Fitt XXX — Beowulf Narrates His Adventures to Higelac

Beowulf's retelling opens with a detail not given in the poem's first account: his companion Hondscio was killed. Grendel ate him — girded war-champion, he fell first, dead. The poem names him here and grants him a brief elegy. Beowulf describes what Grendel intended for him: a battle-glove of monstrous size, sewn from the skins of men, into which he would have been stuffed if the wrestling had gone differently.

He then gives Hygelac the emotional texture of the Danish hall: Hrothgar's long feasting, the old king's gift of a neck-ring and war-horses and treasures, the joy of songs from morning to evening. And he gives the grief: Hrothgar aged and mourning, his breast boiling with memories from a time when he still had a young man's strength.

The retelling of the second night — Grendel's mother coming to take Æschere in revenge — is handled swiftly. Beowulf describes the morning scene at the lake: the blood-stained water, Hrothgar's sorrow for the man he had trusted most in the world, the impossibility of giving the dead counselor even a proper fire-burial because the body was in the cave under the mere.