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Beowulf Battle With The Dragon

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Dragon from the Beowulf poem

The last act of the Anglo-Saxon verse form Beowulf includes Beowulf's fight with a dragon, the tertiary monster he encounters in the epic. On his render from Heorot, where he killed Grendel and Grendel's mother, Beowulf becomes king of the Geats and rules wisely for 50 years 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 beast, the thanes flee in terror, leaving merely Wiglaf to battle at Beowulf'due south side. When the dragon wounds Beowulf fatally, Wiglaf attacks it with his sword, and Beowulf kills information technology with his dagger.

This depiction indicates the growing importance and stabilization of the modern concept of the dragon within European mythology. Beowulf is the starting time piece of English literature to present a dragonslayer. Although the Beowulf dragon exhibits many existing motifs common to Germanic tradition, the Beowulf poet was the offset to combine features and present a distinctive fire-breathing dragon. The Beowulf dragon was adapted for Eye-earth in J. R. R. Tolkien's The Hobbit (1937), ane of the forerunners of modern high fantasy.

The dragon fight, near the finish of the poem, is foreshadowed in earlier scenes. The fight with the dragon symbolizes Beowulf'southward stand up against evil and devastation, and, as the hero, he knows that failure volition bring destruction to his people after many years of peace. The dragon itself acts as a mock "gold-king"; one who sees attacking Beowulf's kingdom every bit suitable retribution for the theft of just a unmarried cup.[i] The scene is structured in thirds, catastrophe with the deaths of the dragon and Beowulf.

Story [edit]

After his battles confronting Grendel'southward female parent and Grendel, Beowulf returns home and becomes rex of the Geats. L years pass with Beowulf in charge, when a local dragon is angered when a slave enters its lair and takes a cup from its treasure. The animal attacks the neighboring towns in revenge. Beowulf and a troop of men get out to notice the dragon's lair. Beowulf tells his men to stay outside, that this fight is his alone, only the dragon proves potent and mortally wounds Beowulf. Meanwhile, his kinsman Wiglaf scolds the other members of the troop for not going in to assistance, earlier coming to Beowulf's aid. He cuts the dragon in the belly to reduce the flames, and Beowulf deals the fatal blow. In his death-speech, Beowulf nominates Wiglaf as his heir and asks for a monument to be built for him on the shoreline.

Background [edit]

Beowulf is the oldest extant heroic poem in English and the get-go to nowadays a dragon slayer. The legend of the dragon-slayer already existed in Norse sagas such as the tale of Sigurd and Fafnir, and the Beowulf poet incorporates motifs and themes common to dragon-lore in the poem.[two] Beowulf is the primeval surviving piece of Anglo-Saxon literature to feature a dragon, and it is possible that the poet had access to similar stories from Germanic fable.[three] Secular Germanic literature and the literature of Christian hagiography featured dragons and dragon fights.[4] Although the dragons of hagiography were less fierce than the dragon in Beowulf, similarities exist in the stories such as presenting the journey to the dragon'south lair, cowering spectators, and the sending of messages relaying the outcome of the fight.[5]

The dragon with his hoard is a common motif in early Germanic literature with the story existing to varying extents in the Norse sagas, but it is nearly notable in the Völsunga saga and in Beowulf.[half dozen] Beowulf preserves existing medieval dragon-lore, most notably in the extended digression recounting the Sigurd/Fafnir tale.[2] Nevertheless, comparative contemporary narratives did not have the complexity and distinctive elements written into Beowulf 'south dragon scene. Beowulf is a hero who previously killed two monsters. The scene includes extended flashbacks to the Geatish-Swedish wars, a detailed description of the dragon and the dragon-hoard, and ends with intricate funerary imagery.[seven]

