Discussion Questions for Thursday, February 4Tolkien, Chance, and Riches offer us a number of ways to interpret dragons as polysemous monsters.How does each scholar acknowledge the Christian audience of Beowulf but resist reducing the heroic elegy to Christian allegory? What would we lose of the poem's richness if we read all dragons as physical manifestations of Pride?How, now that you have encountered all three monsters, would you answer Alcuin's rhetorical question with a genuine argument -- What has Ingeld to do with Christ? |