372 Dragons! (with Scott G. Bruce)
The History of Literature
00:00
The Dragon of Beowulf Is a Scary Symbol
The dragon of beowulf is frightening because he's large and serpentine and winged and breathes fire. But at the same time, it's the fact that he's present preventing that wealth from circulating which has a corrosive effect on the society in which it lives. And they often are imbedded culturally, culturally inscribed with the thing the society fears most. We see it over and over again in bay wolf and some of that other northern vernacular literature that the kings are called ring givers. O everything about their power is what they give away. You know that it's not, they don't hoard wealth themselves. There their power comes from the redistribution of wealth to
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