The Use Of The Dragon In Beowulf

The interaction with the monstrous and the supernatural within Anglo-Saxon literature is certainly well documented, perhaps most famously in the Anglo-Saxon epic, Beowulf. Though the three creatures Beowulf faces are creations of the imagination, they are presented by the poet in very different ways. The man-eating beast known as Grendel is more of a monstrously misshapen reflection of bi-pedal humans that is spawned from ancient evil, whereas the dragon is a bit more conventional. This conventionality may at first make the dragon episode appear slightly less imaginative as the sections with Grendel, but what at first may seem conventional may actually be a very precise decision on the part of the poet. The dragon of Beowulf’s final battle is quite possibly meant to …show more content…
By choosing a creature that many of the poet’s readers believed were real animals, the Beowulf poet created a more tangible consequence to the looting of pagan burial mounds, a practice that was equally relevant to the Beowulf poet’s audience. The use of the dragon in Beowulf as a realistic threat makes the creature function as a symbol of human greed and possibly as a practical repercussion to the practice of looting that was not uncommon in the poet’s time. The “reality” of dragons as it pertains to the Beowulf poet’s audience is undoubtedly arguable, but their appearance in the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle supports the assertion that at least some of the poet’s audience would see the dragon and the destruction it wreaks as a very real possibility. As scholar W.W. Laurence notes, “the people of Northumbria, as the Anglo-Saxon