Beowulf has suggested that he will rid the mead hall of this
Grendel, and immediately steps up
Unferth, the unfriendly one, and he challenges Beowulf,
he says oh you're that Beowulf, that purports to do all these great deeds, I have
heard of you,
and he says you are not that great a man, I hear that you lost at a
swimming match with a man named Brecca and that you will lose at this too,
you like everybody else will die under the hand of Grendel. The role that Unferth
plays is a traditional role in the courts of the Norse
court, the court role of the thyle or the thul,
the thul was a courtier who normally sat at the right hand of the King
and he challenged the claim of anybody in court
who made a public claim, if you made a public claim in court you had to be able to back it up
and show manly prowess, and courage in backing it up and the role of the
the thyle was to challenge you and to
force you to defend your position. So on the one hand
Unferth plays that role of the thyle, challenging Beowulf,
forcing him to show himself to be a true warrior, but notice also
that it is not just a question of him being the thyle,
not just a question of him being what's called the devil's advocate in
the Catholic Church,
he is also there to stir up trouble the text
says. He starts an argument and he's very rude
to Beowulf and so here Beowulf is again faced with the challenge similar
to what he faces when he
confronts the watcher on the cliff, either
he says to Unferth
you're wrong and is rude to him
and therefore he can t-off the whole of the
court there, the Danish Court, or he buckles and says oh you're right I'm
going to die
just like everybody else. I think one could also look at it that Unferth
is a man who is infected also with this Grendel
effect, this Grendel disease, in the same way that the
watchman was infected by it so he is automatically paranoid
and challenging and a little bit hostile, so too is Unferth.
Unferth has seen people die, he has seen the Grendel attack for years now at the court
and no one can stop Grendel. Unferth
can't stop Grendel, I mean Unferth is a warrior as well,
why can't he stop Grendel? He seems to have resigned himself
to the misery and the awfulness that Grendel poses,
and yet he hasn't left the court notice that he is still at the court, and he's still at
the feet
of Hrothgar and consequently
he is almost like a leech himself,
taking advantage of the situation that's at hand
and making the most of it. So he is not entirely
noble of purpose, the way that a thyle might be
in one of the Norse courts. Well, Beowulf has to handle this very
carefully and he says yes I lost swimming
with Becca, Brecca beat me at the swimming match, but
I fought hundreds of creatures and demons in the water,
I swam in full armor, I was able to make it to the far side
of the Norwegian coast, and when I got up I fought a battle,
and so he says even though I lost, I still did a great deed, this is a tremendous deed.
So that he challenges back to Unferth
and he is able to take the accusation a being a loser
and turn it on its head, and thus defeats Unferth's challenge
openly in court and everybody cheers and they all say oh this is a man
to defeat Grendel he's quite the warrior. And then Wealtheow comes around, Wealtheow
is the wife of
Hrothgar and she exhibits generosity and courteousness and
good grace. She is the, in some ways the epitome of what a queen
should be and she even puts under the care of
Beowulf her own children, saying
protect them, such a man as you should protect them
and consequently she shows this generosity of spirit
like what we saw earlier with Scyld Scefing, she
shows a graciousness and a nobility
which I think is the poet's idea of the paragon of
what a woman ought to be. Beowulf then, having
defeated Unferth is ready to be able to meet the real challenge
of the troll, which at night he will be facing. We will see that in the next section.