The Grendiliad
Beowolf
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In an epic, there's supposed to be an invocation to the muse here, but the only invocation I can think of is "Come Lord Jesus, be our guest," and then a line that ends with blest, which doesn't seem to fit this story, so if you don't mind, I'll just jump in with both feet and begin.

Beowulf the Geat has the strength of thirty men (or sixty women by common calculation) in his grip. He has a secret, which I figured out and I'll tell you about it later, but first we have to get the story set up.

You see, Hrothgar, King of the Danes, has been harassed by this monster named Grendel who looks something like a Tyrannosaurus Rex with big hind legs to walk on and claw hands for ripping and tearing flesh. His face looks more like King Kong only with scales instead of hair.

Now old Hrothgar a long time ago did Beowulf's daddy a favor which is too complicated to explain just now, but it was all on the up and up. And then too, Beowulf needs another opportunity to show everyone how great he has become. During a swimming match with his buddy Breca he'd killed a lot of sea serpents while winning the race. But before that he'd been a lazy, good-for-nothing kid, and some people in Geatland can't seem to forget it. So Beowulf talks his Uncle Hygelac, King of the Geats, into letting him sail with fourteen men over to the Danish coast and have a go at Grendel.

Beowulf makes a good impression on the Danish coastguard and then on the hall steward and finally on King Hrothgar himself because he knows just the right balance between proud self-confidence and humble acceptance of a nasty break, which is not such an easy balance to strike, if you ever tried it. Unferth, for example, gets pretty acid-mouthed about being upstaged by the Geat hero, but we won't go into that.
The visiting Geats and their Danish hosts sit around on benches eating Gaul-fried fish and drinking a lot of mead until the old king gets too tired to hold his head up and goes off with his waitress wife Queen Wealhtheow to bed. (Sometimes you don't find out the queen's name in these stories; they are called Somebody's wife or daughter or mother, but this time we know her name, Wealhtheow.)

Everybody goes to sleep except Beowulf, who keeps his eyes open to watch for Grendel. After all, he can't blow a chance like this. Suddenly the strong doors burst open as Grendel smashes through with the sound of an explosion. But Beowulf doesn't rush to meet him just yet; he watches in order to scout out the way Grendel moves when he fights, his habits of moving forward, or sidestepping, feinting, etc. You know how a cagey fighter always checks out an opponent's favorite techniques in order to figure what counters to use. So Beowulf watches while Grendel claws up and gorges himself on the man nearest the door.

This has been called cannibalism, but it isn't, because man-eating is cannibalism only if you're a man, which Grendel isn't; he's a monster. If he ate another monster, it would be cannibalism.

Grendel doesn't even take time to wipe the grease off his face with the torn shirt caught on his teeth and hanging out of his mouth. He sees Beowulf staring at him and goes for him with a Tyrannosaurus Rex-like roar. But Beowulf is ready for him. He relaxes his shoulders and arms, flows his ki through them like water through a fire hose (that's his secret weapon: he discovered aikido fifteen hundred years before it was rediscovered in Japan) and moves into the line of force as the monster attacks.

He blends with that line, sweeping his arms in a circle that comes down on Grendel's arms, pointing in the same direction. Then with his unbendable ki-flowing arm, he leads Grendel on around into a circle that harmonizes with the monster's direction. As Grendel decides to pull back, Beowulf comes around with the other arm into another circle that lifts the scaly chin and points Grendel right down to the floor with an awful crash caused by the tremendous force that Grendel was putting into his attack.

Then quickly, before the monster can think, Beowulf follows him down, grasps Grendel's claw and bends it around into the most excruciating, muscle-twisting pin you ever imagined. It would have been more efficient to use one of the wrist twisting techniques in the first place, but the art was new then, remember. The important thing is, he gets the job done.

Grendel is screaming so you can hear him back in Geatland almost, but Beowulf doesn't tell him that the secret code to make one's opponent stop twisting is to slap the floor with his free hand. How could he tell him anything with all that noise? So Grendel keeps trying to wrench his arm free, only making it worse, until finally there is the god-awful sound of popping bones, snapping tendons, and tearing flesh as Grendel's whole arm comes off at the shoulder in Beowulf's hand. Beowulf stands there, surprised, with the bloody thing in his hand while Grendel runs off shrieking louder and higher, leaving a wide trail of blood all the way to his fen.

Well, next day, they hang the gory trophy up from the rafters, and all day and into the night they feast, sing, tell stories, and drink until the king, who isn't so energetic as he once was, goes off with Wealhtheow again and Beowulf gets special quarters of honor. But the rest of the men, Geatish and Danish together, go to sleep on the benches in the mead hall (where someone has fixed the door Grendel smashed).

Then they get a surprise because Grendel has a mother who got raging mad about someone ripping off her kid's arm when he came whining home and bled to death at her feet. She comes bursting through the door with, I suppose, half the force of Grendel, but it sounds the same and it gets the door down. After eating up the nearest man, she grabs the trophy swinging from the rafters and lights out for the fen.

Beowulf, of course, has to go after her, and he figures he ought to be able to whip her easy enough, since female monsters are naturally weaker than male monsters. (I guess he'd never heard of mama grizzly bears or hyenas or preying mantises.) Anyway, he is strangely anxious and puts on all his armor instead of taking it all off as he had the night he was expecting Grendel. And he borrows a sword with a good reputation.

Still feeling uneasy, he sets out after Grendolyn. (She's generally known as Grendel's dam, but everyone should have a name of her own, even if we have to make one up.) At the water's edge he plunges in and swims a great distance through the ominous dark waters toward the shimmer of fire below. He sinks through tepid water for a long, long time (which makes me think he must have invented a device for extracting oxygen from H2O like a gill) until he finds a fire burning in a kind of transparent cave under the lake, and he enters to find himself facing Grendolyn.

Turns out his borrowed sword can't penetrate, so he takes her sword away from her and uses that. She should have been able to get him first, except that they live in a patristic world with a five-thousand-year-old tradition of a male God who gives him the victory, of course at the last possible second just to make things exciting.

Grendolyn's venomous blood melts her sword up to the hilt where it's sunk into her heart. Beowulf takes the hilt as trophy along with Grendel's head, which he whacks off after finding the monster wasted on the floor of his dam's cave. Beowulf swims back to the surface through a red river of Gwendolyn's boiling life stream. Back on shore, he declares the fen cleansed of evil. It is then turned into a recreation area for swimming, boating, water skiing and general showing off of prowess.

That's the end of the story, and now you lost tribe of Geats can make like old Hrothgar and trundle yourselves off to bed to ponder all the story's symbolism.