In beowulf who is unferth and why does he seem to be perplexed by beowulfs stories?

Question

In beowulf who is unferth and why does he seem to be perplexed by beowulfs stories?

Answer 1

oh god i read that in 7th grade

it was the awfulest book ive ever read

don;t remember...sorry :]

Answer 2

Unferth’s name can be interpreted as meaning Unfaithful. The  King’s counselor in Germanic tales was often an evil person, like the Vizier in Arabian tales, or the Seneschal in French tales.

Unferth was possibly already a stock character in the stories about Hrothgar and his co-king Hrothwulf. So Unferth is rude to Beowulf and insults him, much as we might expect Kay, Arthur’s bullying seneschal to act towards a guest.

I don’t see that Unferth is perplexed by stories of Beowulf. Rather, Unferth knows that Beowulf was defeated by Brecca in a swimming match (or according to some translators and commentators a rowing match). Presumably there was a tale told at the time when “Beowulf” was composed about a swimming (or rowing) match between the two great swimmers (or rowers). And as someone must lose, apparently in that story the loser was Beowulf.

The author of our story of “Beowulf'' excuses Beowulf by claiming that the race was really ended by the contest against the sea monsters and that only by chance did Brecca reach shore first, and so Beowulf should not be dishonored by that race.

Such reinterpretations are to be expected when authors are using characters and tales that have come to them to their own purposes.

The story of Hrothgar apparently continued with his death and the accession of Hrothgar’s son Hrethric to Hrothgar’s half of the Danish kingdom.  However we know that civil war broke out between King Hrothwulf and his cousin King Hrethric, and that King Hrethric lost. Unferth may have been Hrethric’s counselor in the tale. Of course, that is just a guess about Unferth, and may be entirely wrong.

Hrothwulf, under the name Hrolf or Rolf is the “greatest king” in Danish legend. See http://www.viking.ucla.edu/hrolf/ and http://books.google.ca/books?id=zx_O_WNH... . A short version of the story appears in the second half of chapter 2 of Saxo Grammaticus’ “Gesta Danorum” and in the account of the youth of Hrolf’s father and uncle as here ascribed to a certain Harald and Halfdan whose story is told at the beginning of book VII, see http://en.wikisource.org/wiki/The_Danish... and http://en.wikisource.org/wiki/The_Danish... .

Many scholars think that Beowulf is in origin identical to Boðvar Bjarki of the later stories of Hrolf. Hrethric has been mostly forgetten and appears as a minor character named Hröric towards the end of Hrothgar’s (Hroar's) reign in one version and as a later king following Rolf in Saxo.

Unfortunately almost all Old English literature has been lost, and so we don’t have Old English versions of the Hrolf tales, though they likely existed. And we don’t have any other tales of Unferth which would better explain him.