ON HIS return to Geatland, Beowulf reports to Hygelac on his experiences in Denmark, including the celebrations in Heorot after the defeat of Grendel.

This richly suggestive passage raises various questions, including whether the terms gleo, gydd, spell and cwiðan refer to different genres and whether the ‘gomela Scilding’ is Hrothgar. For the purposes of the present study, however, its striking feature is the prominence of emotion terms, including the imagery of surging within the breast (the hydraulic model of emotion), in association with poetic performance. Antonina Harbus remarks on the description of tales as ‘soð and sarlic’, ‘as if the mournfulness were as essential as the truthfulness and both were inherently entertaining’:

The ‘public experience of sorrow’ in the passage is not merely entertaining but involves joy and pleasure (wynn, niod). On the other hand, the sorrow is not confined to the text-world of the tales of old: Hrothgar expresses personal loss that produces a powerfully physical sadness. Story and experience, community and individual, verbal art and embodied emotion come together in this sequence, which is also, as Harbus highlights, one of Beowulf's many self-reflexive moments, with implications for how the poet conceived the functions and nature of heroic poetry.