This is a part of his supreme ordeal. His return home is much broader and includes his supreme ordeal which is what you described in the question. He fought them because he wanted to stop them from taking his wife Penelope. This was during the competition where they had to prove themselves.
This is a short modernist fiction that celebrates the life of the imagination, and points to its shortcomings. As a narrator, Woolf was in the habit of thinking aloud and talking to herself, as well as to her imaginary readers. Here she takes the process one stage further by ‘talking’ to her own fictional creations.
She also shows the process of the artistic imagination at work, raising doubts about its own creations, asking questions, and posing alternative interpretations. She even develops lines of narrative then backtracks on them as improbable or cancels them as invalid, mistaken interpretation, or rejects them as inadequate.
In other words, the very erratic process of ratiocination – all the uncertainties, mistakes, hesitations – are reproduced as part of her narrative. She even addresses her own subject, silently, from within the fictional frame, and reflects on fictional creations which ‘die’ because they are rejected as unacceptable:
I’m not gonna write the whole thing but I can help with some
I think it would be or similar to "Though the government did help end mad cow disease, the people were angry they didn't help sooner."
