The Dragon

Character Analysis

Not Your Average Fairy Tale

Gardner's dragon benefits from at least a thousand years of mythological development, so if you've "read the right sorts of books" (that's a nod to you, Mr. C.S. Lewis), your heart should do a little leap when Grendel's scaly mentor comes into the story.

What should you know about a dragon when you see him? For one thing, definitely stand off to the side and don't mess with his gold—touch one piece, and you're literally toast. And here's another thing: never mistake a dragon in Scandinavian literature for, say, a Chinese dragon. Dragons in stories like Beowulf or The Saga of the Volsung (or Grendel, for that matter) are not a cause for reverence and celebration.

Wherever there's a dragon guarding a hoard, there's intense suffering and death. That's because a dragon is never just a dragon: he's a highly symbolic character in myth. He almost always starts out life as something else—like the character Fafnir, who was a dwarf at first but then got transformed into a dragon because of his greedy and murderous heart.

That's a hint: dragons usually symbolize greed, violence, murder, and other scary things that are hard to keep under control. The treasure itself represents a whole heap of heartache: in it, there's likely to be treasures from lost civilizations, failing dynasties (think Hrothgar and family), and truly unlucky warriors.

Monsters, Inc.

Though he may be symbolic in many ways, the dragon is also a "real" creature in Grendel. So real, in fact, that Grendel can barely control his bladder when he seems him:

Vast, red-golden, huge tail coiled, limbs sprawled over his treasure-hoard, eyes not fiery but cold as the memory of family deaths... The color of his sharp scales darkened and brightened as the dragon inhaled and exhaled slowly, drawing new air across his vast internal furnace; his razorsharp tusks gleamed and glinted as if they, too, like the mountain beneath him, were formed of precious stones and metals. (57)

In short, Grendel's dragon is elemental, massive, invincible—totally scary. In an ironic twist, Grendel can hardly pay attention to the "wisdom" that the creature wants to give him, because he's so entranced by sight of the dragon's body. It's another way in which Gardner is trying to play with the idea of the monstrous: Grendel is too afraid of the dragon to listen to anything he has to say, just as the humans are too afraid of Grendel to listen to anything he has to say.

Dragon on Our Backs

We don't get any backstory on Grendel's dragon, because we don't need it. Gardner is using the dragon as shorthand for the misery of existence—the kind of misery that can lead to the depressing philosophies (and appalling social manners) he ends up sharing with Grendel.

In this sense, the dragon is not only a huge, frightening freak of nature: he's also a state of mind. Remember how Grendel gets to the dragon's lair? He doesn't break out the GPS and hit "Favorite Places": "I made my mind a blank and fell, sank away like a stone through earth and sea, toward the dragon" (56). Moving toward the dragon is as much a psychological journey as it is a physical one.

Grendel may be in the right mood to take advice from the dragon, but Gardner wants us to be more careful. The dragon might use big words, and he might have the gift of prophecy and a lot of ready cash, but what does it all boil down to? "Boobies, hemorrhoids, boils, slaver..." (70), that's what. The best the dragon can hope for, in the end, is to count all his useless junk and arrange it into piles like some kind of demonic Martha Stewart.