Breca the Bronding American patois uses an accusation of ‘a particular form of incest’). Further in the saga, when Heriot is being attacked by Grendel's Mother, we shall see Unferth approach Beowulf in humility, offering his own family's heirloom sword. Breca the Bronding Breca (sometimes spelled Breoca or Brecca) was a Bronding who, according to the Anglo-Saxon poem "Beowulf", was Beowulf's childhood friend. Breca defeated Beowulf in what, by consensus, is described as a "swimming" match. While dining, Unferth alludes to the story of their contest as a reproach to Beowulf's impulsiveness and foolhardiness, and Beowulf then relates it in detail, explaining how
Beowulf: The Monsters and the Critics The Northern gods, like men, are doomed to die. The Southern (Roman and Greek) pagan gods were immortal, so to Tolkien (a Christian), the Southern religion "must go forward to philosophy or relapse into anarchy": death and the monsters are peripheral. But the Northern myths, and "Beowulf", put the monsters, mortality and death in the centre. Tolkien is therefore very interested in the contact of Northern and Christian thought in the poem, where the scriptural Cain is linked to "eotenas" (giants) and "ylfe" (elves), not through confusion but "an indication of the precise point at which an imagination, pondering old