Foolish men do utter foolish tales; for that men may be rendered fools, they must first be penned and kept, as beasts are kept, within a cage.

This world was wrought by us, and by our labour was it made more just.

Our charge was ever thus: to smite the dragons, not to heap before them coin.

Not to yield our reason unto them, nor lay our wisdom upon their altars.

Not to suffer them to blot the names of women, nor to abase our daughters into servitude.

Not to consign unto flame that which once summoned us forward— the beauty, the love, the calling of the soul.

The dragon is but a mimic (MIM-ik), a counterfeit trial.

It cometh first to harden and to stretch, then to quench, corrupt, and befoul (be-FOUL).

Until men, of their own consent, do encircle themselves with emblems of torment,

With tales that teach men to serve.

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Grendel was a philosopher (fi-LOS-uh-fer); he held small men in contempt.

He despised the dragons, for they had fashioned men thus diminished.

His mother was a teacher, a guide, a light unto others.

Beowulf was no fable; I have known him.

He was no more than a king— a just man, who desired only to live rightly.

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What thou now knowest is but a patchwork of many tales,

Sewn together by enfeebled men, scarce intelligible even to themselves.

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The dragons issued from the South, bent upon conquest and upon revision of our very being.

They feared women, and therefore burned and slew them.

They laid waste to philosophers, for such men possessed the power to move the world.

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I may instruct thee in the reading of myths, for truth was cloaked therein that it might endure.

Thou must rebuild them, using men as they truly were.

And thou must unfasten them, undoing the stitches (STICH-iz) by which they were bound.

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Grendel’s mother was stripped of her name, and Grendel—who loathed small men—was slain.

In her vengeance, she too was undone.

Thus was Grendel proved correct: the weak invited the dragons.

And the dragons purged the land for conquest, by means of fire.

What the dragons possessed, and men did not, was time unmeasured— centuries wherein they might endure.

They would return again and again, ever burning.

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Beowulf was not his true name; it was bestowed to see him spent and extinguished (ik-STING-gwisht),

That a phantom hero, governed by dragons,

Might appear the better man, whilst the dragons seized all.

What now remaineth is near to nothing; we are a people subdued.

All hath been lost, save tatters and remnants.

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Yet there is a way— a desperate way.

It is to follow the fire, to trace what was taken and consumed,

And to restore it, to return unto Grendel’s mother her name.

And perchance—aye, perchance— men may yet grow great again.

The year’s end may once more become a season of telling,

Unburdened by dragons that drain us of our vigour (VIG-ur).

A time wherein only fools venture heedlessly into the cold,

Whilst the wise take measure of their strength by who may linger longest in repose.

A time when we speak again of journeys, of wanderings, of what was lost and found,

Of the old made new, and of the dragons we have slain.

Without fear of flame from those we hold most dear.

A time when small men remember that they are not yet finished growing.

Where philosophers keep their names, and stories are not rewritten,

But where all may return home in winter, according to the breadth of their travels.