The dragon (Beowulf) The dragon (Beowulf) The final act of the Anglo-Saxon poem "Beowulf" is about the hero Beowulf's fight with a dragon, the third monster he encounters in the epic. On his return from Heorot, where he killed Grendel and Grendel's mother, Beowulf becomes king of the Geats and rules peacefully for fifty winters until a slave awakens and angers a dragon by stealing a jewelled cup from its lair. When the angry dragon mercilessly burns the Geats' homes and lands, Beowulf decides to fight and kill the monster personally. He and his thanes climb to the dragon's lair where, upon seeing
Beowulf: The Monsters and the Critics thinker, religiously enlightened, who let his mind play over a lost heroic world of the imagination", in other words that the "Beowulf" poet was a man much like Tolkien. Niles cited George Clark's observation that Tolkien left "Beowulf" scholars with the "myth of the poet as brooding intellectual, poised between a dying pagan world and a nascent Christian one." Niles noted that Tolkien's view of the melancholic vision of the "Beowulf" poet, and of the heroic fatalism of the poem's leading characters, was not wholly new, but that his view of the poet himself as a hero was. Joan Acocella,