ABSTRACT
Augustine describes seeing on the beach at Utica "a human molar tooth so big that it could have been cut up into a hundred pieces each as big as one of the authors's modern teeth". For Augustine, the apparently defective demonstrates God's power over nature, accentuating the limitations of human knowledge and challenging the authors's notion of the normative. He has the draugr's characteristic glowing eyes, and Beowulf's beheading of his corpse in the mere would explain what many modern readers consider an apparently redundant precautionary measure. In 100 Year Cover-Up Revealed: the authors Lived With Dinosaurs! James Gilmer argues that Grendel was a thoropod, specifically some type of tyrannosaurid, an interpretation found in the early comic book tradition. By giving Grendel human characteristics, the poet blurs the distinction between the heroic and the monstrous in order to illustrate the dangers of arrogant overconfidence, a topic that Hrothgar emphasizes to Beowulf following his defeat of Grendel and his mother.
