Hwaet, etc. (we won’t go into that).
I was chilaxing in the park with some Geat mates, after a campaign of wholesale rapine in Juteland, when a messenger-boy of King Hrothgar approached me and handed over a letter bearing the royal Danish seal. Turns out Hrothgar had spotted the advert I put out in the Danish papers, offering my services in ‘smiting’ disadvantaged youths who vandalise public buildings (incidents of which have seen a sharp rise in Scandinavia after the economic downturn of 468). The King’s tone was urgent and his prose riddled with Viking expletives that I shan’t repeat here.
In short, Hrothgar had opened the royal coffers and built a state-of-the-art community centre in a down-at-heel suburb of Copenhagen – somewhere the recidivist kids of overburdened single mothers (the fruit the of the Norse invasion of 455, when oats were, so to speak, wildly sowed) can play ping pong and learn the tuba; ‘activities’ that keep them from lurking on street corners chugging jugs of mead and leering at elderly women. Hrothgar named the place Heorot, after his uncle’s infamous drinking game involving runestones and Frisian slave boys.
Yet no sooner had some local tart cut the ribbon and the doors officially opened, then this lairy specimen called Grendel – a larger than average yobo, commonly spotted in a yellow hoodie and navy blue trackies, with ‘bestial eyes’ and ‘foul, infernal breath’ – starting breaking into Heorot after hours through the men’s loo window. Always operating alone, Grendel would snort ketamine off the ping pong table and stash tubas into his gym bag, before urinating on the educational magazines and writing ‘cunt’ on every blackboard. And this had been going on for several weeks, so that, in Heorot, the local youths were presented with an environment that scarcely differed from their own home interiors. Would I, with my years of experience in axing faces and taking names, help Hrothgar make Denmark a safer, fairer, more inclusive place for all, by smiting an oversized boy with chronic self-esteem issues?
I sent the messenger-boy back with four words for his majesty: ‘bring it on bitch’. I immediately quitted the company of my Geat chums, who continued to chew on chicken wings and stare into the middle distance, pondering last month’s rapine, and sped onwards to the Danish embassy to request a four week work visa. My excitement mounted at the thought of all the fur garments and slave women I would receive by way of payment from Hrothgar. But one thing troubled me: Grendel’s mother. In the letter she was cited as a ‘possible hazard’, and described as ‘a veritable fish wife, built like a brick shit house and possessed of a temper like Odin after a really shit day in Valhalla’. I doubt she’d take kindly to her boy getting done in by some Geat bloke in a horned helmet. As I neared the embassy gates, a shudder of trepidation ran over me, such that I always feel before a longship journey. Hwaet, etc.
Beowulf, Geatland, 470 AD
I was chilaxing in the park with some Geat mates, after a campaign of wholesale rapine in Juteland, when a messenger-boy of King Hrothgar approached me and handed over a letter bearing the royal Danish seal. Turns out Hrothgar had spotted the advert I put out in the Danish papers, offering my services in ‘smiting’ disadvantaged youths who vandalise public buildings (incidents of which have seen a sharp rise in Scandinavia after the economic downturn of 468). The King’s tone was urgent and his prose riddled with Viking expletives that I shan’t repeat here.
In short, Hrothgar had opened the royal coffers and built a state-of-the-art community centre in a down-at-heel suburb of Copenhagen – somewhere the recidivist kids of overburdened single mothers (the fruit the of the Norse invasion of 455, when oats were, so to speak, wildly sowed) can play ping pong and learn the tuba; ‘activities’ that keep them from lurking on street corners chugging jugs of mead and leering at elderly women. Hrothgar named the place Heorot, after his uncle’s infamous drinking game involving runestones and Frisian slave boys.
Yet no sooner had some local tart cut the ribbon and the doors officially opened, then this lairy specimen called Grendel – a larger than average yobo, commonly spotted in a yellow hoodie and navy blue trackies, with ‘bestial eyes’ and ‘foul, infernal breath’ – starting breaking into Heorot after hours through the men’s loo window. Always operating alone, Grendel would snort ketamine off the ping pong table and stash tubas into his gym bag, before urinating on the educational magazines and writing ‘cunt’ on every blackboard. And this had been going on for several weeks, so that, in Heorot, the local youths were presented with an environment that scarcely differed from their own home interiors. Would I, with my years of experience in axing faces and taking names, help Hrothgar make Denmark a safer, fairer, more inclusive place for all, by smiting an oversized boy with chronic self-esteem issues?
I sent the messenger-boy back with four words for his majesty: ‘bring it on bitch’. I immediately quitted the company of my Geat chums, who continued to chew on chicken wings and stare into the middle distance, pondering last month’s rapine, and sped onwards to the Danish embassy to request a four week work visa. My excitement mounted at the thought of all the fur garments and slave women I would receive by way of payment from Hrothgar. But one thing troubled me: Grendel’s mother. In the letter she was cited as a ‘possible hazard’, and described as ‘a veritable fish wife, built like a brick shit house and possessed of a temper like Odin after a really shit day in Valhalla’. I doubt she’d take kindly to her boy getting done in by some Geat bloke in a horned helmet. As I neared the embassy gates, a shudder of trepidation ran over me, such that I always feel before a longship journey. Hwaet, etc.
Beowulf, Geatland, 470 AD
