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 Hobbit themes explored in "The Hobbit". Maps figure in both saga literature and "The Hobbit". Several of the author's illustrations incorporate Anglo-Saxon runes, an English adaptation of the Germanic runic alphabets. Themes from Old English literature, and specifically from "Beowulf", shape the ancient world Bilbo stepped into. Tolkien, a scholar of "Beowulf", counted the epic among his "most valued sources" for "The Hobbit". Tolkien was one of the first critics to treat "Beowulf" as a literary work with value beyond the merely historical, and his 1936 lecture "" is still required in some Old English courses. Tolkien borrowed several elements from