Beowulf is a man, just a simple mortal who can be under water by a day and sometimes exhibits some superhuman strength… but he is just a man. Was he the whole day inside the water or was he just the most part of it? How could he survive the lake were Grendel’s mom seemed to live? Of course this is just an overheard story, a legend and it is impossible to know what really happened or if something actually really happened. However, assuming the poet wanted to establish that Beowulf was just a simple mortal, did they knew at the time the real capacities of human body?
Time is a subjective impression, especially if somebody is not wearing a precise watch and it is very probably that somebody could really think he or she is really a long time under the water and, without counting the times a person goes out to breathe it could seem that someone is under the water the whole day! However, this attempt of explanation is just speculation. What can we say about a world with trolls! What is a troll, actually! Beowulf takes place in a non historic world or at least in a world where its historic aspects are totally hid for us.
What we can know by reading Beowulf is about the character of the people who conceived it and enjoyed it, about their beliefs and hopes. We can also know how their ways passed to us as parts of the Western Culture, but we cannot know what really happened there, if something happened, and some of their perspectives are lost for us forever. That is the problem when time goes by without proper records.
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