SAGA-BOOK - Viking Society Web Publications

28 Saga-Book of the Viking Society
and devouring the retainers, a dragon devastating the
shore of Sweden, these belong to the supernatural world,
in which the real hero wins his greatest renown. This is
the case everywhere and the Germanic peoples are in no
wise an exception to this general rule. But in the case
of the Grendel-episode there are some details absent from
Germanic epic poetry in general. This man-like being,
stretching his arm into the hall and grasping a man
asleep on a bench along the wall, and from whose body
the hero tears an arm, is quite foreign to the Germanic
epic tradition. More such details may be added: the
figure of the demon's mother, the fire in the cave at the
bottom of the lake, the blood coming to the surface of the
water and misunderstood as a sign of the hero's defeat. 3
They have been taken as proof of the derivation of this
part of Beowulf from Irish sources. 4
Indeed, it is not difficult to imagine a poet who, engaged
in constructing the poem of Beowulf out of lays or
narratives drifted ashore from Scandinavia, took the
opportunity of embellishing his work with motifs of this
kind. The great Swiss scholar Andreas Heusler expressed
the opinion that the poet did not make use of a Danish
fable of the hero's conflict with a monster, but that he
substituted for it an Irish tale of a quite different
construction. 5
We are, however, confronted with the difficulty that
a tale of quite analogous structure is to be found in the
Icelandic saga of Grettir. The similarities are striking
and they compel us to admit a connection between the
English and Icelandic traditions. Most puzzling is the
fact that in two corresponding episodes a sword bears
a similar name in both cases: in the saga the weapon
wielded by the giant is called heptisax, the hero's weapon
in Beowulf haft-mece. These prove not only a common
• See Heinz Dehmer, Primitives Erzahlwngsgu: i1! den Islendi1!ga-S6gur
(1927), 62 ft.
• See Dehmer, loco cit.
• See Anzeiger fur deutsches Altertum XLIII (1918),53.