The dragon (Beowulf) Grendel's mother and Grendel, Beowulf returns to homeland and becomes king of the Geats. Fifty years pass with Beowulf leading as a wise king, when a local dragon is angered when a slave enters its lair and takes a cup from its treasure. The creature attacks the neighboring towns in revenge. Beowulf and a troop of men (“the Geats”) leave to find the dragon’s lair. The Geats run away in fear, leaving only Beowulf and his young companion Wiglaf to slay the dragon. Beowulf receives a fatal wound from the dragon, but Wiglaf impales the dragon’s belly to reduce the
Beowulf was made early on by Guðbrandur Vigfússon (1878). "Grettis saga" is a family saga, and a story about , a great-grandson of an Icelandic settler, cannot be comparably as old as "Beowulf". Axel Olrik (1903) claimed that on the contrary, this saga was a reworking of "Beowulf", and others had followed suit. However, (1910) wrote a thesis in which both "Beowulf" and "Grettis saga" drew from a common folkloric source, and this encouraged even a detractor such W. W. Lawrence to reposition his view, and entertain the possibility that certain elements in the saga (such as the waterfall in place