The dragon (Beowulf) Grendel's mother and Grendel, Beowulf returns to homeland and becomes king of the Geats. Fifty years pass with Beowulf leading as a wise king, when a local dragon is angered when a slave enters its lair and takes a cup from its treasure. The creature attacks the neighboring towns in revenge. Beowulf and a troop of men (“the Geats”) leave to find the dragon’s lair. The Geats run away in fear, leaving only Beowulf and his young companion Wiglaf to slay the dragon. Beowulf receives a fatal wound from the dragon, but Wiglaf impales the dragon’s belly to reduce the
Beowulf who, throughout the story, do nothing and "generally serve as backdrops for more heroic action." Daniel Podgorski has argued that the work is best understood as an examination of inter-generational vengeance-based conflict, or feuding. In this context, the poem operates as an indictment of feuding conflicts as a function of its conspicuous, circuitous, and lengthy depiction of the Geatish-Swedish wars—coming into contrast with the poem's depiction of the protagonist Beowulf as being disassociated from the ongoing feuds in every way. Beowulf Beowulf (; ) is an Old English epic story consisting of 3,182 alliterative lines. It may be the oldest