Hello and welcome to this podcast about the Dragon in the old English epic Beowulf and the
translators and fantasy writers who've been inspired to tell its story anew for the modern age.
Dragons have exerted an irresistible power over the imagination for centuries.
Going back to Beowulf and beyond. Fierce fire belchers smoke snorters, wide winged far-flyer's, dragons keep to their caves and hidden burrows.
They brood over their treasure guard it obsessively, and we cannot help but be drawn to that gem encrusted, scaly magnificence.
There is danger in arousing a dragon. Of course, the flames will pursue you to the death if you take so much as a sniff at their loot.
But they have nonetheless a unique glamour. As Seamus Heaney puts it. Dragons are known to us from myth, legend and fairy tale.
Enticing stories cluster around them, but words of wisdom warn us not to get too close.
J.R.R. Tolkien reminds us that it does not do to leave a live Dragon out of your calculations.
And the motto of Hogwarts School teaches us that you must never tickle a sleeping dragon.
And yet the temptation to sneak inside the dragon's cave to stay upwind of the powerful snout,
that can smell a dwarf at a hundred paces run strong and deep,
inspired by the unnamed dragon in Beowulf, along with a riddling Fafnir from Old Norse legend,
Tolkien created one of the most charismatic dragons of the 20th century Smaug in The Hobbit.
And in his essay on fairy stories, he confessed that, quote, He desired dragons with a profound desire.
And while he might not wish to have them in the neighbourhood, he declared that, quote,
The world that contained even the imagination of Fafnir was richer and more beautiful at whatever cost of peril.
My name is Dr. Laura Varnam. I'm a lecturer in old and middle English literature at University College Oxford.
And I too have harboured a deep desire for dragons ever since childhood form my first encounter with
The Hobbit and the Tolkien Bestiaries that tantalised me with fantastic beasts and where to find them.
I've been entranced by these larger than legend reptiles.
I've tracked them in Modern Fantasy from Christopher Paulini's Eragon and his dragonriders to the mother of Dragons herself,
Daenerys Targaryen in Game of Thrones. But as a mediaevalist researching and teaching adaptations of old stories,
I've been most interested to identify their ancestors in early mediaeval works such as Beowulf and in particular
to explore modern reimaginings of those original dragons and even to have a go at writing some myself.
In this podcast, I'll be pursuing one legendary dragon into his
Or is it her treasure filled den, The Imaginations of J. R. R. Tolkien and fantasy author and translator Maria
Headley will be our guides to approaching the Dragon in Beowulf,
and I will conclude by adding my own poetic rendering of the Beowulf Dragon to the store of myth and legend.
The clifftop barrow of Beowulf's Dragon is our hunting ground, home of the final and fatal antagonist in the old English epic.
Where Beoulf finally meets his match, going out in a blaze of heroic glory, but also, sadly, in my view, taking the dragon with him.
Tolkien's expertise as professor of early mediaeval literature at Oxford is
itself legendary and his contribution to Beowulf studies with his essay Beowulf,
The Monsters and the Critics in the 1930s was field changing.
He replaced the monsters at the centre of scholarly discussion and emphasised above all the poem's status as a work of unrivalled, imaginative power.
I'm lucky enough to spend my days in term time in Oxford, just as Tolkien did, introducing my students to old English poetry such as Beowulf.
Susan Cooper, author of The Dark is Rising fantasy series, was even more lucky.
She was educated in the Oxford of Tolkien and Lewis themselves, and she recalled fondly that they taught us to believe in dragons.
And although my students might look at me with a wry smile or a raised eyebrow, I aim to do the same.
Bilbo Baggins tells us that it is foolish to laugh at a live dragon, and in my view,
it's equally unwise to underestimate the very real and symbolic potential of a literary dragon.
Tolkien has had an enormous influence on my own development as a literary critic, teacher and writer.
And in this podcast, I will examine his response to the Dragon in Beowulf in his lectures,
letters and commentary on the poem to reveal his surprisingly ambivalent attitude, which ultimately inspired his own fantasy creation of Smaug.
The dragon of his dreams. From there
I will jump feet first into the radical new feminist translation of Beowulf by
Maria Headley published to significant critical and popular acclaim in 2020.
Headley had already published a superb novel inspired by the female characters of the poem, and we set in modern America called The Mere Wife.
The title is a play on the old English mere,
or water woman used to describe Grendel's mother and the dismissive pigeonholing of a woman as a mere wife.
