The dragon (Beowulf) with a Discussion of the Stories of Offa and Finn", says that "Beowulf"s dragon acts like "the typical dragon of Old English proverbial lore" because he guards treasure. W. P. Ker criticized the inclusion of Beowulf's fight with the dragon and his subsequent death in the poem, writing "It is as if to the end of the "Odyssey" there had been added some later books telling in full of the old age of Odysseus, far from the sea, and his death at the hands of Telegonus". In "", J. R. R. Tolkien noted that the dragon and Grendel are "constantly
Beowulf: The Monsters and the Critics in the symbolic value of such preternatural representations of sheer evil." Weinreich added that ""Beowulf," like other ancient legends, served to nourish Tolkien's imagination." John Garth, writing in "The Guardian", describes the paper as "still well worth reading, not only as an introduction to the poem, but also because it decisively changed the direction and emphasis of Beowulf scholarship. Up to that point it had been used as a quarry of linguistic, historical and archaeological detail". Garth notes that Tolkien's paper was praised by the Irish poet Seamus Heaney in the introduction to his critically acclaimed translation of "Beowulf". He