Beowulf’s re-entry to his homeland does not read smoothly. Perhaps it worked better as a live recitation and to an audience who loved the side stories that feel like digressions to us. The first view of Hygelac’s hall, right by the sea, is immediately side-tracked by a story of a legendary queen. The poet speaks of the hall and its young King and the even younger queen, who is a teenager. The queen is, like Beowulf, wiser than her age suggests, and she is good at that most important of all skills, gift-giving.
By contrast, says the poet, think of a queen who was terrible! The suggestion seems to be that at least Hygd was better than that, but to a modern mind it seems that she could hardly have helped being better.
The digression about the legendary queen, like many of the side stories, raises more questions than we can answer. Is her name Modthryth, or is it Thryth? Both are used by editors and translators, because of an ambiguity in the original language. R. M. Liuzza prefers a reading in which the element “Mod” is part of the sentence, not part of her name, and suggests that Hygd considered her an example of how not to act. The story states that Thryth married Offa, King of the Angles in southern Denmark, but it does not tell us where Thryth lived as a wicked King’s daughter. Was she a Geat, and thus a local example to Hygd? Were Hygd and Thryth supposed to be related in some other way, perhaps both from some other neighboring people?
The story is straightforward enough. Thryth was so proud and so disrespectful of the bonds of the war band that if any man, except one related to her by blood or marriage, dared to look at her eyes, she cried out, “Off with his head!” If we modern readers were projecting onto the royal ladies of Beowulf a role of ceremonial power, not real power, perhaps the story of Thryth should make us pause and reconsider. Thryth appears to have had the power to put innocent men to death, although everyone watching found it wrong and shocking. She was destroying, not upholding, the bonds of hall loyalty.
Perhaps her father found it expedient to shuffle her out of his hall as soon as possible, and she was gold-laden and sent to Anglia, for Offa to deal with. Offa seems to have been able to teach her new ways, and under his roof, she took up the approved role of ring-giver.
The second part of the poem, then, ends with the first sight of Hygelac’s hall. The hero has come home.