long without Beowulf. In the world of the Beowulf poet, civilization is always precarious, apt to be overwhelmed by the darkness at any moment.

The dragon kills Beowulf, but Beowulf also kills the dragon. The Geats are not yet wiped out, only placed in greater danger. If they could find the courage and heroism they once displayed, they might save themselves again. Here, the ambiguous Christian element in the poem comes to the fore. The forces of darkness, symbolized by the dragon, always threaten to overwhelm the world, but their victory is never quite complete.

As has been mentioned by the other answers, the dragon in Beowulf represents absolute evil. It is greedy (hoarding a trove of gold) and destructive (killing many people). This is the opposite of Beowulf's conduct as a king. Beowulf is generous in sharing wealth with his warriors, and he loves his people enough to put his life on the line to save them, even though he is, at this point in the epic, an old man.

The dragon is also Beowulf's antithesis because it is essentially an antisocial creature. Unlike Beowulf, who is a generous king willing to die to save his people from destruction, the dragon lives alone and only seems to prize its treasure hoard. This quality links the dragon with the other two monsters Beowulf faced in his youth: Grendel and Grendel's mother. Both of those characters were outcasts descended from Cain, who was cursed to wander the earth after murdering his brother, Abel, out of jealousy. However, the dragon is, in a way, worse than Grendel or his mother, since at least those two characters (violent outcasts though they were) had one another as a small family and therefore deserve a little sympathy, even if their actions were evil. The dragon has no sense of community at all, making it even more unsympathetic.

So in the end, the dragon is the ultimate threat to Beowulf's community and represents pure evil.

Grendel, Grendel's mother, and the dragon all appear in the epic Anglo-Saxon poem Beowulf.

The Geats and the Danes depicted in the epic were Christian, shown through the Christian perspective the epic was told from. That being said, there are many references made to the fact that the Geats and Danes followed God and honored him through their epic battles and buildings which they erected (Heorot).

Therefore, any of the battles depicted in the text took place between a hero of God (Beowulf) and a monstrous, God-hating foe (Grendel, his mother, and the dragon). Evidence of this hatred is found in the following lines:

Thus the clan's life was one of good cheer and revel until that fiend of hell began to work evils. Grendel was this grim beast called, who haunted the moors and secluded fens; this accursed one had long dwelled with monsters since the Creator had decreed his exile. On the kin of Cain did the sovereign God avenge the slaughter of Abel; Cain gained nothing from this feud and was driven far from the sight of men for that slaughter. From him awoke all those dire breeds: ogres, elves, and phantoms that warred with God a lengthy while; He paid their wage to them!

Therefore, all of the monsters depicted in the text symbolize the pagan creatures and images which needed to be fought and destroyed in the name of God.

Grendel serves as a multi-faceted symbol in Beowulf, one that mirrors the complex culture and religious background of the poem. One one hand, Beowulf is a poem about a Scandinavian folk hero vanquishing monsters, and on the other, the poem comprises a detailed history of dynastic struggles among the Swedes and Danes, and, perhaps more important, explores the nature of loyalty, war, and kingship. Overlaying the poem are two competing belief systems—paganism and Christianity—that create a constant tension between imagery and world view.

When Grendel first appears, he is described as

That fiend from Hell,/That grim spirit, was called Grendel,/ ... this sorrowful man had stayed awhile,/Since the Shaper had condemned him/as Cain's kinsman. (ll. 101-107)

Although many readers see Grendel as just a monster, the Beowulf poet carefully places him within a Christian context and thereby creates a Christian symbol. As a descendant of Cain, the world's first murderer according to biblical tradition, Grendel has been cast out by God just as God cast out Cain for having murdered his brother, Abel. Grendel's lineage, then, is human—he may be inhuman now, having lived with "eotens, elves, and orkneys," but the poet implies that Grendel is a debased human, not another species.

Because Grendel is also a creature related to pagan enemies of mankind in the Scandinavian belief system also present in Beowulf, he becomes the symbol of nature as predator. Despite his origins within the human family, Grendel eats men, the ultimate sign that he has become, through his isolation and living with monsters rather than men, something other than man. In the Scandinavian pagan belief system, nature is more often seen as the enemy of mankind than as benign or even neutral. The Old English poems "The Seafarer" and "The Wanderer" clearly express the dangers and hardships brought upon mankind by nature, and Grendel is a part of that natural danger.

To further distance Grendel from mankind, the poet points out that he not only attacks Hrothgar and his men constantly without cause, but Grendel also ignores cultural norms, further evidence that he is not part of mankind or the society he attacks:

... hate feuds/crimes and murders ... he wanted no truce/with any man of the Danish forces,/to let them buy peace, pay him wergild (man-money, compensation) ... (ll. 152-56)

Grendel, being a hater of men, does not accept traditional ways of stopping constant warfare. In Scandinavian culture, war can be avoided if the weaker party is willing to pay a price, and the murder of a man, rather than resulting in a war between tribes, can be solved by the murderer paying compensation to the murdered person's family and tribe. In the eyes of Hrothgar and his people, Grendel becomes the symbol of implacable hatred, something that will not respond to reasonable ways of solving conflicts.

