Beowulf: The Monsters and the Critics give it a powerful effect. He rebuts suggestions that the poem is an epic or exciting narrative, likening it instead to a strong masonry structure built of blocks that fit together. He points out that the poem's theme is a serious one, mortality, and that the poem is in two parts: the first on Beowulf as a young man, defeating Grendel and his mother; the second on Beowulf in old age, going to his death fighting the dragon. The work has been praised by critics including the poet and "Beowulf" translator Seamus Heaney. Michael D. C. Drout called it the
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