Before there was Game of Thrones, there was Beowulf... Beowulf is one of the earliest poems in a modern European language, composed in England before the Norman Conquest. A brilliant story of the adventures of Beowulf, a Scandinavian hero who saves the Danes from the seemingly invincible monster Grendel and, later, from Grendel's mother. He then returns to his own country and dies in old age in a vivid fight against a dragon. The poem is about encountering the monstrous, defeating it, and then having to live on in the exhausted aftermath.