Beowulf's Fight with the Nine Nicors

Abstract

The two accounts of the competition with Breca may serve to alert the audience to the way the monsters function in the poem as a whole. Without any reference to sea‐beasts, Unferth's version offers the core of what happened: Breca outswam Beowulf. Although Beowulf attempts to obscure this fact by presenting the incident as a shared adventure, the poet confirms it in the contrasting descriptions of how Breca and Beowulf return to land. Rather than being additional facts, the monsters in Beowulf's account are used first by the character and then by the poet to draw out the significance of the event. With the image of the sea‐beasts sitting on the ocean floor preparing to eat him, Beowulf reshapes the story to fit his immediate situation in Hrothgar's court. The poet, however, goes further by using them to implicate Beowulf himself in the Danish problems. The juxtaposition of the accounts, then, reveals that monsters are literary constructs used to comment on human actions.

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