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.