Case file · Folklore / legend
Grendel's lair
In 'Beowulf', the monster Grendel and his mother live in a cave beneath a haunted mere, from which Grendel raids the Danish king Hrothgar's hall Heorot, often placed at Lejre in Denmark.
1000 CE · 55.62, 11.92 · status: legend
The account
Beowulf tears off Grendel's arm, then dives into the mere and kills the mother in her underwater hall with a giant's sword. The poem survives in a single manuscript of around 1000. Some writers have compared Grendel to wild-man or troll traditions, and Michael Crichton's novel 'Eaters of the Dead' (1976) reimagined the monsters as surviving Neanderthal-like people.
The sceptical view
A literary monster descended, the poem says, from Cain; excavations at Lejre found great halls but no monsters.