn, when they find his tracks. He comes back the next night. After that, the poet says drily, it was easy to find a man who preferred a bed somewhere else.

For twelve winters the finest house in the world sits empty after dark. The poet frames this as a legal failure as well as a horror. A killing could be settled with payment, and Grendel will not settle: no counsellor could hope for "handsome amends at the hands of the murderer." In desperation the Danes pray at the shrines of their idols, and the Christian poet interrupts his own story to condemn them. They remembered hell, he says, and did not know God.

One line in this section is still unresolved. Grendel could not touch the throne, the gift-seat, because God opposed him. Hall's footnote gives three readings: Grendel could not become ruler of the Danes, or Hrothgar grieved that Grendel never came to his throne for gifts, or God would not let him wreck the hall. Hall does not choose between them.

The Geat who left his sword behind

Among the Geats, a retainer of King Higelac hears the news. The poet calls him the strongest man alive. He picks fourteen companions and sails, and the ship goes "Likest a bird." In Hall's rendering they sight the Danish cliffs within twenty-four hours. A coast guard challenges them and says he has never seen a greater man than one of them.

Hrothgar remembers Beowulf as a boy, and he remembers his father, Ecgtheow, who killed a man named Heatholaf and fled to the Danes. Hrothgar settled that feud with treasure. One scholar cited in Hall's notes reads Hrothgar's greeting as a reference to that obligation. The plain text only says Beowulf came to help.

Sailors had told Hrothgar that Beowulf had "thirty men's grapple" in his hand. That is the same number Grendel carried off on the first night. Beowulf asks to cleanse Heorot with his own band. He has heard the creature uses no weapons, so he will carry neither blade nor shield. If he dies, Grendel will eat him and there will be nothing to bury, so they should send his mail shirt, the work of Wayland, home to Higelac. He ends: "Goes Weird as she must go!"

At the feast Unferth, son of Ecglaf, taunts him with the swimming match against Breca. In Unferth's account they swam for seven nights and Breca won. In Beowulf's account they swam together for five nights until the currents parted them, and he killed nine sea-beasts and washed up among the Finns. The two men give different numbers for the same contest. Beowulf then accuses Unferth of killing his own brothers.

The man who was eaten first

Hrothgar hands over the hall, something he says he has never done for anyone. Beowulf takes off his armor and gives his sword to a servant. Everyone sleeps, "One only excepted."

Grendel's touch throws open a door hung on fire-forged hinges. His eyes give off "A lustre unlovely likest to fire." He sees the rows of sleepers and rejoices. Then he seizes the first man he reaches and eats him completely: he "Bit his bone-prison, the blood drank in currents," down to the feet and hands.

Beowulf is not asleep. Hall's text gives only a strained line: Higelac's kinsman "Great sorrow endured how the dire-mooded creature / In unlooked-for assaults were likely to bear him." Hall's margin note calls this suspense. Beowulf acts when Grendel reaches for him, rising on his elbow to catch the arm. The next day Hrothgar orders gold paid for the dead man, who was one of Beowulf's companions. Grendel never paid a man-price for anyone, and in the end the king pays one for the creature's last victim.

Swords that would not bite

Grendel has never met a grip like this, and he is afraid. He wants to flee to the fen, to "the devils' assembly." Fingers crack. Gilded benches tear loose from the floor. The Danes hear him howl "hymns of horror." Beowulf's men draw their old swords and hack at him, not knowing what the poem now explains: no blade on earth would injure Grendel.

That reverses the meaning of the earlier boast. Beowulf gave up weapons as a point of honor, matching a foe who used none. It turns out to have been the only method that could work. The shoulder splits, the sinews burst, and Grendel tears free to die in his mere, which by morning is seething with blood.

Beowulf does not claim complete success. He tells Hrothgar he meant to pin Grendel down and kill him on the spot, but "God did not will it," and the creature escaped, leaving the arm behind.

What the poem never shows

The poem never describes Grendel's face. Hall's text gives only the hanging claw, where "Each finger-nail strong steel most resembled." Hrothgar's later description, in Tolkien's translation, says Grendel "in man's form trod the ways of exile," only larger. Wikipedia notes that his severed head later takes four men to carry. It also notes that at line 649 the referent of the word aglæca is disputed: it may be Grendel, or it may be Beowulf. Sherman Kuhn argued that the word simply meant fighter.

The hall's condition is uneven too. During the fight, Hall's text marvels that Heorot "withstood" the struggle and did not fall, held together with iron. A couple of hundred lines later, the same building is "broken to pieces," its hinges torn off, with only the roof left whole. Both can be true. It stayed standing, but it was wrecked.

Grendel is also not the end of the trouble. His mother is still in the mere. Old English place-names such as grendeles pytt and grendles mere likely preserve his name, and they sit beside marshes and pools. The fens may have kept his name longer than the hall lasted.

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