Beowulf scholar J. R. R. Tolkien considered the dragon in Beowulf to be one of just two real dragons in northern European literature, writing of information technology, "dragons, real dragons, essential both to the mechanism and the ideas of a poem or tale, are actually rare. In northern literature in that location are just two that are significant ... nosotros have merely the dragon of the Völsungs, Fáfnir, and Beowulf'due south bane."[8] Furthermore, Tolkien believes the Beowulf poet emphasizes the monsters Beowulf fights in the poem and claims the dragon is as much of a plot device as anything. Tolkien expands on Beowulf 'south dragon in his own fiction, which indicates the lasting impact of the Beowulf poem.[2] Within the plot structure, even so, the dragon functions differently in Beowulf than in Tolkien's fiction. The dragon fight ends Beowulf, while Tolkien uses the dragon motif (and the dragon's love for treasure) to trigger a concatenation of events in The Hobbit.[9]

Characterization [edit]

The Beowulf dragon is the earliest instance in literature of the typical European dragon and outset incidence of a fire-breathing dragon.[10] The Beowulf dragon is described with Quondam English terms such as draca (dragon), and wyrm (reptile, or serpent), and as a brute with a venomous bite.[eleven] Besides, the Beowulf poet created a dragon with specific traits: a nocturnal, treasure-hoarding, inquisitive, vengeful, burn down-breathing creature.[12]

The burn down is likely symbolic of the hellfire of the devil, reminiscent of the monster in the Book of Chore. In the Septuagint, Job's monster is characterized as a draco, and identified with the devil.[10] Task's dragon would have been accessible to the author of Beowulf, as a Christian symbol of evil, the "bully monstrous adversary of God, man and fauna alike."[thirteen]

A study of German and Norse texts reveals three typical narratives for the dragonslayer: a fight for the treasure, a battle to save the slayer'south people, or a fight to free a adult female.[fourteen] The characteristics of Beowulf 'southward dragon appear to be specific to the poem, and the poet may take melded together dragon motifs to create a dragon with specific traits that weave together the complicated plot of the narrative.[12]

Importance [edit]

The third deed of the poem differs from the beginning ii. In Beowulf's two earlier battles, Grendel and Grendel's mother are characterized as descendants of Cain: "[Grendel] had long lived in the land of monsters / since the creator cast them out / as the kindred of Cain"[15] and seem to be humanoid: in the poet's rendition they tin can be seen as giants, trolls, or monsters. The dragon, therefore, is a stark contrast to the other 2 antagonists.[sixteen] Moreover, the dragon is more than overtly destructive. He burns vast amounts of territory and the homes of the Geats: "the dragon began to belch out flames / and burn bright homesteads".[17] [18]

Beowulf'south fight with the dragon has been described variously as an deed of either altruism[19] or recklessness.[20] In contrast with the previous battles, the fight with the dragon occurs in Beowulf'due south kingdom and ends in defeat, whereas Beowulf fought the other monsters victoriously in a state distant from his home. The dragon fight is foreshadowed with earlier events: Scyld Shefing'due south funeral and Sigmund's death past dragon, as recounted past a bard in Hrothgar's hall. Beowulf scholar Alexander writes that the dragon fight likely signifies Beowulf's (and by extension, society's) battle confronting evil.[21] The people's fate depend on the outcome of the fight between the hero and the dragon, and, equally a hero, Beowulf must knowingly confront expiry.[22]

Wiglaf is the unmarried warrior to return and witness the death of the hero. Illustration by J. R. Skelton, 1908

Beowulf'south eventual expiry from the dragon presages "warfare, death, and darkness" for his Geats.[23] The dragon's hoard symbolizes the vestige of an older club, now lost to wars and famine, left behind by a survivor of that period. His imagined elegy foreshadows Beowulf'due south expiry and elegy to come up.[24] Before he faces the dragon, Beowulf thinks of his past: his babyhood and wars the Geats endured during that menstruation, foreshadowing the future. At his death, peace in his lands volition finish, and his people will once more suffer a menstruum of war and hardship.[25] An embattled guild without "social cohesion" is represented past the avarice of the "dragon jealously guarding its gilt hoard",[26]and the elegy for Beowulf becomes an elegy for the entire culture.[27] The dragon'southward hoard is representative of a people lost and antique, which is juxtaposed against the Geatish people, whose history is new and fleeting.[28] As king of his people, Beowulf defends them against the dragon, and when his thanes desert him, the poem shows the disintegration of a "heroic society" which "depends upon the honouring of common obligations between lord and thane".[29]

