In a curious scene in the middle of Beowulf, a raven appears joyfully heralding the arrival of a new day. The scene is entirely unparalleled in the extant Old English literature, where cheerful ravens ordinarily form part of the well-known ‘beasts of battle’ topos; in this guise they appear either relishing the proliferation of fresh carcasses after battle or eagerly anticipating the forthcoming feast before the fighting commences. In the Beowulf passage, there is no such apparent slaughter. After Beowulf hunts down Grendel and his mother in their lair, he presents Hroðgar with the sword found therein (lines 1677–86), prompting Hroðgar to deliver a lengthy sermon on the follies of pride and fame (lines 1700–84) before the entire company feasts and sleeps (lines 1785–98). We are then told that:

Many commentators have been taken aback by the perceived incongruity of the raven, a bird bearing ‘sinister associations with death and carnage’, appearing as a ‘joyous harbinger of the bright, radiant morning’ that follows the first night of peaceful slumber after the elimination of Grendel and his mother. The difficulties in interpreting this passage can be usefully categorised as stemming from two details. On the one hand, there is a lexical ambiguity in the adjective blaca, which may either be a weak nominative singular form of blāc (‘bright’, ‘shining’)5 or a weak nominative singular form of blæc (‘black’). This ambiguity is important because in Old English, as today, ‘black’ colour terms hold associations with evil and wickedness, whereas ‘bright’ colour terms do not. On the other hand, there is the puzzlingly positive description of the raven's joy and its resonance with the successful deliverance of Heorot from its monstrous attackers.