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 thinker, religiously enlightened, who let his mind play over a lost heroic world of the imagination", in other words that the "Beowulf" poet was a man much like Tolkien. Niles cited George Clark's observation that Tolkien left "Beowulf" scholars with the "myth of the poet as brooding intellectual, poised between a dying pagan world and a nascent Christian one." Niles noted that Tolkien's view of the melancholic vision of the "Beowulf" poet, and of the heroic fatalism of the poem's leading characters, was not wholly new, but that his view of the poet himself as a hero was. Joan Acocella,