Decades pass, and Beowulf, now an old man who has ruled the Geats as king for fifty years, faces a final threat when a thief disturbs a dragon's hoard, provoking the dragon into a campaign of fiery raids across the kingdom. Beowulf, insisting on facing the dragon himself despite his age, goes to its barrow with a small band of retainers, nearly all of whom flee in terror when the fight turns dangerous; only the young warrior Wiglaf stays to help, and together they kill the dragon, but not before Beowulf is fatally wounded by its venomous bite.
Beowulf dies having secured the dragon's treasure for his people, and the poem closes with his funeral, his body burned on a great pyre and his ashes housed in a barrow built high on a headland as a landmark for sailors, accompanied by a lament for the wars and hardships his death is expected to bring on a kingdom that has lost its protector. The poem survives in a single manuscript, the Nowell Codex, probably copied around the year 1000 from an already older poem whose original date of composition remains debated among scholars, some placing it as early as the eighth century.
Wiglaf's loyalty in the dragon fight is set in deliberate contrast with the cowardice of the other retainers who abandon Beowulf, and the poem uses that contrast, along with the closing lament, to voice anxiety about whether the Geats can survive without the strong protector-king who is dying in front of them, ending the poem on a note of uncertainty about the kingdom's future rather than unambiguous triumph.