Beowulf

Fifty years pass. Hygelac falls in battle, and Beowulf takes over as King of the Geats. He, like Hrothgar, is a generous and respected ruler, and grows old and wise in his post. However, a monster disrupts his peaceful reign. This time, it’s a dragon, awakened when a foolish man found his way into its barrow and stole a bejeweled cup from its hoard. The poet is sympathetic to this man: he didn’t intend any harm, but was a slave trying to appease a cruel master. 

(Here, we lose fragments of the story, indicated in the text by ellipses. The fire damage that destroyed parts of the ancient poem appears, by coincidence, just as the fiery dragon emerges.)

The dragon’s hoard, we learn, was a cache buried by the last survivor of an ancient clan. The poet imagines him mourning over these abandoned treasures as they go unused and fall into disrepair, wandering the world lamenting “until death’s flood/brimmed up in his heart” (155). The dragon came afterward to nest in the heap of treasures, and stayed there undisturbed for three centuries, until the slave took the goblet and his master returned to the barrow to plunder its remaining