Wiglaf remains loyal to his king and stays to confront the dragon. The parallel in the story lies with the similarity to Beowulf's hero Sigemund and his companion: Wiglaf is a younger companion to Beowulf and, in his courage, shows himself to be Beowulf's successor.[30] [31] The presence of a companion is seen as a motif in other dragon stories, simply the Beowulf poet breaks hagiographic tradition with the hero'south suffering (hacking, burning, stabbing) and subsequent death.[5] Moreover, the dragon is vanquished through Wiglaf's actions: although Beowulf dies fighting the dragon, the dragon dies at the hand of the companion.[29]

The dragon battle is structured in thirds: the training for the boxing, the events prior to the battle, and the battle itself. Wiglaf kills the dragon halfway through the scene, Beowulf's death occurs "after two-thirds" of the scene,[32] and the dragon attacks Beowulf three times.[33] Ultimately, as Tolkien writes in Beowulf: The Monsters and the Critics (1936), the death past dragon "is the right end for Beowulf," for he claims, "a man can just dice upon his death-mean solar day".[34]

Critical reception [edit]

Before Tolkien [edit]

In 1918, William Witherle Lawrence argued in his commodity "The Dragon and His Lair in Beowulf" that the fight betwixt Beowulf and the dragon tends to receive less critical attending than other portions of the poem, commenting that "Grendel and his dam have, as information technology were, become more beloved of the commentators".[35] Conversely, Kemp Malone writes in "The Kenning in Beowulf" that Beowulf's fight with the dragon receives much disquisitional attention, but that commentators fail to note that "the dragon was no fighter. Non that it refused to fight when challenged, simply that it did not seek out Beowulf or anyone else. It left Beowulf to practice the seeking out".[36] In his 1935 piece of work Beowulf and the Seventh Century, Ritchie Girvan writes that Beowulf should be seen as having some degree of historical accuracy despite the presence of a dragon in information technology; he argues that "Tales of dragons likewise as a belief in dragons survived till contempo times, and the popular mind is apt to accept with credulity stories of water-monsters. The stories, moreover, are often fastened to existent persons and localized precisely in time and place. The habit is so well known that examples are superfluous".[37] Raymond Wilson Chambers, in his Beowulf: An Introduction to the Study of the Poem with a Discussion of the Stories of Offa and Finn, says that Beowulf 'southward dragon acts like "the typical dragon of Old English proverbial lore" because he guards treasure.[38] Due west. P. Ker criticized the inclusion of Beowulf's fight with the dragon and his subsequent death in the verse form, writing "It is every bit 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".[39]

Tolkien, 1936: The Monsters and the Critics [edit]

In his 1936 lecture Beowulf: The Monsters and the Critics, J. R. R. Tolkien noted that the dragon and Grendel are "constantly referred to in linguistic communication which is meant to recall the powers of darkness which Christian men felt themselves to be encompassed. They are 'inmates of hell', 'adversaries of God', 'offspring of Cain', 'enemies of mankind'....And and so Beowulf, for all that he moves in the globe of the primitive Heroic Age of the Germans, nevertheless is almost a Christian knight".[40]

After Tolkien [edit]

Peter Gainsford noted in the article "The Deaths of Beowulf and Odysseus: Narrative Time and Mythological Tale Types" that "In the twenty-showtime century Beowulf does not lack for commentators to defend the literary merit of the dragon episode".[39] Adrien Bonjour opined in 1953 that the dragon's "ultimate significance in the poem" remains a "mystery".[41]

