Hrothgar, the king of the Danes, built a hall, named Heorot, where his followers could drink mead, listen to the scop, enjoy the music of the harp, and find solace in social intercourse during the dreary winter evenings.

  “So liv’d on all happy the host of the kinsmen
  In game and in glee, until one night began,
  A fiend out of hell-pit, the framing of evil,
  And Grendel forsooth the grim guest was hight,
  The mighty mark-strider the holder of moorland,
  The fen and the fastness."[10]

This monster, Grendel, came from the moors and devoured thirty of the thanes.  For twelve winters he visited Heorot and killed some of the guests whenever he heard the sound of festivity in the hall, until at length the young hero Beowulf, who lived a day’s sail from Hrothgar, determined to rescue Heorot from this curse.  The youth selected fourteen warriors and on a “foamy-necked floater, most like to a bird,” he sailed to Hrothgar.

Beowulf stated his mission, and he and his companions determined to remain in Heorot all night.  Grendel heard them and came.

“...he quickly laid hold of A soldier asleep, suddenly tore him, Bit his bone-prison, the blood drank in currents, Swallowed in mouthfuls."[11]

Bare-handed, Beowulf grappled with the monster, and they wrestled up and down the hall, which was shaken to its foundations.  This terrible contest ended when Beowulf tore away the arm and shoulder of Grendel, who escaped to the marshes to die.

In honor of the victory, Hrothgar gave to Beowulf many presents and a banquet in Heorot.  After the feast, the warriors slept in the hall, but Beowulf went to the palace.  He had been gone but a short time, when in rushed Grendel’s mother, to avenge the death of her son.  She seized a warrior, the king’s dearest friend, and carried him away.  In the morning, the king said to Beowulf:—­

“My trusty friend AEschere is dead...  The cruel hag has wreaked on him her vengeance.  The country folk said there were two of them, one the semblance of a woman; the other the specter of a man.  Their haunt is in the remote land, in the crags of the wolf, the wind-beaten cliffs, and untrodden bogs, where the dismal stream plunges into the drear abyss of an awful lake, overhung with a dark and grizzly wood rooted down to the water’s edge, where a lurid flame plays nightly on the surface of the flood—­and there lives not the man who knows its depth!  So dreadful is the place that the hunted stag, hard driven by the hounds, will rather die on the bank than find a shelter there.  A place of terror!  When the wind rises, the waves mingle hurly-burly with the clouds, the air is stifling and rumbles with thunder.  To thee alone we look for relief."[12]

Beowulf knew that a second and harder contest was at hand, but without hesitation he followed the bloody trail of Grendel’s mother, until it disappeared at the edge of a terrible flood.  Undaunted by