Beowulf: The Monsters and the Critics of the hero by accepting Grendel and the dragon." In Tolkien's view, the poem is essentially about a "man at war with the hostile world, and his inevitable overthrow in Time". The underlying tragedy is man's brief mortal life. Grendel and the dragon are identified as enemies of a Christian God, unlike the monsters encountered by Odysseus on his travels. What had happened is that Northern courage, exultant, defiant in the face of inevitable defeat by "Chaos and Unreason" (Tolkien cites Ker's words), fuses with a Christian faith and outlook. The "Beowulf" poet uses both what he knew to be
The dragon (Beowulf) monster than a symbol." In "From Homer to Harry Potter: A Handbook on Myth and Fantasy", Matthew Dickerson and David O'Hara argue that the "Beowulf" poet added the figure of the dragon to "the pot...that is ladeled out of by most modern fantasy writers"; they argued that both numerous works with villainous dragons, as well as literature with benign dragons like the "My Father's Dragon" books and the "Pern" series by Anne McCaffrey, were influenced by "Beowulf"s dragon. Dickerson and O'Hara further elaborated that through its dragon, "Beowulf" turned the "notion of having a monstrous evil (and not mere human