Why does Hrothgar name his great dynastic hall Heorot, the “Hart”? More importantly, does this name have any bearing on the timing or nature of Grendel's carnivorous visitations upon that place? These questions arise from the juxtaposition of these two moments in Beowulf, for Grendel is introduced immediately upon the founding and naming of Heorot (64–90a). In fact, Grendel's appearance comes between two “founding moments,” the establishment of the Scylding hall and the songs extolling Creation that are intoned by the scop within it. The Beowulf-poet hardly loses a beat by then evoking the origin of murder and monsters to characterize Grendel by a lineage rooted in abomination. This cluster of “beginnings” seems to effect a critical mass, an intersection of biblical and Scylding histories that erupts in the violence of Grendel's feeding in Heorot. Should we assume that Caedmonian song could anywhere and any time drive demons to cannibalistic wrath? Or could the naming of Heorot also have something to do with it?

We need to know more about the resonances of “Heorot” and what associations are evoked when Hrothgar selects this name in particular for this imposing hall. Beside musings on the hall's gables, studies have approached this problem through the “pagan stag cult,” seeing a link between the pagan Danes and worship of the Celto-Germanic fertility god Cernunnos/Herne; but their best results tend to serve exegetical readings that reduce the symbolism to what a “conventional Christian” poet would denounce. Notably lacking in them is a consideration of why stag rituals that are condemned in penitential manuals do not figure in the poet's censure of the Danes’ idolatry; or whether the fertility symbolism has any thematic relevance; or how the stag cult should relate to the monotheism of the poem's worthy and able barbarians; or what the cult could mean to Grendel. Heorot becomes for Grendel an obsession, for he singles out only the hall for slaughter (he never menaces its outbuildings, 138–43), and he keeps raiding it long after he has killed the mirth that triggered his rage. How does the pagan conduct of the Danes relate to that? My premise is that the poet has created a heroic world evoking barbarian, not narrowly pagan, experience.