Beowulf

With notable irony, the narrator refers to Beowulf as a guest at the home of Grendel’s mother, a foreboding underwater lair. After Grendel's mother attacks Heorot in retaliation for the death of her “sole-born son,” Hrothgar commissions Beowulf to track her down and kill her. After swimming to her lair, they fight: 

Seized then by shoulder, shrank not from combat,
the Geatish war-prince Grendel's mother.
Flung then the fierce one, filled with wrath, 
his deadly foe, that she fell to ground.
Swift on her part she paid him back
with grisly grasp, and grappled with him.
Spent with struggle, stumbled the warrior,
fiercest of fighting-men, fell adown.
On the hall-guest she hurled herself, hent her short sword,
broad and brown-edged, the bairn to avenge,
the sole-born son.

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The narrator uses a metaphor that compares the ferocious dragon to a “shepherd” when describing a scene in which several of Beowulf’s men, including Wiglaf, furnish his grave with the treasures they find in the dragons’ hoard: 

No lots they cast for keeping the hoard
when once the warriors saw it in hall, 
altogether without a guardian,
lying there lost. And little they mourned
when they had hastily haled it out, 
dear-bought treasure! The dragon they cast,
the worm, o'er the wall for the wave to take,
and surges swallowed that shepherd of gems.
Then the woven gold on a wain was laden— 
countless quite!—and the king was borne, hoary 
hero, to Hrones-Ness.

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