Hrothgar’s hall; the hardy and wise one
had purged it anew. His night-work pleased him,
his deed and its honor. To Eastern Danes
had the valiant Geat his vaunt made good,
830all their sorrow and ills assuaged,
their bale of battle borne so long,
and all the dole they erst endured,
pain a-plenty.—’Twas proof of this,
when the hardy-in-fight a hand[1] laid down,
835arm and shoulder,—all, indeed,
of Grendel’s gripe,[2]—’neath the gabled roof.
XIII
Many at morning, as men have told me,
warriors gathered the gift-hall round,
folk-leaders faring from far and near,
840o’er wide-stretched ways, the wonder to view,
trace of the traitor. Not troublous[3] seemed
the enemy’s end to any man
who saw by the gait of the graceless foe
how the weary-hearted, away from thence,
845baffled in battle and banned, his steps
- ↑ Hadding, in the forest by night sheltered by a rude tent of twigs, sees “a hand of extraordinary size” wandering about. His nurse, a giantess, holds the hand while Hadding hews it oft, and “corrupt matter” flows from it. Tearing and rending with their claws is the giants’ way. See Saxo, Bk. I (Holder, p. 23), and Elton’s translation.
- ↑ That is, all Grendel’s machinery of grasp, both clutch and reach. The translation “fist” will not do. The concluding nine lines of this section are compared by ten Brink with the last stanza of Tasso’s Jerusalem Delivered.
- ↑ Note the favorite litotes.
- ↑ Sea or Lake of the Nicors. Indefinite talk of the moorland or fen as home of the monsters here yields to the idea of home in the waters. The