Her energetic and dynamic new translation opens by turning the attention grabbing Hwaet of the original poem into the explosive bro,
foregrounding the competitive,
aggressive masculinity that drives the poems, depictions of monster fights and feuds and can appear to marginalise women's agency in the poem.
But Headley also recognises that quote. While there are many examples of gender inequality in the poem, there is no shortage of female power, unquote.
She deliberately sets out that she states in her introduction to encourage moments in which the feminine might be poetically suggested.
And she makes the bold and brilliant move of making the Dragon female.
This gender switch enables Headley to offer a fresh perspective on the dragon's vulnerability as a result of the invasion of her horde.
But it also makes space for her to reaffirm female power and the dangers of underestimating it.
So let's begin with Tolkien. What does he have to say about the dragon in Beowulf and where in his lecture, the monsters and the critics,
he laments that real dragons essential to the machinery and the ideas of a poem or tale are actually rare.
And he concedes that in Northern literature, the only ones that really count are the Old Norse Dragon Fafnir,
who has a riddling conversation with the hero Sigurd before he dies from the wound inflicted on his belly and the dragon in Beowulf,
or rather the two dragons in Beowulf.
Because after Beowulf's fight with Grendel, the shop or poet recites the story of Sigmund, who successfully kills a dragon and loots its hoard.
This story, within a story inspired by Sigurd and Fafnir,
celebrates Beowulf's monster slaying credentials but also prefigures the dragon
lurking at the end of his own tale against whom Beowulf will not be so successful.
So even before the real dragon swoops into the main plot of the story he's conjured up in the poet's imagination.
In Tolkien's essay, he praises the rich potential of dragons in storytelling.
But he cannot help but express his disappointment in the actual dragon that Beowulf ultimately faces.
In general terms, he says that, quote, A dragon is no idle fancy, whatever may be his origins, in fact, or invention.
The dragon in legend is a potent creation of man's imagination, which are in significance than his burrow is in gold.
But in a lecture in nineteen forty nine, Talking confessed that he didn't think the dragon in Beowulf was frightfully good.
He said that Fafnir was better and that Smaug and his conversation is obviously in debt to you.
And Tolkien admitted to similar reservations in the monsters and critics say, quote, Beowulf's Dragon, if one wishes really to criticise,
is not to be blamed for being a dragon, but rather for not being dragon enough plain, pure fairy story dragon.
There are in the poems some vivid touches of the right kind in which this dragon is real worm with a bestial life and thoughts of his own.
But the conception nonetheless approaches draconitas us rather than Draco, a personification of malice, greed and destruction.
The evil side of heroic life, unquote. So for Tolkien, the dragon in Beowulf becomes almost too symbolic.
He tips over into unappealing allegory in his embodiment of the anti-king,
greedily hoarding his gold rather than dispensing it as a reward to his loyal retainers like the human kings' in the poem.
So when it comes to Smaug in The Hobbit, Tolkien is able to create exactly the dragon he desires.
Yes, he describes Smaug's dreams of greed and violence.
But he also emphasises his physical weight, the bestial bulk and heft of the vast red gold dragon.
He describes him, quote, with wings folded like an immeasurable bat,
turned partly on one side so that the Hobbit could see his underparts and his long,
pale belly crusted with gems and fragments of gold from his long lying on his costly bed.
And this glittering description is also more than evident in Tolkien's own illustration of Bilbo's visit to the Dragons hold.
But more than physical presence Smaug has glamour.
This dragon has, as Tolkien puts it, overwhelming personality.
And his effect on Bilbo is to almost enchant him into giving himself away.
When Smaug's, quote, roving eye flashed across him,
he trembled and an unaccountable desire seised hold of him to rush out and reveal himself and tell all the truth to Smaug.
In fact, he was in grievous danger of coming under the dragon's spell.
The dragon spell that Tolkien casts over us as readers resides, of course,
in his language and the words spell derives from the old English word for tale. In a build-up of tension, Bilbo hears Smaug before he sees him.
And Tolkien invokes the hobbit like preference for the homely and familiar in his description of Smaug snoring.
There is, quote, a sort of bubbling like the noise of a large pot galloping on the fire, mixed with a rumble as of a gigantic tomcat purring.
But you domesticate a dragon at your peril. And when Bilbo finally peeks his head into the dungeon hall at the root of the mountain.
