In her attack, Grendel’s mother follows a different strategy. Grendel became accustomed to the hall, and in his pride he ate his victims on the spot, as well as taking some away with him. But the mother has never been seen in Heorot; only her anger and sorrow drove her into the dwellings of men. She takes no risks; she makes a lightning strike. With an instantly-killed victim in hand, she takes a life for a life, and leaves as quickly as she can.
The victim this time is a nobleman, one of Hrothgar’s oldest friends, and we learn his name: Aeschere. Pursuit of the monster begins with discovery; the men in the hall see what happened, then they must waken the King, who is in another building. Beowulf too awakens, and both men arrive around dawn in the hall to find disorder, uproar and fear. The attack took place before the sun rose, and now it is grey dawn.
In one of the few humorous touches, Beowulf appears not to notice what has happened. Realizing he has been wakened urgently at an earlier hour than he expected, he fails to notice the signs of tragedy, and asks Hrothgar if he had a pleasant night’s rest.
Where has Grendel’s mother gone? Home, but such a home. Hrothgar gives a vivid description of the mere (a word for a small lake) where the water-trolls live. Its chief features are threatening landscape, stormy weather, loner animals, and unnatural fire on the water. It has high cliffs, waterfalls, and a fearful forest; its headlands are windy, and its storms so violent that the waves climb as high as the sky. We learn that wolves haunt the hills around it, and later (1425 ff) that sea-monsters live in the water. All this may seem in the order of nature but there is something more. The fire on the water at night is enough to warn even hunted stags from splashing into the water and swimming to get away from hunters. Animals are as afraid of the haunted mere as the Danes themselves.
Beowulf’s response to this challenge is at once familiar and strange. To the sorrowing Hrothgar, he offers platitudes about death, like an early form of a condolence card. “Each of us shall abide the end of this world’s life,” he says, echoing the narrator’s sentiment that death will catch everyone some day. Then Beowulf offers a comfort that sounds strange to modern ears. He promises vengeance, so that Hrothgar may not grieve, and so that he himself may seek glory before his own death. His statement that “It is always better to avenge one’s friend than to mourn overmuch” (1385) is given in the tone of the obvious, a statement to which he expects no disagreement.
The idea that vengeance is the best comfort after a murder makes a great deal of sense in a culture of feud, but not in a culture of restitution, such as the later Anglo-Saxons encouraged. Paying the “wer-gild,” the “man-money,” meant settling the feud without any vengeance. In a modern culture of social restraint, we find even less to agree with when Beowulf makes this pronouncement. There are occasions when a murderer is sentenced to death, and the victim’s family appeals to the judge to spare his life. “His death won’t bring back my son,” they say, “it will only bring about more death. Two wrongs don’t make a right.” Not so the Danes!
Beowulf’s trip to the haunted mere is made in full state parade. With some of the Geats and many of the leading Danes on horseback, the procession follows the footprints of Grendel’s mother. Beowulf scouts ahead at one point, perhaps impatient with the slow pace of the foot soldiers. The most startling discovery is the discarded head of Aeschere, perhaps spat out like a seed as the mother passed by. It is implied that the body of Aeschere went into the water with the murderer, for the water “boiled” with blood.
There are three places in the poem where this same mere is said to bubble with blood. There is surely something magical about this detail, as it does not seem realistic. In the first case, Grendel’s torn arm has had several miles to bleed before he reaches the mere, and yet the mere is said to be welling up with blood when the Danes scout it a few hours later. In this case, Aeschere too would have not been an endless source of blood after he was carried over the path to the mere. Water would quickly diffuse the color of blood. It seems rather a statement of moral value, for blood has always been the symbol of the life taken, and of the crime. The poem has already cited Cain’s murder of his brother Abel in Genesis 4; in that passage, God tells Cain that Abel’s blood cries out from the ground. About six hundred years after the Beowulf manuscript was written, Shakespeare’s Lady Macbeth feels that the stain of blood is on her hands from the murder. Blood is the sign of the life as it leaves the body, staining the murderer or the murder site, or in this case, the water of the mere.
Unable to attack the mother themselves, still the Geats make one small inroad on the haunted mere. One Geat warrior lets fly an arrow against a sea monster, whose wound allows it to be hooked and brought to shore. Unfortunately, we get no description of the “wave-roamer,” so we cannot know if we should picture a crocodile, a shark, the Loch Ness monster, or a mythical creature combining the body of a whale, the teeth of a lion, and the tusks of an elephant. Any of these would be possible.