After a period of fifty years has passed, Beowulf defeats a dragon, but is fatally wounded in the battle.

Later in his life, Beowulf is himself king of the Geats, and finds his realm terrorised by a dragon whose treasure had been stolen from his hoard in a burial mound.

Beowulf finally slays the dragon, but is mortally wounded.

Jane Chance ( Professor of English, Rice University ) in her 1980 article " The Structural Unity of Beowulf: The Problem of Grendel's Mother " argued that there are two standard interpretations of the poem: one view which suggests a two-part structure ( i. e., the poem is divided between Beowulf's battles with Grendel and with the dragon ) and the other, a three-part structure ( this interpretation argues that Beowulf's battle with Grendel's mother is structurally separate from his battle with Grendel ).

A 1908 depiction of Beowulf fighting the dragon by J. R. Skelton. Beowulf returns home and eventually becomes king of his own people.

Beowulf and his warriors come to fight the dragon, but Beowulf tells his men that he will fight the dragon alone and that they should wait on the barrow.

Beowulf descends to do battle with the dragon but finds himself outmatched.

The two slay the dragon, but Beowulf is mortally wounded.

During the final battle against the dragon, Beowulf receives fatal wounds and dies.

* The commissioning of a special metallic shield to fight Turnus in the Aeneid and the dragon in Beowulf.

The theme survives into medieval legend and folklore, with dragon slayers such as Beowulf, Sigurd, Tristan, Margaret the Virgin, Heinrich von Winkelried, Dobrynya Nikitich, Skuba Dratewka / Krakus.

The blood of the dragon in Beowulf has acidic qualities, allowing it to seep through iron.

The Beowulf poem contains several elements that Tolkien borrowed for The Hobbit, including a monstrous, intelligent dragon.

Certain descriptions in The Hobbit seem to have been lifted straight out of Beowulf with some minor rewording, such as when each dragon stretches out its neck to sniff for intruders.

In many ways the Smaug episode reflects and references the dragon of Beowulf, and Tolkien uses the episode to put into practice some of the ground-breaking literary theories he had developed about the Anglo-Saxon poem and its early medieval portrayal of the dragon as having bestial intelligence.

Grendel is one of three antagonists, along with Grendel's mother and the dragon, in the Anglo-Saxon epic poem Beowulf ( AD 700 – 1000 ).

Tolkien's Beowulf: The Monsters and the Critics discussed Grendel and the dragon in Beowulf.

On the other hand, the Old English poem Beowulf includes Sigemund the Wælsing and his nephew Fitela in a tale of dragon slaying told within the main story.

Since none of these glimpses of poetizing without writing is intended to incorporate a signature into the epic matter, there is prima-facie evidence that Beowulf and the Homeric poems each derive from an oral tradition.

After stipulating a number of conditions to Hroðgar in case of his death ( including the taking in of his kinsmen and the inheritance by Unferth of Beowulf's estate ), Beowulf dives into the lake.

Travelling further into the lair, Beowulf discovers Grendel's corpse and severs its head.

This funeral also helps the poet to develop the plot to lead into the confrontation between the protagonist, Beowulf, and the main antagonist, Grendel.

Early studies into Scandinavian sources / analogues proposed that Beowulf was a translation of an original Scandinavian work, but this idea has been discarded.

* A human like giant, a Cyclops in the Aeneid book III, Grendel in Beowulf, coming into a hall every day to eat members of the hero's crew.

The Bible can fall into both the category of ecclesiastical sources and also this category, as the Beowulf poet would have relied on Old English translations.

Their accuracy has been called into question, however ( e. g., by Chauncey Brewster Tinker in The Translations of Beowulf, a comprehensive survey of 19th-century translations and editions of Beowulf ), and the extent to which the manuscript was actually more readable in Thorkelin's time is unclear.

Specific plot elements and features in The Hobbit that show similarities to Beowulf include the title thief as Bilbo is called by Gollum and later also by Smaug, the underground path into the mountain, and Smaug's personality which leads to the destruction of Lake-town.

Themes found in early English literature, and specifically in the poem Beowulf, have a heavy presence in defining the ancient world Bilbo stepped into.

By his naming the blade " Sting " we see Bilbo's acceptance of the kinds of cultural and linguistic practices found in Beowulf, signifying his entrance into the ancient world in which he found himself.

A Beowulf cluster is a computer cluster of what are normally identical, commodity-grade computers networked into a small local area network with libraries and programs installed which allow processing to be shared among them.

In the Old English poem Beowulf, Heremod is a Danish king who was driven into exile and in Old English genealogies Heremod appears appropriately as one of the descendants of Sceafa and usually as the father of Scyld.

