Beowulf Hrothgar, king of the Danes, whose great hall, Heorot, is plagued by the monster Grendel. Beowulf kills Grendel with his bare hands and Grendel's mother with a giant's sword that he found in her lair. Later in his life, Beowulf becomes king of the Geats, and finds his realm terrorized by a dragon, some of whose treasure had been stolen from his hoard in a burial mound. He attacks the dragon with the help of his "thegns" or servants, but they do not succeed. Beowulf decides to follow the dragon to its lair at Earnanæs, but only his young Swedish
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