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grabbed young Hondscio who lay nearest to him, and almost before his victim had time to cry out, tore him limb from limb and drank the warm blood. Then, while the young warrior’s dying shriek still hung upon the air, he reached for another. But this time his hand was met and seized in a grasp such as he had never felt before; a grasp that had in it the strength of thirty men. And for the first time he who had brought fear to so many caught the taste of it himself, knowing that at last he had met his match and maybe his master.
    Beowulf leapt from the sleeping-bench and grappled him in the darkness; and terror broke over Grendel in full force, the terror of a wild animal trapped; so that he thought no more of his hunting but only of breaking the terrible hold upon his arm and flying back into the night and the wilderness, and he howled and bellowed as he struggled for his freedom. Beowulf set his teeth and summoned all his strength and tightened his grip until the sinews cracked; and locked together they reeled and staggered up and down the great hall. Trestles and sleeping-benches went over with crash on crash as they strained this way and that, trampling even through the last red embers of the dying fire; and the very walls seemed to groan and shudder as though the stout timbers would burst apart. And all the while Grendel snarled and shrieked and Beowulf fought in silence save for his gasping breaths.
    Outside, the Danes listened in horror to the turmoil that seemed as though it must split Heorot asunder; and within, the Geats had sprung from their sleeping-benches sword in hand, forgetful of their powerlessness against the Troll-kind, but in the dark, lit only by stray gleams of bale-fire from the monster’s eyes, they dared not strike for fear of slaying their leader; and when one or other of them did contrive to get in a blow, the sword blade glanced off Grendel’s charmed hide as though he were sheathed in dragon scales.
    At last, when the hall was wrecked to the walls, the Night-Stalker gathered himself for one last despairing effort to break free. Beowulf’s hold was as fierce as ever; yet none the less the two figures burst apart—and Grendel with a frightful shriek staggered to the doorway and through it, and fled wailing into the night, leaving his arm and shoulder torn from the roots in the hero’s still unbroken grasp.

    Beowulf sank down sobbing for breath on a shattered bench, and his fellows came crowding round him with torches rekindled at the scattered embers of the fire; and together they looked at the thing he held across his knees. ‘Not even the Troll-kind could live half a day with a wound such as that upon them,’ one of them said; and Waegmund agreed. ‘He is surely dead as though he lay here among the benches.’

    â€˜Hondscio is avenged, at all events,’ said Beowulf. ‘Let us hang up this thing for a trophy, and a proof that we do not boast idly as the wind blows over.’
    So in triumph they nailed up the huge scaly arm on one of the roof beams above the High Seat of Hrothgar.
    The first thin light of day was already washing over the moors, and almost before the grizzly thing was securely in place the Danes returned to Heorot. They came thronging in to beat Beowulf in joyful acclaim upon his bruised and claw-marked shoulders, and gaze up in awe at the huge arm whose taloned fingers seemed even now to be striving to claw down the roof beam. Many of them called for their horses and followed the blood trail that Grendel had left in his flight up through the tilled land and over the moors until they came to the deep sea-inlet where the monster had his lair, and saw the churning waves between the rocks all fouled and boiling with blood. Meanwhile others set all things on foot for a day of rejoicing, and the young men wrestled together and raced their horses against each other, filling the day with their merrymaking, while the King’s harper walked