Though the dragon is a fully realized character—indeed,
the only character besides Beowulf with whom Grendel has any significant dialogue—many
critics have proposed that the dragon is not a real being, but comes
instead from within Grendel’s own psyche. The dragon seems to live
in another dimension, one reached not by a physical journey but
a mental one, as Grendel has to “make his mind a blank” in order
to approach the dragon. Moreover, several characteristics of the
dragon are echoes of things Grendel has previously witnessed: the
dragon’s “nyeh heh heh” laugh, for example, recalls the laugh of
the goldworker Grendel once watched at Hart. The dragon is a curious
amalgam of dragon imagery from widely varying sources, including
Asiatic mythology, Christian texts, and the works of J.R.R. Tolkien,
which were enjoying a surge in popularity at the time of Grendel’s
publication.
Despite the dragon’s claims of complete, unlimited knowledge, we
should follow Grendel’s lead and regard the dragon and his teachings
with some amount of skepticism. The dragon hardly bears any of the
characteristics one would expect in a sage old teacher. Wheezing,
greedy, and slightly effete, he spouts a torrent of philosophical
chatter that seems to parody man’s own convoluted attempts at making
meaning. In fact, the dragon actually quotes a human philosopher
extensively in his lecture to Grendel: whole passages are lifted
without attribution from Alfred North Whitehead’s Modes
of Thought. The dragon’s instruction to “know thyself”
is lifted from an inscription at the oracle-shrine in Delphi, Greece.
The dragon is more closely linked, though, with the existentialist
philosopher Jean-Paul Sartre, a man whose philosophy Gardner often vehemently
criticized. In fact, Gardner frequently commented that, aside from Beowulf, the
second “source” text for Grendel is Sartre’s Being
and Nothingness.
