Question: what was the name of the dragon in beowulf

title: The dragon (Beowulf)
text: In From Homer to Harry Potter : A Handbook on Myth and Fantasy , Matthew Dickerson and David O'Hara argue that the Beowulf poet added the figure of the dragon to `` the pot ... that is ladeled out of by most modern fantasy writers '' ; they argued that both numerous works with villainous dragons , as well as literature with benign dragons like the My Father 's Dragon books and the Pern series by Anne McCaffrey , were influenced by Beowulf 's dragon . Dickerson and O'Hara further elaborated that through its dragon , Beowulf turned the `` notion of having a monstrous evil ( and not mere human foes ) as the enemy '' into `` a hallmark of modern fantasy '' present in C.S. Lewis ' Narnia books , Ursula K. Le Guin 's Earthsea books , and the Thomas Covenant series by Stephen Donaldson . J.R.R. Tolkien used the dragon story of Beowulf as a template for Smaug of The Hobbit ; in each case , the dragon awakens upon the hoard being disturbed by one stealing a chalice and goes into a wrathful rampage until slain by another person . Aia Hussein of the National Endowment for the Humanities has written that the fight between Harry Potter and the Hungarian Horntail in Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire ( 2000 ) by J.K. Rowling was influenced by the confrontation between the dragon and the title character in Beowulf . James Parker of The Atlantic saw similarities between the dragon in Beowulf and the dragons in Game of Thrones ( 2011 -- present ) .