found here in Beowulf, to mean swimming rather than merely something aquatic. Unferth also uses the phrases wada cunnedon (line 509), “made trial of the waters”, and glidon ofer garsecg (line 515), “glided over the sea” during his description of Beowulf's match against Breca. Both terms are equally applicable to swimming and rowing. Rowing was, as much as swimming or water-wrestling, an essential skill for warriors during the Anglo-Saxon era, so a rowing competition between Beowulf and Breca would not have been out of the question. Although there are Nordic tales of swimming competitions, no other has characteristics of such extreme duration and danger as this – which, strictly speaking, was not a race but merely a testing of their own strength. Moreover, the duration of the challenge seems to make rowing more likely than swimming; seven days and nights immersed in Scandinavian waters, in winter no less (line 516), evidently without food nor an opportunity to go ashore for sleep or warmth, seems lethal (and certainly more arduous than Diana Nyad’s five attempts – only the last one successful – to swim from Cuba to Miami, each effort lasting only 2½ days). Additionally, the text refers to Beowulf as fleotan (line 543) – “floating”, and being on sidne sæ (line 508), and on deóp wæter (line 510) – “upon the wide sea” and “upon the deep water” and similar expressions—putting him consistently atop or above the water, rather than in or under the water. In line 515, he is described as having glidon ofer garsecg – “glided over / above the surf”; again, an image more in keeping with rowing than swimming. Further, in line 581, fatigued from his struggles with the sea monsters, Beowulf was carried by the currents to the land of the Finns (presumably a great distance) – and here the original manuscript's text clearly reads wudu weallendu – wudu, a word related to “wood” and often meaning “boat” (or perhaps “raft”), as it does in lines 216, 298 and elsewhere, so that Beowulf was carried to the Finns on a tossing, quaking boat; however, several editors and translators saw an obscure difficulty (between the masculine wudu and the neuter weallendu) and insisted on changing the wudu (“boat”) to wadu (“water”), making it appear that Beowulf was carried to the Finns on “surging water” (and, naturally, translators relying on the printed Anglo-Saxon text worked up by