The Swimming Match With Breca: Beowulf's Boast Tested

Before the poem's audience ever sees Beowulf fight Grendel, it hears Unferth, one of King Hrothgar's own retainers, try to discredit him. Unferth recalls a boyhood swimming contest against a man named Breca, claiming Beowulf lost it and predicting he will lose against Grendel in the same way. Beowulf's own account, given immediately after in his own words, does not match Unferth's telling: the two young men swam together for five nights, not the seven Unferth claims, each carrying a sword and wearing armor for the sea's dangers, matched stroke for stroke until rough currents finally drove them apart. Sea monsters found Beowulf alone in the deep water that followed, dragging at him repeatedly through the night, and by the time dawn separated him from the last of them he had killed nine of the creatures with his own sword. Beowulf turns the story directly back on his accuser, observing that Unferth has no comparable feat of his own to his name, and pointedly recalling that Unferth is known in the hall as the man who killed his own brothers, the gravest charge Anglo-Saxon custom could level at anyone. The exchange, boast against boast, ends not in violence but in laughter, the whole hall's mood lifted by Beowulf's confidence before Grendel has even appeared.