ABSTRACT
This chapter focuses on an in-depth case study using the author's own experience gained through years of anthropological fieldwork with British practitioners of magic. It recounts how the author developed a particular relationship with Niohoggr, the dragon of Northern European mythology, and how Niohoggr would introduce him to the cosmic tree Yggdrasil. In the reading, Beowulf's battle with the dragon signifies the hero's confrontation with death itself, which, through Beowulf union with the dragon, shows his transformation into something transcendent. The dragon had shown him something of the continuity between life and death. Paradoxically, the chapter founds that the most fearful thing is that which ultimately heals fear. The dragon is the beast of fearful nightmares, a monster that haunts the imagination in the night, but an understanding of the dragon offers a way out of the same nightmares, for the dragon is not an objective cause of fear: it is the emotion of fear itself.
