Hálfdanar saga Brönufóstra to his father's kingdom and defeats and kills Soti and his Vikings. Although numerous sagas contain analogs to the iconic cave battle with Grendel and his mother in "Beowulf," none is closer to the Old English epic than is Hálfdan’s cave battle with Járnnefr and his wife. The saga is found in three, 15th-century vellum manuscripts, but its post-medieval popularity is evidenced by its preservation in over four dozen paper manuscripts. In the 18th century it served as the source for the first known saga forgery. "Hálfdanar saga Brönufóstra" has a sequel in "Sörla saga sterka", where it becomes clear
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,