With envy and anger an evil spirit
endured the dole in his dark abode,
that he heard each day the din of revel
high in the hall: there harps rang out,
90clear song of the singer. He sang who knew[1]
tales of the early time of man,
how the Almighty, made the earth,
fairest fields enfolded by water,
set, triumphant, sun and moon
95for a light to lighten the land-dwellers,
and braided bright the breast of earth
with limbs and leaves, made life for all
of mortal beings that breathe and move.
So lived the clansmen in cheer and revel
100a winsome life, till one began
to fashion evils, that fiend of hell.
Grendel this monster grim was called,
march-riever[2] mighty, in moorland living,[3]
in fen and fastness; fief of the giants
105the hapless wight a while had kept
since the Creator his exile doomed.
On kin of Cain was the killing avenged
- ↑ A skilled minstrel. The Danes are heathens, as one is told presently; but this lay of beginnings is taken from Genesis.
- ↑ A disturber of the border, one who sallies from his haunt in the fen and roams over the country near by. This probably pagan nuisance is now furnished with biblical credentials as a fiend or devil in good standing, so that all Christian Englishmen might read about him. “Grendel” may mean one who grinds and crushes.
- ↑ See notes below on the notion of a water-hell. “Hell and the lower world,” says Bugge, “were connected to some extent in the popular mind with deep or boundless morasses.” Home of the Eddic Poems, tr. Schofield, p. lxxiv.
