Beowulf, A Precessional Myth, page 10
A Danish warrior king, Hrothgar, decides to build a new palace,
a mead hall, that would be the wonder of the world.
It would be his throne room, from which he would dispense goods to young and old,
which would hang with works from all the world, and dispense rings to the loyal nobles.
He named the mead hall 'Heorot'.
It would be a place where his nobles and warriors could feast and recount great deeds
and battles.
In the language of mythology, a structure such as the mead hall, or a temple, or a palace
represents the system of equinoxes and solstices.
There are four of these through the year, and each represents a corner of the building.
Thus, referring to a new mead hall, our author is representing a new set of equinoxes and
solstices relevant to the new age.
No sooner was this magnificent edifice built than a monster, a demon, heard the din from the daily banquets and merry-making, the poets recounting tales of the creation, and the sound of the harp. This monster was Grendel, a demon of such strength that he came upon the mead hall and savagely made away with 30 nobles in one night, carrying their butchered bodies off to his lair.
We know there are no such things as demons, especially ones that can carry off 30 mighty warriors at a time, so our story has departed from history and is heading for the fantastic. No need to sense a myth here, it is thrust right into our full attention. So what is an Anglo-Saxon scholar of the tenth century doing recording a myth about a demon in sixth century Denmark? This question has bothered me since schooldays when I first encountered this saga. My English teacher couldn't tell me, nor anybody else since.
It was only when reading the language of mythology uncovered by Santillana and von Dechend that I realised what was going on. We need to refer back to the diagram representing the solstices and equinoxes. The four points of the year, and the constellations that carry the sun into the dawn sky on those days represent a structure. That structure lasts for as long as the spring equinox sun rises in the same constellation, that is just over two thousand years. Currently that constellation is Pisces, and in a couple of hundred years it will be Aquarius. Each time the spring equinox rolls onto a new constellation the whole structure changes. The annual round of festivals may be based on that equinox so a whole new rota will be required when the constellation changes. No wonder it seemed that an age ending was like a cataclysm to our ancestors.
Santillana and von Dechend found that tales of palaces being destroyed were a metaphor for the ending of a world age. A well known story from the Bible is about Samson, who pulled down the palace of the Philistines and killed their nobles. The same idea has surfaced in similar myths from around the world.
From this I deduce that our Anglo-Saxon scholar meant that the Danish warrior king Hrothgar had built a new mead hall for the new age. The age of 'might is right', the belief that the strongest must always reign was passing. The age of Christianity replaced that idea with that of 'right is might', that only the true believers would inherit the Earth. The old gods were dying with the old world, but the new mead hall, symbolic of the new age, was still populated with the nobles and warriors of the old age. Something had to remove them, so what better than a monstrous demon who could carry them off thirty at a time.
"Thirty" is also an interesting number, being the years it takes the planet Saturn to complete an orbit of the sun. In mythology Saturn is the king who gives the measure to all things, the ruler of all. He is also renowned in Greek mythology as the King who devoured his own children, fearful that one of them would take his throne. We have an interesting conjunction of mythologies here.