Beowulf says a dying king won a dragon's hoard with no son to leave it to, and his people buried the gold with him

Beowulf is an Old English poem, not history. It survives in one manuscript, the Nowell Codex, dated about 975 to 1025; scholars date the poem anywhere from about 700 to 1000. Near the end, the poet tells of the last survivor of a vanished people. He hides his people's treasure in a barrow and says, "Hold thou, O Earth, now heroes no more may." A dragon finds the hoard and guards it for three hundred winters. A man steals a plated cup from it; the manuscript is damaged at this word, and editors read him as a slave, a thane or a thief. The dragon burns the land and Beowulf's own hall. Beowulf, who has ruled the Geats for fifty years, fights it with Wiglaf and is fatally wounded. Dying, he tells Wiglaf, "Bring me the hoard." He says he would give his armour to a son, "Had any of heirs been after me granted." The poet says the gold lay under a spell. The Geats burn Beowulf and place the rings and jewels in his barrow, "where yet it remaineth / As useless to mortals as in foregoing eras." The manuscript, damaged in a fire at Ashburnham House in 1731, is in the British Library as Cotton Vitellius A.XV.