The poet Seamus Heaney, writer of a major translation of Beowulf, suggests that Beowulf'due south 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.[42] Every bit Beowulf dies from his fight with the dragon, despite defeating information technology, James Parker of The Atlantic writes that "There is no transcendence in Beowulf, and no redemption [...] kill the dragon—but the dragon volition get you anyway".[43] Joan Acocella states in The New Yorker that "dissimilar Grendel and his mother, [the dragon] is less a monster than a symbol."[44]

Legacy [edit]

In From Homer to Harry Potter: A Handbook on Myth and Fantasy, Matthew Dickerson and David O'Hara contend that the Beowulf poet added the figure of the dragon to "the pot...that is ladled out of past most modern fantasy writers"; they argued that both numerous works with villainous dragons, likewise as literature with benign dragons like the My Father's Dragon books and the Pern serial past Anne McCaffrey, were influenced by Beowulf 'south dragon. Dickerson and O'Hara farther elaborated that through its dragon, Beowulf turned the "notion of having a monstrous evil (and non mere human foes) equally the enemy" into "a authentication of modern fantasy" present in C. S. Lewis' Narnia books, Ursula Thousand. Le Guin's Earthsea books, and the Thomas Covenant serial by Stephen Donaldson.[45]

J. R. R. Tolkien used the dragon story of Beowulf as a template for Smaug of The Hobbit; in each case, the dragon awakens upon the hoard being disturbed by one stealing a chalice and goes into a wrathful binge until slain by another person.[46] Aia Hussein of the National Endowment for the Humanities has written that the fight between Harry Potter and the Hungarian Horntail in Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire (2000) by J. G. Rowling was influenced by the confrontation betwixt the dragon and the championship grapheme in Beowulf.[47]

In the 2007 motion picture version, the dragon is Grendel's younger one-half-brother as he'due south the son of the latter'southward mother and Beowulf whom he ironically ends upwards killing in the end of the movie.

References [edit]