Tolkien revels in the contrast and in the inexpressibility of what he sees Smaug nesting on his treasure.
He writes, To say that Bilbo's breath was taken away is no description at all.
There are no words left to express his staggerment,
since men change the language that they learnt of elves in the days when all the world was wonderful.
Bilbo had heard tell and sing of Dragon hoards before. But the splendour, the lust, the glory of such treasure had never yet to come home to him.
According to the Oxford English Dictionary staggerment is taught Tolkien's own coinage here,
and it's appropriate for the passages focus on the way in which in reality,
the dragon and its hoard is beyond ordinary description, beyond familiar language.
And yet characteristic of Tolkien's dragon is his susceptibility to flattery, to honeyed words.
Bilbo appeals to his ego in their riddling conversation.
Addressing him Oh Smaug the tremendous, the mighty. Oh Smaug, the chiefest and greatest of calamities.
The unassessably wealthy, Smaug the impenetrable.
And it is this rich cocktail of fawning words and piercing questions that tricked Smaug into revealing the chink in his armour.
The patch in the hollow of his left breast as bear as a snail out of its shell.
And that will ultimately be his downfall. Bilbo sweet talks Smaug, telling him he did not come to pilfer his hoard.
But to have a look at you and see if you were truly as great as tales say and Smaug himself
indulges in a spot of self mythologising when he declares My armour is like ten fold shields.
My teeth are swords, my claws spears, the shock of my tail, a thunderbolt, my wings are hurricain, my breath death.
You really can't help but read that passage dramatically.
So dragons attract rich language and imagery in fantasy literature just as much as they do treasure,
and it's always felt symbolically suggestive to me that the old English term for a man's treasury of language is his word-hoard.
The Beowulf poet's word-hoard for the Dragon includes eald uhtscea∂a Old Dawn Ravager. Nacod
Ni∂draca, naked malicious dragon. He is fyre befangen - enveloped in Flame.
The Dragon is a wyrm, a worm or serpent, hat ond hreohmod
hordweard the hot and savage minded hoard guardian.
He is a terror, a far flyer, a war monger, a fire Drake, a terror, an uncanny and dreadful stranger.
The Dragon coils itself burns, glides, slithers and loops across the land.
It is gryrefahne. Terrifying in its shimmering colours, its flames advance in waves.
It shatters Beowulf's sword and sinks its fangs into his neck. But in the end, the wideflier it is brought to ground, stilled by its wounds.
No longer wheeling through the air, gloating in its treasure, the dragon falls to earth fire quenched and unleashing.
I describe the dragon in my own words here is uncanny. And this is in response to two old English words.
First is the adjective on unhryre, which means fierce, cruel or dreadful, but literally is a negation, unpleasant.
And there's a wonderful Germanic understatement and a dragon being merely unpleasant.
The second is the description of the dragon is gryregæst a dreadful stranger.
Ironically enough, when Beowulf, who is truly the unwelcome houseguest, enters the dragon's burrow,
this description is part of the Beowulf poet's fascination with holes that visitors and
invaders in the poem and the dragon itself is appropriately described as a guest or stranger.
When he burns down Beowulf hall. Seamus Heaney translates dreadful stranger as outlandish thing in his award winning translation of the poem.
And that sense of the dragon is both recognisable but strange.
Uncanny in its dangerous familiarity. Outsized and extravagant; is suggestive to me.
of another quiet and understated moment in the narrative that shows the poet's skill when describing the dragon.
When Beowulf approaches the barrow, he lets out a great heroic shout that enters under the stone ahead of him.
We're told that Hete wæs onhrered, hordweard oncniow
mannes reorde; næs ðær mara fyrst // freode to friclan. Hate was aroused.
The Hoard Guardian recognised the man's speech. There was no more time to seek for peace or friendship.
What's most unnerving about this moment to me is that the dragon recognises the man's speech.
He knows it for what it means and what it will mean for him.
And for a moment, friendship between man and beast quivers in the echo of that shout.
There's no more time to seek for peace or friendship, but it's snatched away in the space of a second.
One of the Beowulf poet's strengths in his rendition of the Dragon episode is the way in which empathy is created for the Dragon's plight.
The Dragon has been guarding its treasure perfectly peacefully. Thank you very much.
Until it was disturbed by the fugitive who stumbled upon the hoard and before I move on from Tolkien,
I just want to read from his commentary on this passage,
which shows the poet's deafness in structuring the episode and creating its emotional meaning.
