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Just read this on it.

Yeah, that's why we don't have any idea what anybody might have said (or meant) more than a thousand years ago.

The dragon in the Saint George legend is described as and 'poisonous', not fire-breathing. (the Legenda Aurea is where it was written down in the 13th century). The original latin describes it as draco pestifer (= "destructive snake").

The 11th century Beowulf story mentions dragons and fire, but the dragon isn't breathing it: there's a stream of fire from the burial mound the dragon defends, and the dragon is apparently enveloped in flame.

I'm not sure what you mean by the Revelation of St Peter - theres an Apocalypse of Peter (which doesnt mention a dragon) and the Revelation of St John? In that, the dragon and the beast are separate things, and the dragon breathes a river, not fire (chapter 12). There's horses that breathe fire though (9:17). In any case in its original greek 'drakon' meant snake.

BTW I don't really know all this stuff - when I read your reply I vaguely remembered that Beowulf's dragon was fire-breathing and George's wasn't - I was just curious enough to check.

-Baz

>>Tolkien created the fantasy genre.

I think that the author of Beowulf might not agree with you.

There are other translations, you know, if you're one of those people who reads the book before seeing the movie, maybe read one translation before the other?

http://www.lone-star.net/literature/beowulf/

Can you imagine ... the death of Beowulf?

GO!

Experience different cultures, both geographic and "corporate" (whether it's Peace Corps, military, missionary, ESL, etc.). While you're bound to meet many different people while traveling, your projects will determine the kind of people you're immediately surrounded by.

Experience time - living abroad in the ".ne" domain has provided me with time to focus on learning new things (like horseback-riding) and improving my code, because I had time to RT*entire*FM. Maybe you can write some "man" pages for Passport ;)

See *real* opportunities for applications and hardware and challenge your field abilities (e.g. packet radio).

Even the original Beowulf cluster assembled to assist people in a foreign land:

"But a warrior of Hygelac's
heard of Grendel's doings;
he was the strongest of men
alive in that day,
mighty and noble.
That man called for a ship,
said he would cross the ocean
and help the king who needed help.
Wise men urged him
to that adventure
though he was dear to them.
They examined omens
and whetted him on."

Beowulf, a fictional Scandanavian warrior from the sixth century, is the subject of the oldest known english epic poem. Read it here . Naturally (?), geeks working on clustering computers together to combine their number crunching power decided to name their work after it. I think this may have to do with Beowulf having the combined strength of 50 men.

I don't understand how you could have trouble figuring this out. The FIRST link that came up when I did a search for Beowulf on google explaned what beowulf means in a clustering context. Elsewhere on the FIRST page there was a link to the translation I linked above. Learn to use google.

While Doom was the first Really Good FPS, it was still a take off of several other stories, it is no more orginial than Half-Life is related to Doom.

True that. Saving humanity from the spawns of hell is probably one of the oldest plot devices in human story-telling history. Beowulf (the book not the cluster) is the oldest known work in the English language and basically follows the same plot line.

There is nothing new under the sun.

whether they will put an ID chip in Beowulf .

On every single story, somebody posts a parody of [the ring] poem [from LotR]. This is the new Beawolf cluster.

Not exactly. It'd be the new Beowulf if they started parodying The Adventures of Beowulf .

An internal passport is the tool of a repressive regime. Stalin introduced them to Russian and they're still using them.

I never thought I'd ever agree with Texas Republicans about anything.