Is Beowulf a Foil for Unfirth?

I think that Unfirth is kind of a foil for Beowulf, you know, to prove his virtue. He does provide some comic relief, I suppose in that Beowulf gets to his corrections pretty funny. And also, spending five or six days in the water killing sea monsters is quite a, quite a workout regimen. Neil Gaiman's retellings of North, North mythology? It almost makes me sad that the Beowulf movies apparently very bad because Neil Gaiman seems to kind of grasp something there.