Tolkien's commentary was published posthumously in 2014 alongside his 1926 translation of the poem,
neither of which were intended for publication but were working documents for his teaching.
The commentary material comes from his Oxford lectures and is a real goldmine for the student or Dragon Hunter.
This is what he says about the introduction of the Dragon into the poem when the fugitive steals a cup from his horde.
And it's quite a long quotation. Allowing for the old English manner, this is a very moving treatment of this fairy tale situation,
remarkable for the sympathy shown by the author for both the wretched fugitive and the Dragon.
But it's characteristic of this manner that the narrative is not straight.
First we hear of the dragon, then that someone got into the barrow and took a cup.
Then that nearby folk soon learnt of the dragon's rage. Then we hear more of the intruder.
He was a fugitive slave master unknown. Then some precious details of his experience of the barrow are lost.
This is because the manuscript is damaged at that point.
So it's not until later that we get the detail that he had trodden close to the worm's head,
it is also characteristic of our poet and of old English as we know it as a whole,
that the scene in the barrow passes at once into an elegiac retrospect on the forgotten lords who placed
their gold in the hoard and then died one by one until it was left masterless and open prey to the dragon,
end quote. And Tolkien takes pains to explain that this elegiac passage is not inartistic.
So this moment when treasure is placed in the hoard and lamented because it will be of no more use to the people who are passing away.
So Tolkien writes, for one thing,
this passage occupies the emotional space between the plundering of the hoard and the curiously vivid and perceptive lines on the dragon,
snuffling and baffled rage and injured greed when he discovers the theft.
Also, of course,
the feeling for the treasure itself and this sense of sad history is just what raises the whole thing right above a mere treasure story,
just another dragon tale. The whole thing is sombre, tragic, sinister, curiously real.
The treasure is not just some lucky wealth that will enable the find it have a good time or marry the princess.
It is laden with history leading back into the dark heathen age ages beyond the memory of song, but not beyond the reach of imagination.
To me, this is Tolkien at his literary critical, best on the Beowulf poet's achievement, the interweaving of history and elegy,
the delay of action and the foregrounding of emotional response, the symbolic weight of the treasure and how the dragon feels about its loss.
That emotional space in the episode, as Tolkien puts it, not only elevates the narrative beyond being just another Dragon story,
but it opens up room for modern translators and creative writers to spread their own wings and to cast new light on the creature and her treasure.
My use of her brings us to Maria Headley's magnificent feminist translation of it, of Beowulf with its female dragon.
I cannot recommend this translation highly enough. Her introduction is as brilliant a critical engagement with the poem as I've ever read.
And she truly breathes new and fierce life into the poem for a 21st century audience.
As I mentioned earlier, Headley was keen to encourage, as she puts it, moments in which the female might already be poetically suggested.
We see this, for example, in her use of marital imagery to describe conflict and male bonding,
hinting at the ways in which women in the poem are often relegated to second place.
War was the wife Hrothgar wedded first, she translates, his hall was created for Warriors as a house to espouse
His faithful. In her description of the sword melting like ice when Beowulf decapitates the body of Grendel Headley portrays spring as female.
In contrast to God, the father. She translates, the slaying sword began to melt like ice just as the world thaws in May,
when the father unlocks the shackles that have chained frost to the climate and releases hostage
heat uses sway over seasons to uncage his prisoner spring and let her stumble into the sun.
This female spring also calls to mind Persephone as entrapment in the underworld, in classical mythology. When it comes to the dragon,
Headley emphasises her status as a warrior, just as she does for Grendel's mother, whose realm is similarly invaded and violated by Beowulf.
Headley writes of the Dragon across a star studded sky in deepest dark, one night, a dragon raged unchecked.
She was a scar skinned warrior, long accustomed to shadow soaring by moonlight, defending her claim hoarding in her own high hall.
No man knew the way into the dragon's clifftop cocoon, but a thief stumbled through a split in the stone and retrieved a gem festering goblet.
He robbed her of nothing else, just the cup. But up she rose, raging, grieving.
Though to cry out was to confess she'd been stripped while sleeping. This country.
These creatures would feel her fire. This punchy, poignant moment intertwines the dragon's rage and her grief, and again,
it recalls Grendel's mother, whom Headley describes as crazed with sorrow,
looking for someone to slay, someone to pay in pain for her heart's loss when she returns to Heorot to take revenge for the death of her son.
