From Monsters to Dragons.
This is one of the cooler images of Grendel I was able to find on the internet <www.timelessmyths.com/norse/beowulf.html>. Its by Robert Ingpen in the Encyclopaedia Of The Things That Never Were (1985). I like it because it is as mysterious as the monster in the poem and looks like Goya.

As we continue to make our way slowly through the poem, I am amazed at how it has this universal appeal across age groups--it easily keeps the interest and imagination of a ten-year-old even through all of the history and braggadocia.

We are finally to the part of the story that prompted us to start reading it in the first place, the dragon. Everything the poem says is in keeping with (or what it the source of?) dragon lore. Dragonology, the amazingly sophisticated and cool kid's book about dragons, mentions Beowulf, of course, and other sources of dragon mythology.

One interesting connection is the representation of larged, feathered lizards in Aztec sculpture, which Dragonology refers to as Draconis Americanus. It is amazing how trans-cultural the notion of the dragon is, and one has to begin to wonder exactly what these peoples are refering to in their depictions. Is it just an archetype of the imagination?