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
On Translating Beowulf On Translating Beowulf "On Translating "Beowulf"" is an essay by J. R. R. Tolkien which discusses the difficulties faced by anyone attempting to translate the Old English heroic-elegiac poem "Beowulf" into modern English. It was first published in 1940 as a preface contributed by Tolkien to a translation of Old English poetry; it was first published as an essay under its current name in the 1983 collection "The Monsters and the Critics, and Other Essays". In the essay, Tolkien explains the difficulty of translating individual words from Old English, noting that a word like "eacen" ('large', 'strong', 'supernaturally powerful') cannot