Close Reading Analysis
Focus on your selected passage and provide a close reading of its portrayal of your monster, examining its form, imagery, and thematic resonances with the rest of the text. How does it contribute to the creation of your monster as a literary artifact? Look at: imagery; stylistic devices; verbal patterns. Make interesting, specific, arguable claims about the portrayal of your monster, both in the passage and in the poem as a whole. Back up this claim with good evidence, observing stylistic devices and literary strategies in the chosen passage, and linking details of the text with the wider themes of the poem.
In this section, you may also take a comparative or source-driven approach: is this passage related to other texts? Is your monster a figure in other myths and narratives? What traits persist? How does its portrayal differ from one story or tradition to the other?
These following observations that I have made from the poem “Beowulf” and Howard Shilton’s journal “The nature of Beowulf’s dragon”; will help you to resonate with my thinking as to how I came to my conclusion at the end of this essay.
1) Dragon is described as serpent-like; spitting fire from its mouth; angry monster.
“burning the ground to ashes” could mean it’s in fury.
2) Beowulf’s sword failed against the Dragon’s skin, so that means that the dragon has natural immunity from attacks or other creatures; this signifies that the dragon is a supreme creature with lots of power. But the underbelly of the dragon its “weak-spot” as mentioned in the poem, is soft and Wiglaf’s sword was able to penetrate it so that supports one argument that the Dragon is a creature created by God as like all the creatures created by God, it too has a weakness.
3) The dragon is 300 years old and is described as “harrower of the dark”; “burning one”; “slick skinned” (this use of words creates imagery in the mind of the reader to tingle their sense of touching something slick as the dragon’s skin.); “threatening night sky with streamers of fire” (this imagery is of fire and could induce some fear among the readers); people fear the dragon.
4) At the same time, Beowulf was around 80 years of age when he fought the dragon so, comparatively in human scale, Beowulf is pretty old too and its surprising that he has energy and is still strong enough to fight a dragon! By the time most people are 80, they are bed-ridden, with no energy.
5) Dragon is like Beowulf in some ways. For example-he is old like Beowulf; he is linked to treasure like Beowulf, and he is feared like Beowulf.
6) “Even in death the dragon is flame-scorched, indicating the “ferocity of its flames as a weapon and re-enforcing the imagery of the dragon” (Howard Shilton, page 67)1
7) Wiglaf killed the dragon by inserting his sword in the underside of the Dragon’s belly. The dragon as we know had hard and scaly skin like most reptiles, and to be more precise, Shilton5 compares the dragon’s skin with the skin of a common iguana, a lizard that has bony scales on the top of its body, and whose belly is very soft and susceptible to attacks.
8) Regarding the size of the dragon, Shilton mentions6 that “the poet clearly states that the dragon was 50 feet in length”, but Mr. Shilton also points out7 that “it could simply be a figure indicating a large number”. I also agree with Mr. Shilton and I think it is also just described as 50 feet long in the poem with the sole purpose of setting imagery of fear in the mind of the readers.
9) Howard Shilton says “A readily recognizable trait of the dragon is it's reptilian nature2. A comparison can be drawn from the serpent and lizard class of creatures.” He also says that “A further reptilian feature of the dragon is its venomous bite3. Beowulf’s wound caused by the Dragon’s bite began to burn and swell”.
As you know – This capability to produce venom is god-gifted to snakes usually.
To add to that, Shilton also points out that the “dragon’s movement also appears to be serpentine4 in nature” This is because it progresses towards Beowulf “coiled” and “gliding” like a snake would do. Not only that, but also “it rapidly moved over stone”. Howard Shilton correctly points out that “If one observes the movements of lizards and snakes, they do seem to glide and slither over rocks”.
10) Howard Shilton also believes that the Dragon like us (humans) is also a God-Created creature as it has flesh and blood and also because the poet describes the dragon as the one who “seeks out barrows to stay in” not “the one who seeks out halls to wreck” like Grendel did. This also brings me to contemplate whether only Grendel and his mother were “enemies of God” and not the dragon as the dragon “does not attack unless its provoked” (Shilton)14. First when the thief stole his treasure the dragon set out to attack and secondly when Beowulf challenged him, he accepted the challenge and came to fight, unlike Grendel who just attacks human dwellings for fun and game. The Dragon, in contrast, if it’s not disturbed, lies in peace upon his treasure.
11) Lastly Shilton says that since Grendel is decapitated (a method traditionally used to kill a TROLL) and the Dragon, contrastingly, is disposed of by being pushed over the cliff wall and gifted to the sea. “Grendel is condemned as God’s enemy whereas the dragon is not.” (Shilton)15
From all of these close reading observations, some mine and some of Mr. Howard Shilton, I have come to a conclusion that the dragon was given a noble death unlike Grendel who deserved to be torn apart limb by limb since he was God’s enemy. In addition to be given a noble death I would like to quote Shilton16 when he says “it is a fitting end for Beowulf to die as a result of a dragon fight. And it is a fitting end for the dragon to die at the hands of the mighty Beowulf. Probably no other end is grand enough for either” (Howard Shilton. Page 77)