The poem has been broken into parts counted in Roman numerals. Part I was about Scyld Sceafing, to set the stage. Part II introduces Hrothgar and Heorot, the grand mead hall he has built. We hear of Grendel, a monster descended from Cain, who hates the joy and fellowship of the hall. Part III begins the action. Link to antiquated but free version: here.
“When the sun was sunken, he set out to visit/The lofty hall-building, how the Ring-Danes had used it/For beds and benches when the banquet was over./Then he found there reposing many a noble /Asleep after supper; sorrow the heroes,/Misery knew not. The monster of evil/Greedy and cruel tarried but little,/He drags off thirty of them, and devours them/Fell and frantic, and forced from their slumbers/Thirty of thanemen; thence he departed/Leaping and laughing, his lair to return to,/With surfeit of slaughter sallying homeward.”
So many questions come to my mind, but the poem doesn’t answer them. How could he take thirty men without some of them waking up and fighting back? Or at least running away? How was this only discovered when the sun rose? Didn’t any of the men scream? The whole thing seems to play out silently, and yet later we read that his killing method (at least sometimes) meant sucking the blood out right there in the hall. He didn’t smother each one silently, then gather them all up to sneak out.
The next night, we read, he came back again. And after that, men were afraid to sleep in the hall, so they tried outbuildings. He picked them off one by one, easily. He can’t surely have taken 30 at once every night, unless Heorot had at least the population of Copenhagen, if not Shanghai. Because this went on for twelve years, or twelve winters. Was Heorot only their home in winter because the men spent time away in the summer? Maybe, but that wouldn’t help the race to survive if Grendel was wiling to eat women and children, which surely he was.
The Danes seem to have been helpless. Again, the modern mind boggles: couldn’t you build something, invent something? Couldn’t the men of the shield wall develop a way to defend? Did they really just go to sleep every night and wait? The poem doesn’t give more details, except that the Christian poet writing in Old English must remind us that this is history (or at least historical fiction) and happened before conversion:
“At the shrines of their idols often they promised/Gifts and offerings, earnestly prayed they/The devil from hell would help them to lighten/Their people’s oppression. Such practice they used then,/Hope of the heathen; hell they remembered/In innermost spirit, God they knew not,The true God they do not know./Judge of their actions, All-wielding Ruler,/No praise could they give the Guardian of Heaven,/The Wielder of Glory.”