The dragon’s treasure, the poet tells us, remains “eldum swa unnyt swa hit æror wæs”. Wiglaf, however, decides to bury the riches along with Beowulf’s body. “fremmað gena leoda þearfe”, Beowulf tells Wiglaf with his dying breath, while he glances upon the dragon’s treasure that he has just secured for his nation. Viii) The dragon’s treasure and Beowulf’s barrow They broke their oath of loyalty to their rightful lord: “Shame on you”, indeed! “You cowards! Shame on you!” – Team Beowulf Noooo!” “Dragon blood is green, obviously…”įollowing the defeat of the dragon, Wiglaf condemns the retainers who fled. They also remembered how the dragon was stabbed in the gut, though I doubt the dragon would have complained about its abdominal muscles as this one does, shouting “Oh no! My beautiful stomach! I had just started working out for the summer. The following student remembered that it was Wiglaf (not Walder or Unferth!) who stayed behind to aid his king. Vi) Beowulf and Wiglaf stab the dragon in the gut Good attention for detail: “useless sword” “old king Beowulf (beard for oldness, wrinkles also)” “angry dragon” says “grrr” V) The dragon bites Beowulf in the neck “Oh no! The dragon bit my neck!”Īnother dramatic scene is when the dragon clamps down on Beowulf’s neck, inflicting a mortal wound. The dramatic scene of Beowulf’s sword breaking in the heat of the battle, causing his companions to flee to the woods, appears to have left an impression on several students even though they seem to have a hard time remembering the name of the retainer who left behind: Nope, not Walder! Iv) The breaking of Beowulf’s sword and his company’s morale “Bad luck Beowulf” One of them, apparently, came prepared for the bonus question and even used several colours: Beowulf and the multi-colour dragon Thankfully, some students recalled this and, therefore, depicted the hero as an elderly man. When the dragon harassed Beowulf’s people, the king had been on the throne for fifty years. The student explains that these are “the annoying musicians who are inflicting horrible violence on their instruments in the adjoining class room, keeping me from concentration”. Naturally, Beowulf’s shield did not have any musicians attached to it (for as far as we know). Thus, he uses a special shield, as illustrated by this student: Beowulf and the musicians’ shield In lines 2522-2524, Beowulf announces that he will not fight the dragon unarmed (as he had done with the monster Gendel), since he expects “heaðufyres hates”. Also note the rather tiny dragon sleeping with “a diamond teddy bear, lying on a bed of rupees because I can’t draw coins” Tolkien’s The Hobbit. Hence, the slave was given a “Bilbo nose” in this rendition: “Slave stealing golden cup from dragon. 2220) or, as this student put its, he was like: “I’m mad! Gimme that cup back! Imma go kill some people now!”Īnother student recalled that the thief was a slave -and- that there were some striking resemblances with a scene in J. Upon discovering the theft, the dragon became “gebolgen” [enraged Beowulf, l. In the third and final part of Beowulf, the dragon is roused from his lair by the theft of a cup, as this student well remembered. I) A stolen cup The theft of a cup – student with “non-existent drawing skills” Below follows a selection of my students’ drawings that deal with the fight between Beowulf and the dragon, along with some commentary. In a previous blog post, I shared their renditions of The Battle of Maldon ( The Battle of Maldon: A Student Doodle Edition) . While the exercise was intended as a bit of a gag, their doodles actually allowed me to see which events from the poem had captured their interest how they (mis)remembered certain passages and which scenes, apparently, made no impact on them at all. In recent years, I have decided to turn the tables on my students and, for a bonus point (worth 1% of the exam grade), I have them draw scenes from Old English poems, discussed in class. On occasion, I use my own drawings to spice up my lectures (such as my Anglo-Saxon Anecdotes) or explain complicated bits of Anglo-Saxon literature (e.g., The Freoðuwebbe and the Freswael: A Comic Strip Reconstruction of the Finnsburg Fragment and Episode). Note the hash tags and the Viking horns on the dragon!ĭrawings have long since been used for the purpose of teaching (for an example from the Anglo-Saxon period see Teaching the Passion to the Anglo-Saxons: An early medieval comic strip in the St Augustine Gospels). Student rendition of Beowulf’s fight against the dragon. Together, these doodles cover almost the third part of the poem and document how well (or how badly) my students remembered the poem. For a bonus question on one of my Old English literature exams, my students used their artistic talents to draw scenes from the concluding fight in the Old English poem Beowulf.

Dragon battle drawing