Hrothgar is plunged into gloom and near-despair after Grendel's mother attacks the hall and kills Hrothgar's best friend and closest advisor ; but when Beowulf advises him not to despair, and that " it is better to avenge our friends than to mourn overmuch ", Hrothgar leaps to his feet and thanks God for Beowulf's wise words, and leads the Danes and Geats out to attack the small lake ( mere ) where Grendel's mother lives.

Ironically, the Mesan Alignment is conducting its string pulling behind the interstellar political events in an attempt to overthrow the Solarian League and its early laws outlawing genetic engineering upon man and genetic slaves in general as pushed into law by the highly prestigious daughter colony Beowulf after " Earth's Final War " where genetically altered soldiers and their genetically enhanced leadership played a horrific role and took decades to defeat.

Hrethel fostered Beowulf ( his grandson ) by taking him into his royal household aged seven.

" For one night in April, the dining hall is transformed into a medieval banquet hall, and students enjoy medieval fare and dramatic re-enactments of " Beowulf " and dragon battles before besieging and pillaging a rival college.

Spread across six volumes and divided into two sets, the anthology provides an overview of poetry, drama, prose fiction, essays and letters from Beowulf to the beginning of the 21st century.

Beowulf and Wiglaf go to the Cave once again and Beowulf goes into the cave alone.

The dragon's fall mortally wounds Beowulf, but he lives long enough to watch the carcass of the dragon transform into its true form, the humanoid body of his son, before it is washed out to sea.

Both of these are important in regards to the uncertainty surrounding the Beowulf manuscript, as the works which it draws from or influences suggest time-frames of composition, geographic boundaries from which it could be composed, or range ( both spatial and temporal ) of influence ( i. e. when it was " popular " and where its " popularity " took it ).

Beowulf channels Genesis, Exodus, and Daniel in its inclusion of references to God's creation of the universe, the story of Cain, Noah and the flood, devils or the Devil, Hell, and the Last Judgement.

The earliest known owner of the Beowulf manuscript is the 16th-century scholar Laurence Nowell, after whom the manuscript is named, though its official designation is British Library, Cotton Vitellius A. XV because it was one of Robert Bruce Cotton's holdings in the Cotton Library in the middle of the 17th century.

The question of whether Beowulf was passed down through oral tradition prior to its present manuscript form has been the subject of much debate, and involves more than the mere matter of how it was composed.

According to this view, Beowulf can largely be seen to be the product of antiquarian interests and that it tells readers more about " an 11th-century Anglo-Saxon ’ s notions about Denmark, and its pre-history, than it does about the age of Bede and a 7th-or 8th-century Anglo-Saxon ’ s notions about his ancestors ’ homeland.

Although elves could be considered to be beautiful and potentially helpful beings in some sections of English-speaking society throughout its history, Old English evidence also attests to alignments of elves with demons, as for example in line 112 of Beowulf.

The strong influence of the Aeneid has been identified in the development of European vernacular literatures — some English works that show its influence being Beowulf, Layamon's Brut ( through the source text Historia Regum Britanniae ), The Faerie Queene, and Milton's Paradise Lost.

Heaney's prize-winning translation of Beowulf ( Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 2000, Whitbread Book of the Year Award ) was seen as ground-breaking in its use of modern language melded with the original Anglo-Saxon ' music '.

The poem Beowulf describes a draca (= dragon ) also as wyrm (= worm, or serpent ) and its movements by the Anglo-Saxon verb bugan = " to bend ", and says that it has a venomous bite ; all of these indicate a snake-like form and movement rather than with a lizard-like or dinosaur-like body as in later belief ( though the dragon of Beowulf does show several features that would later become popularized with dragons ; namely, it breathes fire, lives underground, and collects treasure ).

Beowulf is the only heroic epic to have survived in its entirety, but fragments of others such as Waldere and the Finnesburg Fragment show that it was not unique in its time.

* Berserkers as depicted in the Beowulf epic are incorporated as mysterious and fearsome enemies in Michael Crichton's Eaters of the Dead novel ( 1976 ), and in its film adaptation The 13th Warrior ( 1999 ).

However, when Hrunting fails Beowulf in his battle against Grendel's mother, it possibly reflects its previous owner, Unferth, who failed to defeat the hated Grendel.

The Geatish ( Swedish ) hero Beowulf defends the royal hall and its residents from the demonic Grendel.

The most recent publication on Lejre and its role in Beowulf is by Marijane Osborn and John Niles, Beowulf and Lejre.

Her mother is an direct immigrant from the long settled planet Beowulf, which is known for its strong research and practice in the life sciences, and it is revealed in A Rising Thunder, her brother is one of its planetary directors — and both siblings are from Beowulf family famous for its intellectual, especially medical abilities, making them something of a noble house in Beowulfian regard.