The feminisation of the dragon here enables these fertile links to be drawn to the poem's
other powerful female warrior and the dragon's loss is not merely a treasured possession
to confess she'd been stripped while sleeping triggers associations of shame,
a key concept in the poem, and the violence perpetrated against women in their own homes.
But balanced against this, Headley portrays Beowulf's desire to conquer the dragon single handedly as his downfall in a brilliant
perspective shift from the original poem that gives us an insight into Beowulf's internalised misogyny.
The Beowulf poet writes that he distained to attack the far flung flyer with a host, a large army, he did not fear that attack,
nor did he worry at all about the dragon's warfare, his strength and courage, because he Beowulf had survived many battles.
Now, if you listen carefully to this moment, the Beowulf poet is not unaware of the dragon's strength and courage.
It's Beowulf himself, who fails to recognise it and to take it into account. Headley translates this perfectly foregrounding Beowulf's viewpoint.
She writes that he was too proud to bring a war band to mar an army against the firmament flyer.
His plan would be his pyre. He imagined the dragon, a dimwit clocking neither her courage nor her grit.
There's a grim satisfaction then in Beowulf being proved wrong,
and Headley revels in her descriptions of the dragon's attack. There's a truly wonderful passage in her translation,
the serpent swirled, twisting and unfurling her scales.
Flames swayed, flinging herself hard at fate, a flexing firework aimed straight at the king.
The two battled furiously. The dragon renewed rapturous, inhaling, uncoiling afresh.
The energy and verve is really irresistible.
When the dragon sinks her needle fangs into Beowulf's throat Headley describes her, shaking him like a captured flag.
The dragon here is a victorious queen aloud indeed celebrated in her moments of glory.
When Beowulf retaliates and draws a dagger, he dipped it into the dragon's side.
I love Headley's use of dipped here for Beowulf's wounding of the dragon.
It smacks of that old English understatement, but it also drains the action of its force.
He doesn't stab her. He just dips his blade into her.
And even when her body is diminished to a shovel, split snake dead in dark dirt beside a gilded grave.
Headley takes the poet's cue and deploys the most dazzling language from her word-hoard to re-establish the dragon's imaginative dominance in the poem,
she writes Never again what she soar through a starry sky revel in rising rhapsody rolling in and out of clouds and mist.
A raging rainbow glinting golden. This is the rich and perilous beauty that Tolkien would have admired.
This is the kind of writing that reignites my own desire for dragons and most importantly,
the ability of the original poem to speak to and connect with a 21st century audience.
Scottish poet and Beowulf translator Edwin Morgan said that a successful translation must make the nerves tingle and the skin flush,
as with original poetry. And Headley fulfils this criteria, and then some, please do go away and read this incredible translation.
At the close of the poem, as Beowulf is entombed in his kingly funeral pyre and eulogised by his men,
the dragon is unceremoniously cast into the sea. In Headley's rendering they heave the dragon over the cliffs into the sea.
Brine bedding that beast bride. That ring taker. In my own creative reimagining of the Dragon,
I wanted to find a space earlier in the story to cast my own dragon spell within the original epic and to bring the dragon back to life.
I'd like to end this podcast by sharing two of my own poems about the Dragon.
That's a part of my poetry collection inspired by the women of Beowulf that I wrote back in twenty nineteen.
The first is a direct response to Tolkien's disappointment in the Dragon he found in the poem, and it's called His Dragon.
The second is part of a longer sequence of poems in which I give the dragon a voice,
reimagine the identity of the thief who plunders her hoard, and take a closer look at what the dragon is really guarding.
One of the driving forces of my poetry is to give voices to the voiceless in the poem, from Grendel's mother to Princess Freyawaru.
Both poems are we here are in the voice of a powerful female dragon.
I also deepen the association between dragons and language in making space for a treasured word-hoard at
the back of the cave in which a number of familiar old English words from the original poem are lurking,
waiting for someone to steal them and sing them anew. Since childhood,
I've always felt the dragons are more often than not misrepresented and misunderstood when Eustace
Scrubb turned into a dragon in C.S. Lewis Voyage of the Dawn Treader in the Narnia series.
I always felt that that might not be so bad after all,
and that armed with the Dragon lore that Eustace so clearly lacks, I might make a better job of it than he does.
I wouldn't mind being a dragon, at least on weekends.
