It is true that the old warrior is proud; perhaps excessive pride (ofer-mod) causes him to use poor judgment, as Hrothgar warned that it might. Beowulf is up against a formidable foe, and he is no longer a young man. Employing his troops to surround the barrow and overwhelm the dragon through force of numbers might be more prudent. But Beowulf has earned the right to try to be a champion one more time. If his people will be considerably worse off without him — and they will — his service to them is nearly over anyway. He deserves the chance to die like a warrior.
Beowulf seems to know that he is going to die. After reaching the barrow, he sits down with his men and wishes them good fortune. The poet tells us that the old man's spirit is "sad, / restless, death-ripe" (2419–20) as he thinks back over his life. (His recollections are probably more important than the names.) Beowulf was seven years old when King Hrethel became his foster father. Hrethel had three sons of his own: Herebeald, Haethcyn, and Hygelac. Beowulf recalls the kind generosity of the father and a tragic dilemma that is difficult for a modern audience to grasp.
The code of vengeance of the heroic age probably exceeds the modern audience's capacity to understand. When they were young men, Haethcyn killed his older brother, Herebeald, with an errant arrow in a shooting accident. Although that incident is tragic in itself, the grief was exacerbated because the code required King Hrethel to seek vengeance, even against his own son and even though the death was accidental. Unable to endure the dilemma, the father suffered and died without taking action against Haethcyn. In a passage that some critics find one of the finest examples of poetry in the epic, but which might slip by the casual reader, Beowulf compares Hrethel's grief to that of a father whose son is on the gallows (2444 ff.). The first word of the passage is correctly translated "So," but the meaning might be more clear if it were "So also" or "Thus." Haethcyn is not the one on the gallows. Succeeding his father as king, he is killed in the feud with the Swedes (Scylfings). The crown then went to the third brother, Hygelac.