  1. ^ Nitzsche, Jane Take chances. "The Structural Unity of Beowulf: The Problem of Grendel's Mother". Verse Criticism, vol. 22. 1999. p. 290.
  2. ^ a b c Evans 2003, pp. 25–26
  3. ^ Rauer 2003, p. 135.
  4. ^ Rauer 2003, p. 4.
  5. ^ a b Rauer 2003, p. 74.
  6. ^ Evans 2003, p. 29.
  7. ^ Rauer 2003, p. 32.
  8. ^ Tolkien 1936, p. 4.
  9. ^ Evans 2003, p. xxx.
  10. ^ a b Chocolate-brown, Alan Thousand. (1980). "The firedrake in Beowulf". Neophilologus. Springer Netherlands. 64 (3): 439–460. doi:10.1007/BF01513838. S2CID 162080723.
  11. ^ Rauer 2003, pp. 32, 63.
  12. ^ a b Rauer 2003, p. 35
  13. ^ Rauer 2003, p. 52.
  14. ^ Evans 2003, p. 28.
  15. ^ Alexander 2003, p. 6.
  16. ^ Mellinkoff, Ruth. "Cain's monstrous progeny in Beowulf: part I, Noachic tradition" Anglo-Saxon England (1979), 8 : 143–162 Cambridge University Press.
  17. ^ Heaney 2001, p. 157.
  18. ^ Rauer 2003, pp. 74–75.
  19. ^ Clark 2003, p. 43.
  20. ^ Crossley-Holland 1999, p. xiv.
  21. ^ Alexander 2003, pp. xxiv–xxv.
  22. ^ Alexander 2003, pp. thirty–xxxv.
  23. ^ Crossley-Holland 1999, p. vii.
  24. ^ Crossley-Holland 1999, p. xvi.
  25. ^ Crossley-Holland 1999, p. xvii.
  26. ^ Crossley-Kingdom of the netherlands 1999, p. xix.
  27. ^ Crossley-Holland 1999, p. xxvi.
  28. ^ Clark 2003, p. 289.
  29. ^ a b Alexander 2003, p. xxxvi
  30. ^ Crossley-Holland 1999, p. xviii.
  31. ^ Beowulf and some fictions of the Geatish succession by Frederick K. Biggs.
  32. ^ Rauer 2003, p. 31.
  33. ^ Alexander 2003, p. xxv.
  34. ^ Tolkien 1936, p. 14.
  35. ^ Lawrence, William Witherle (1918). "The Dragon and His Lair in Beowulf". PMLA. 33 (4): 547–583. doi:10.2307/456981. JSTOR 456981.
  36. ^ Malone, Kemp (July 1928). "The Kenning in Beowulf". The Periodical of English and Germanic Philology. 27 (iii): 318–324. JSTOR 27703161.
  37. ^ George, Jodi-Ann (2010). Beowulf . Macmillan. ISBN978-1137098016.
  38. ^ Chambers, Raymond Wilson (1921). Beowulf . Cambridge University Press. p. 349. Retrieved September xviii, 2017. typical dragon.
  39. ^ a b Hinge, George (1921). Classica et Mediaevalia vol. 63. Museum Tusculanum Printing. pp. 247–248. ISBN9788763540643 . Retrieved September xviii, 2017.
  40. ^ Fulk, Robert Dennis (1991). Interpretations of Beowulf: A Critical Album . Indiana University Printing. p. 25. ISBN9781587431333.
  41. ^ Bonjour, Adrien (March 1953). "Monsters Crouching and Critics Rampant: Or the Beowulf Dragon Debated". PMLA. 68 (1): 304–312. doi:10.2307/459922. JSTOR 459922.
  42. ^ Heaney, Seamus (iv November 1999). "A New 'Beowulf'". The New York Review of Books . Retrieved 17 September 2017.
  43. ^ Parker, James (April 2017). "Beowulf Is Dorsum!". The Atlantic . Retrieved September 17, 2017.
  44. ^ Acocella, Joan (2 June 2014). "Slaying Monsters". The New Yorker . Retrieved 17 September 2017.
  45. ^ Dickerson, Matthew; O'Hara, David (2006). From Homer to Harry Potter: A Handbook on Myth and Fantasy . Brazos Press. pp. 124–125. ISBN978-1587431333.
  46. ^ Clark 2003, p. 31.
  47. ^ Hussein, Aia (14 June 2011). "Old English language, New Influences". National Endowment for the Humanities. Retrieved 17 September 2017.

Sources [edit]

  • Alexander, Michael (2003) [1973]. Beowulf: a verse translation. London: Penguin. ISBN978-0-14-044931-0.
  • Clark, George (2003) [1998]. "The Hero and the Theme". In Bjork, Robert East.; Niles, John D. (eds.). A Beowulf Handbook. University of Nebraska Press. ISBN978-0-8032-6150-1.
  • Crossley-The netherlands, Kevin (1999). O'Donohue, Heather (ed.). Beowulf: The fight at Finnsburh. Oxford University Press. ISBN978-0-19-283320-4.
  • Evans, Jonathan (2003) [2000]. "The Dragon-Lore of Heart-earth: Tolkien and Old English and Former Norse Tradition". In Clark, George; Timmons, Daniel (eds.). J.R.R. Tolkien and his literary resonances: views of Middle-globe. Greenwood Press. ISBN0-313-30845-4 . Retrieved 2010-05-18 .
  • Heaney, Seamus (2001). Beowulf: A New Verse Translation . Norton. ISBN978-0-393-32097-8 . Retrieved 19 May 2010.
  • Rauer, Christine (2003). Beowulf and the Dragon: Parallels and Analogues. Cambridge: Brewer. ISBN0-85991-592-1 . Retrieved 18 May 2010.
  • Tolkien, J. R. R. (25 Nov 1936). "Beowulf: The Monsters and the Critics". Sir State of israel Gollancz Lecture 1936. Archived from the original on three November 2009. Retrieved xix May 2010.

External links [edit]

Wikisource has original text related to this article:

Beowulf Battle With The Dragon,

Source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_dragon_(Beowulf)

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