In my poem, my dragon has the wisdom to foresee her cataclysmic end, but she will survive in the stories that are crafted from her word-hoard,
made in particular by the little thief, a young girl of my own imaginative invention called Ellen, whose name means courageous deed in old English.
But before we meet Ellen, this is my poem, His Dragon, in affectionate tribute to J. R. R. Tolkien.
His dragon - 'Not dragon, enough for Professor Tolkien, I'll be bound,
though I do hail from his northern imagination where we know that drama means sharp sighted and to beware of flattery,
keen as an arrow and just as dangerous to dragons. It was my cousin that the professor deemed not frightfully good,
but given half the chance that red great dragon would have raised Northmoor Road to ruins and shown him who's boss If Beowulf hadn't stepped in.
Of course, heroes just can't resist a dragon fight is the epic scale of the thing, though I admit that our scales are also an attraction.
You should have seen the handbag that Grendell fashioned from my uncle, but I digress.
Dragons aren't known for their timekeeping that we keep hold of our gold well enough while we can.
I'd have liked to have seen the professor's face if I turned up for his lecture on Dragons at the University Museum,
his catch of the breath when a female dragon swooped beneath that rib cage ceiling, richer and more beautiful, at whatever cost of peril.
And next, I'd like to read my poem, The Dragon and the Thief, written from the point of view of the dragon within her cave.
Take courage. I won't bite. Tell the truth, I'm glad of the company, sorry about the smell.
It's the Warriors. They can't help shitting themselves when they come face to face with my magnificence.
The wings and tail are quite something. I agree. And the fire is on brand, though.
I try to keep it on the down low in my own home. The smoke is a drag, makes the place feel smaller.
Heroes get so distracted by knickknacks than knuckleheads.
Bright and shiny baubles, trinkets, tchotchkes.
That's not the treasure I'm guarding. Back of the cave beyond the heap topped with a sword that looks like Hrunting a snuffle to the left.
That's it. There. Counted, catalogued, cared for - my word hoard.
The nouns are forming a shield wall arranged by equipment, shield and sweord human thegn cyning cwen,
a monster, your standard eotenas ond ylfa, your giants and elves.
But keep your eye on the ellengast. That bold demon is always trying to sneak out and poets just love to hook him in.
A good stock of wyrd - faith is essential when death is a regular caller.
And of course you can't have Grendel without gryre.
The kind of horror that makes my smartest kenning sit up straight that ealuscearwan ale-sharing is a real bully by the by.
I always recommend an illiterate little writing pair of adjectives grim and gredig say to start
you off for a monster fight and snotor and sci∂ferth covers your kings' wisdom and strength.
Your flatpack heroes should be the strengest of men in ∂am dæge
∂isses lifes. But if your title isn't set in those days of this life, then in geardagum is your best bet.
In former days, a bit of spit and polish will clean off that tarnish and then you can all lament with some heirlooms.
I'm all out of eotonisc swords, the last giant made blade dissolved on contact, which was unfortunate,
but there's an ealuweg ale cup that has quite the tale to tell A spell - story - that will have you spellbound.
It's just there beside some words I've been saving for a special occasion.
Ellen sweostor scop. Courage, sister poet.
Footsteps slinking past my snout. What's your name?
I say, pretending not to see the cup tucked under the cloak.
Ellen, she answers. Chin up proud and you've got all the courage you need.
I reply as I shift my bulk coins cascading ready for take off it's a bore to have to go out burning.
But I must keep up appearances. I do put on an excellent show lif-draca.
They'll holler fire Drake. Gu∂-scea∂a Warmonger, la∂ lyftfloga hated high flyer - nacho ni∂draca.
What a smooth operator this lithe lizard. They'll shake their puny fists as my fateful flames roast them in their tracks.
A dawn visitor and a dawning realisation. Don't get me wrong, I do know that the tail end of this particular tale is my death, my conflagration.
But I'll take King Beowulf with me. I'd like to qualify as epic, afterwards and our feud will burn itself out.
King and Dragon chasing each other's tails in a zoomorphic feedback loop.
But she'll remember me. She won't be able to help herself, although I suspect that with my spell at her heels she will.
Thank you very much for listening,
and I hope that my dreams of dragons in this podcast will encourage you to revisit Beowulf with new dragonish eyes and to add to
your own literary goldhord from the translations and retellings of writers such as JRR Tolkien and Maria Dhavana Headley.
Thanks again.