The second story—the adventure of Grettir at Sandhaugar (Sandheaps)—begins in much the same way as that of Grettir and Glam. Grettir is staying in a haunted farm, from which first the farmer himself and then a house-carl have, on two successive Yuletides, been spirited away. As before, a light burns in the room all night, and Grettir awaits the attack alone, lying down, without having put off his clothes. As before, Grettir and his assailant wrestle down the room, breaking all
in their way. But this time Grettir is pulled put of the hall, and dragged to the brink of the neighbouring gorge. Here, by a final effort, he wrenches a hand free, draws, and hews off the arm of the ogress, who falls into the torrent below.
Grettir conjectures that the two missing men must have been pulled by the ogress into the gulf. This, after his experience, is surely a reasonable inference: but Stein, the priest, is unconvinced. So they go together to the river, and find the side of the ravine a sheer precipice: it is ten fathom down to the water below the fall. Grettir lets down a rope: the priest is to watch it. Then Grettir dives in: "the priest saw the soles of his feet, and then knew no more what had become of him." Grettir swims under the fall and gets into the cave, where he sees a giant sitting by a fire: the giant aims a blow at him with a weapon with a wooden handle ("such a weapon men then called a hefti-sax"). Grettir hews it asunder. The giant then grasps at another sword hanging on the wall of the cave, but before he can use it Grettir wounds him. Stein, the priest, seeing the water stained with blood from this wound, concludes that Grettir is dead, and departs home, lamenting the loss of such a man. "But Grettir let little space come between his blows till the giant lay dead." Grettir finds the bones of the two dead men in the cave, and bears them away with him to convince the priest: but when he reaches the rope and shakes it, there is no reply, and he has to climb up, unaided. He leaves the bones in the church porch, for the confusion of the priest, who has to admit that he has failed to do his part faithfully.
Now if we compare this with Beowulf, we see that in the Icelandic story much is different: for example, in the Grettis saga it is the female monster who raids the habitation of men, the male who stays at home in his den. In this the Grettis saga probably represents a corrupt tradition: for, that the female should remain at home whilst the male searches for his prey, is a rule which holds good for devils as well as for men[[100]].
The change was presumably made in order to avoid the difficulty—which the Beowulf poet seems also to have realized—that after the male has been slain, the rout of the female is felt to be a deed of less note—something of an anti-climax[[101]].
The sword on the wall, also, which in the Beowulf-story is used by the hero, is, in the Grettir-story, used by the giant in his attack on the hero.
But that the two stories are somehow connected cannot be disputed. Apart from the general likeness, we have details such as the escape of the monster after the loss of an arm, the fire burning in the cave, the hefti-sax, a word which, like its old English equivalent (hæft-mēce, Beowulf, 1457), is found in this story only, and the strange reasoning of the watchers that the blood-stained water must necessarily be due to the hero's death[[102]].
Now obviously such a series of resemblances cannot be the result of an accident. Either the Grettir-story is derived directly or indirectly from the Beowulf epic, more or less as we have it, or both stories are derived from one common earlier source. The scholars who first discovered the resemblance believed that both stories were independently derived from one original[[103]]. This view has generally been endorsed by later investigators, but not universally[[104]]. And this is one of the questions which the student cannot leave open, because our view of the origin of the Grendel-story will have to depend largely upon the view we take as to its connection with the episode in the Grettis saga.
If this episode be derived from Beowulf, then we have an interesting literary curiosity, but nothing further. But if it is
independently derived from a common source, then the episode in the saga, although so much later, may nevertheless contain features which have been obliterated or confused or forgotten in the Beowulf version. In that case the story, as given in the Grettis saga, would be of great weight in any attempt to reconstruct the presumed original form of the Grendel-story.