The Sword Hrunting in Beowulf : Unlocking the Word hord

Abstract

The Beowulf -poet depicts Beowulf as striking Grendel's dam with a sword. At line 1520b the manuscript reads, "hord swenge ne ofteah." The only editor to interpret the half-line as it stands is the first editor, Grímur Jónsson Thorkelin (1815), who, however, misconstrues the sense and syntax. So in one way or another do all later editors. The standard treatment of the crux for the last century entails both emending two of the four words in the half-line and abandoning one of the poet's favorite syntactic patterns. But there is no need to rewrite the half-line according to modern specifications. The Beowulf -poet is poetic. Overall, he employs seventeen different terms found nowhere else in Old English poetry in reference to swords: hord at line 1520b—perhaps the most daring of them all—need not mean a collection of valuables but can mean a single thing singularly valuable. The word befits Hrunting, the most famous sword in the heroic world of Beowulf . The fact that the weapon fails is but one strand in the web of irony that the poet weaves in the episode.

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