Beowulf: The Game structure but is defeated and thrown into the water; there, Grendel's mother appears and says he is her new hero, and grants him power. Beowulf defeats the sea serpent with his newfound power and returns to the beach where he was racing with the Thane. Afterward, having heard the problem the Danes are facing, he goes to help King Hrothgar to stop Grendel, gaining Heroic powers on the journey. Afterwards, the player plays through the thirty years of Beowulf's life as king of the Danes, which was not seen in the movie. Beowulf gets to journey from Herot to Iceland,
Beowulf was made early on by Guðbrandur Vigfússon (1878). "Grettis saga" is a family saga, and a story about , a great-grandson of an Icelandic settler, cannot be comparably as old as "Beowulf". Axel Olrik (1903) claimed that on the contrary, this saga was a reworking of "Beowulf", and others had followed suit. However, (1910) wrote a thesis in which both "Beowulf" and "Grettis saga" drew from a common folkloric source, and this encouraged even a detractor such W. W. Lawrence to reposition his view, and entertain the possibility that certain elements in the saga (such as the waterfall in place