21 February 2009
In the midst of the feast at Heorot, Unferth, one of Hrothgar’s thanes and evidently a particularly favored one as he is seated at Hrothgar’s feet, challenges Beowulf’s abilities. He claims that Beowulf once engaged in a swimming contest (or perhaps it was rowing—the text isn’t all that clear) with a man named Breca. According to Unferth, the swimming contest lasted seven days and Breca was the victor, indicating that Beowulf is not that strong and will be unable to defeat Grendel. Beowulf responds that Unferth is drunk and doesn’t know what he’s talking about. The two men swam together for five days, until the ocean floods separated them. The two men swam in armor and holding their swords in their hands (no mean feat, that) in order to protect themselves from “whales.” In Beowulf’s case, this proved fortuitous, as he was dragged under the waves by a sea beast, but his armor protected him against the creature’s bite and once on the ocean floor our hero defeated the creature with his sword.
Unferth’s challenge is often pointed to as an example of flyting, a ritual exchange of insult common in medieval Nordic literature. The Norse poem the Lokasenna, or The Flyting of Loki, is a more fitting example though. This incident in Beowulf isn’t much as far as flyting goes. And flyting is not all that characteristic of Anglo-Saxon literature—it’s more of a Norse tradition, although it does appear in late-medieval Scottish literature too. The big question is whether Unferth is challenging Beowulf on behalf of Hrothgar, something that Hrothgar, as host, cannot do directly, or whether Unferth is simply drunk as Beowulf accuses him of being. More on Unferth in the next fit as we hear more of Beowulf’s response and we learn more about the man.
The confusion over swimming v. rowing is the use of the verb rowan to describe the contest at some points. This may simply be rhetorical flourish or it could be that the rowan also carried a sense of swimming—it’s often difficult to ferret out all the connotations of words in a dead language.
There’s not a lot of notable language in this fit, although Beowulf’s description of the sea conditions during the swim is pretty neat (lines 545b-548):
oþ þæt unc flōd tōdrāf,
wado weallende, wedera ċealdost,
nīpende niht, ond norþan wind
heaðogrim ondhwearf; hrēo wæron yþa.until the flood drove us apart,
water welling, the coldest of weathers,
descending night, and the northern wind
turned battle-grim; the waves were rough.
