If you can imagine the lobby bar of the Manchester Marriott as an Anglo-Saxon mead hall, I can explain how it felt to cover the New Hampshire primary.
I will need the help of the late Seamus Heaney, who described what it was like to be quaffing in Heorot Hall while Grendel lurked and swooped through the frost-stiffened north.
In his lyrical translation of “Beowulf,” Heaney described Grendel as “the terror-monger,” the “captain of evil” and “the dread of the land.”
He wrote that the fiend “ruled in defiance of right” and was “malignant by nature, he never showed remorse.”
The “powerful demon, a prowler through the dark, nursed a hard grievance,” he said, adding: “Grendel waged his lonely war, inflicting constant cruelties on the people, atrocious hurt,” pursuing “vicious raids and ravages.”
The New Hampshire primary felt like a chapter of that Old English saga: Donald Trump, the ogre who keeps coming back to terrorize us, was stomping around that lovely little snow-covered state, devouring his foes.
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