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The Beowulf-poet depicts Beowulf as striking Grendel's dam with a sword. At line 1520b the manuscript reads, "hord swenge ne ofteah." The only editor to interpret the half-line as it stands is the first editor, Grímur Jónsson Thorkelin (1815), who, however, misconstrues the sense and syntax. So in one way or another do all later editors. The standard treatment of the crux for the last century entails both emending two of the four words in the half-line and abandoning one of the poet's favorite syntactic patterns. But there is no need to rewrite the half-line according to modern specifications. The Beowulf-poet is poetic. Overall, he employs seventeen different terms found nowhere else in Old English poetry in reference to swords: hord at line 1520b-perhaps the most daring of them all-need not mean a collection of valuables but can mean a single thing singularly valuable. The word befits Hrunting, the most famous sword in the heroic world of Beowulf. The fact that the weapon fails is but one strand in the web of irony that the poet weaves in the episode.
Beowulf plunges into Grendel's mother's mere with Hrunting, Hunferth's sword. After the troll-wife grabs and drags Beowulf to her dark den, the poet describes the beginning of combat in lines 1518-22a:
Ongeat þa se goda grundwyrgenne,
merewif mihtig; mæ genræ s forgeaf
hildebille, hond sweng ne ofteah,
þæ t hire on hafelan hringmæ l agol
græ dig guðleoð.1
On line 1520b the editors of F rederick Klaeber's fourth edition follow Klaeber in italicizing n in "hond" and g in "sweng" to indicate departure from the manuscript, a double emendation first proposed by Moritz Trautmann a century ago.2 The manuscript reading is hord swenge. Given the emended readings, one may translate the passage: "Then the good one perceived the accursed one of the deep, the mighty sea-woman, gave strong thrust to his battle-sword- his hand did not withhold the swing-so that on her head the ring-marked sword sang a greedy war-song." The passage as emended makes excellent sense. The passage should not be emended in this or any other way, however. The reading hord swenge makes powerfully poetic sense as it stands in the manuscript.
After reviewing how scholars have dealt with the manuscript reading...