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
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