The dragon (Beowulf) in 1953 that the dragon's "ultimate significance in the poem" remains a "mystery". Seamus Heaney suggests that Beowulf's attitude towards fighting the dragon reflects his "chthonic wisdom refined in the crucible of experience", that is there is already a "beyond-the-grave aspect" to his resoluteness. As Beowulf dies from his fight with the dragon, despite defeating it, James Parker of "The Atlantic" writes that "There is no transcendence in "Beowulf", and no redemption [...] kill the dragon—but the dragon will get you anyway". Joan Acocella states in "The New Yorker" that "unlike Grendel and his mother, [the dragon] is less a
Beowulf: The Monsters and the Critics The Northern gods, like men, are doomed to die. The Southern (Roman and Greek) pagan gods were immortal, so to Tolkien (a Christian), the Southern religion "must go forward to philosophy or relapse into anarchy": death and the monsters are peripheral. But the Northern myths, and "Beowulf", put the monsters, mortality and death in the centre. Tolkien is therefore very interested in the contact of Northern and Christian thought in the poem, where the scriptural Cain is linked to "eotenas" (giants) and "ylfe" (elves), not through confusion but "an indication of the precise point at which an imagination, pondering old