The following abstract was submitted to the South Central Renaissance Conference in 2007, and it was accepted. I forget what panel it was on.
The dragons featured in Beowulf and in cantos xi and xii of Book I of The Faerie Queene are eerily similar in the threats they pose to admirable kingdoms, their physical attributes, weaknesses, and the manner in which they die—at the hands of armor-clad noble-class warriors who are themselves similar in equipment and temperament and whose fights follow oddly similar paths. Though the correspondences between the dragons and dragon-slayers in the two works are not wholly exact, they are quite close, and that proximity invites explication; little if any work has been done comparing these aspects of the two English-language epics, let alone the more fantastical elements in them.
Through examination of the characteristics of the dragons in Beowulf and Book I of The Faerie Queene, albeit in a limited manner, the depth of their correspondence to one another becomes apparent, and invites speculation as to the source and results thereof. The source may possibly be that Spenser was in some way familiar with Beowulf, though that is highly unlikely. Far more likely, even certain, is the implication of the correspondences between the Anglo-Saxon and early modern works; the existence of a distinct tradition of dragons in English-language literature, a tradition which extends from the Beowulf poet through Spenser to Tolkien and on into contemporary fantasy works, most of which are in English and nearly all of which reference, directly or obliquely, the works of Tolkien.