The dragon (Beowulf) with a Discussion of the Stories of Offa and Finn", says that "Beowulf"s dragon acts like "the typical dragon of Old English proverbial lore" because he guards treasure. W. P. Ker criticized the inclusion of Beowulf's fight with the dragon and his subsequent death in the poem, writing "It is as if to the end of the "Odyssey" there had been added some later books telling in full of the old age of Odysseus, far from the sea, and his death at the hands of Telegonus". In "", J. R. R. Tolkien noted that the dragon and Grendel are "constantly
Beowulf: The Monsters and the Critics the point of no monsters, but not in complaining about their mere numbers; the poet could not, he argues, have balanced Beowulf's rise to fame through a war in Frisia, against death by dragon. Similarly, he dismisses notions that the poem is primitive: it is instead a late poem, using materials left over from a vanished age: Tolkien finishes by arguing that "Beowulf" "has its own individual character, and peculiar solemnity;" and would still be powerful even if it came from some unknown time and place; but that in fact its language, Old English, Scholars and critics agree on the