Lastly, the Beowulf poet places Grendel in the realm of magic, a symbol of supernatural strength and invulnerability. When Grendel attacks the Geats in Heorot, where Beowulf awaits him unarmed, the poet notes that the Geat warriors tried to attack him with their weapons, but

... no war-blades,/the choicest of weapons anywhere on Earth,/could even scathe that sinful wrecker; for he'd cast spells against all/edged weapons whatever. (ll. 802-06)

The advantage that Grendel gives himself by magic, however, is short-lived. Beowulf, not wanting to take advantage of an unarmed man (being), is not carrying a weapon and, in the event, Beowulf grapples with Grendel and tears his arm off at the shoulder, a fatal wound.

In many epics, good and evil are clearly defined. In Beowulf, the title character is obviously our epic hero. His antagonist (the first one, at least) is Grendel, who is the clear villain. Beowulf stands for good; he fights for what is right and symbolizes the traits that Anglo-Saxon warrior culture held in highest regard. Grendel, on the other hand, stands for evil and represents traits that the Anglo-Saxons feared or did not value or respect.

The epic begins by telling us that Grendel is descended from the Biblical Cain, who, of course, murdered his brother. This description sets Grendel up as bloodthirsty and ruthless. Grendel lives up to his reputation when he repeatedly murders and eats Hrothgar's men in the mead hall. His appetite for blood is insatiable. What's even more fearsome about Grendel is that there seems to be no good or understandable reason for his murderous ways; he seems to be inherently evil. We only know that he is upset about the noise made in the mead hall, probably because Grendel is alone and outcast. However, Grendel is not a sympathetic figure in the epic. Grendel, then, may represent the fear of unmotivated violence or envy. Grendel is described as a monster who will continue to terrorize the kingdom until he is killed himself. Beowulf enters the scene and mortally wounds Grendel. Good triumphs over evil.

The monsters in this poem can best be understood within the poem’s original pagan context and in the ways in which later generations attempted to make Christian sense of it. Grendel is defined as a descendant of Cain. In the Bible, Cain is exiled: he becomes somebody condemned to wander outside of the group he once belonged to. The same is arguably true of Grendel. He represents the fear we see in many Anglo-Saxon poems of being turned into an outsider. Grendel is jealous of the mead hall because he does not have recourse to a place of community like this. As such, he attempts to destroy it. Grendel is, we might argue, the ultimate example of what happens when behavior against social norms causes a man to be exiled for too long.

Grendel’s mother, in her own way, represents a subversion of societal expectations. In defending her son, she has behaved appropriately, but at the expense of attacking the greater group. As such she may represent the difficulties of balancing the various social expectations Anglo-Saxon society placed upon the community.

Beowulf, at least the modern translation, is written from a Christian perspective. Therefore, the symbolism of the monsters (Grendel, Grendel's mother, and the dragon) is that of evil. Since Beowulf is good, and on the side of God, that which is against Beowulf is against God.

Another view regarding the monsters is that they symbolize sin. Grendel, and his detest of the light (because he cannot live it it) symbolizes envy: "Then an evil creature who dwelt in darkness, full of envy and anger, was tormented by the hall's jubilant revel day by day." Grendel's mother symbolizes wrath (given her actions are fueled by the murder of her son). Lastly, the dragon symbolizes greed. It cannot fathom that one piece of its treasure is missing. Regardless of the vast treasure, the dragon must have the one piece which was taken.

One final definition of the monster's symbolism revolves around "the evil of human suffering caused by natural disasters" (taken from the eNotes Themes page on Beowulf). While the page denounces the accuracy of this idea, the symbolism behind the monsters in regards to human suffering has been defined previously.

To understand the symbolism behind Grendel one needs to understand the Biblical references in the poem. In the Book of Genesis, the first book of the Bible, the first murder in human history is the killing of Able by his brother, Cain. He was jealous of his brother because God accepted Able's offering and not Cain's. As a result, Cain was thrown out of his family's land and became an outcast, Grendel is said to be a descendent of Cain. The poem's original audience would have been deeply struck by this association. Like Cain, Grendel is jealous of the joy of Hrothgar's people. He makes himself evil by killing them. Thus Grendel symbolizes a lonely, jealous outcast like Cain.

The dragon, on the other hand, is symbolic of death and evil, perhaps even the devil. The dragon is described as a serpent and scaly and breathes out fire. Hoarded treasure in Old English literature usually is often associated with death and evil. Even though Beowulf wants to give the dragon's treasure to the Geats, it is buried with him, symbolically linking Beowulf with death.

Obviously, Grendel is the foe and therefore represents death and evil to the Danes in the poem Beowulf. But just as Beowulf himself represents more than just the idea of good, Grendel is deeper than that. In the Anglo-Saxon warrior culture, Grendel represented their destruction and the things that would rip them apart. One of those main ideas was paganism which was spreading throughout the Danish lands, and Grendel certainly can be seen as a type of that. Additionally, however, the Anglo-Saxon people were seeing migration and growing separation as they fled to the British Isles and elsewhere in Europe as other nations receded. Grendel, and his direct attack on the heart of the community, Heorot, can be shown to symbolically represent the destruction of the Anglo-Saxon culture and community.