Review : Penguin Dragons (1)

Immediately following on from The Greek Myths I proceeded to devour the Penguin Book of Dragons. I simply had to find something to fill the mythological gap until I could get back to the shop for the other books in the "Myths That Shape The Way We Think" series, so what better than one all about my favourite creature of myth and legend ? Admittedly "The Penguin Book of Dragons" sounds a lot like The Usborne Children's Guide To Scary Lizards, or something, but in fact it's a delight : I only wish there was an expensive, hardback, fully-colour-illustrated edition I could display proudly on my bookshelf.

The book is a wide-ranging collection of translated storied about dragons, covering pre-antiquity, classical Greece and Rome, medieval Europe (the main focus) and Asia, and even modern America. It's a wide-ranging and eclectic mix indeed, from the absolutely bizarre to the profound to the childish and boring. It doesn't feature much at all in the way of analysis by the editor, which is a shame – sometimes it would have been useful to have some context as to why the stories are significant*. Nor is it in any way comprehensive – rather disappointingly it misses one of my favourites, the Lambton Worm, while including many which are so dull that they're only bearable because of their pathetic brevity.

* I'd like to say this makes it more interesting to do my own analysis, but in this case I'm often lacking enough information to get a handle on it. 

That said, it's still a very nice collection overall, featuring many stories I'd never even heard of. It doesn't really seem fair to give it a review but I would definitely recommend it for anyone who likes stories about dragons. There's a lot more to them than the standard scaly-scary-lizard, and even the really boring stories are interesting in adding variety to the dragon-as-plot-device motif. 

I don't have a particular question I want to answer here. Rather I'm going to just give a summary of the different ways dragons are used in the old stories, ordered roughly by how interesting I found them. These categories don't always divide quite so neatly as this, but as a guide, it's probably not awful. As I see it there are six main types of story : 

• Dragons as simple warnings and moral instruction
• As anecdotal traveller's tales asserting little more than that they exist as real creatures
• Surrealist fantasy where the symbolism is unintelligible
• Natural histories concerned with some degree of critical thinking on the nature of the beast
• High literature with complex characters, moral reasoning, and subtle symbolism
• Mythological explanatory metaphors in which dragons have a deep connection to the natural world and human nature.

To avoid spreading myself too thin, I'll cover the first three parts here and the second three in the next post.

1) Dragons : A Warning From History

A great many of the stories – too many – consist of very very simple warnings aimed at converting the heathens to Christianity. "So-and-so the blessed saint", they say, "came along and made the sign of the cross, and lo! the deadly beast was thwarted." And that's about it. They contain very little information of any kind, with the dragon itself barely even described.

I suppose if used together, delivered by a priest suitably skilled at oratory, listing a whole series of examples of devout Christians defeating dragons might have some rhetorical, persuasive power behind it. "Did not St Butface not smite the dragon with his mighty club ? And did not St Windolene not crush the heathens as St Gertrude did vanquish the firebeast of Moronia ?". That sort of thing. As it is, without context there's not much to say about them. Typically the dragon is very easily vanquished, literally in some cases just by the sheer power of belief or making the sign of the cross, nothing more than that. 

On its own each of these sort of stories are deadly dull. There's nothing at stake, no risk to the protagonists, the defeat of the dragon is assured. The dragon usually seems to symbolise paganism or some such, but is barely developed beyond merely naming it as a dragon. Everything about these stories is zero dimensional and presumably aimed at very simple, very stupid people.

There is one interesting exception that nevertheless fits the general description though. The twelfth century Abbot Herman of Tournai describes how God, rather than the Devil, sends a dragon which lays waste to an entire town for the relatively minor crime of refusing to welcome visitors carrying holy relics. Herman's gracious host himself escapes by the usual virtue of just being sufficiently pious, and the offending deacon has to seek God's forgiveness. These are all the usual tropes of the genre, but still, for God to send a five-headed dragon to burn a town to ashes for such a minor misdemeanour is surprising. Tolkien held that the earlier writer of Beowulf was no muddled Christian-Pagan hybrid, but this story only bolsters my disagreement* : even in these later ages, the distinction between the two is not at all sharp. Christianity itself, with its prophets, saints, messiah and holy trinity, has never really managed (in some ways) to fully escape the pagan past.

* And also Tolkien's claim that "a dragon is no idle fancy", with so many of the stories presented here being quite literally nothing more than that. It should be no idle fancy, but it often was.

2) Traveller's Tales

By number if not by total length, these probably make up the bulk of the collection. Anecdotal incidents abound of unwary travellers who had an unlucky encounter with a dragon, in which still nothing much is at stake except (at least) the traveller themselves. These aren't usually adventurers or explorers, just ordinary people who were in the wrong place at the wrong time. The point of these, if there is one at all, seems to be only to tell people to take care on the roads, much as we'd take note of a traffic report. At most they're concerned with establishing the existence of the beasts and their general characteristics, but nothing more than that. Everything is presented in a very matter-of-fact way.

This often makes the dragon itself narratively uninteresting. It doesn't carry any greater significance, it's just an animal which exists and does its thing, with no supernatural attributes of any kind except perhaps size. Even in the story of St George, the poor dragon itself only gets a walk-on part, though at least the rest of the story has some surprising redeeming qualities (see "literature" in the next post).

The Roman story of the dragon of Bagrada river in Tunisa exemplifies this sort of "traveller's tales" variety of dragon. It reads an awful lot like fan fiction : not actually at all bad in its description, but only hopelessly boring in narrative. The dragon is at least, unlike in the Christian warning stories, described in truly fearful terms, but in the end it's just an animal. The characters are still pretty lifeless : the main protagonist is brave but his companions are not, and in the end he goes forth and kills the beast without too much fuss and bother. More interesting is how often this particular story was repeated by later chroniclers, being held up as a standard piece of evidence that of course dragons existed – even though it reads very obviously as pure fiction.

Rather surprisingly, the last tales in the book purporting to be sincere encounters with dragons are from late 19th-century American newspapers. I have to wonder how seriously these were ever intended, with, for example, the otherwise extremely boring Abergavenny Chronicle currently having rather more fun than one might expect for a paper that usually describes such things as how much everyone likes cake. Critical thinking is a recurring theme with dragons and myth, on which more next time.

3) Surrealism

Much more fun but completely unintelligible are the stories which are truly bizarre. Few of these are pieces of pure surrealism : they tend to be halfway towards genuine literature but then with aspects which are absolutely random and baffling. One exception is the deliberately comic Dragon of Wantley, which, rather surprisingly, is a genuinely funny ballad about a giant flatulent dragon defeated by a local knight.

More typically, the surrealism is merely peppered throughout all the other sorts of dragon stories, even the natural histories. Pliny was convinced that dragons were the mortal enemies of elephants for some reason, describing their battles as almost chess-like in their careful tactics. This became widely accepted, it being proposed that dragons are particularly keen to drink the blood of elephants for its cooling properties. Then there was another author who insisted that dragons were afraid of lightning as, being so dry and hot themselves, it would easily cause them to burn up. The very obvious question of "well why doesn't their own fire ignite them ?" (and this author does assert that dragons breathe fire, unlike many others) is left cheerfully unraised.

More of these in the next post. Others are truly weird allegories and surely not intended as literal. Such as the idea, found in a medieval bestiary, that Jesus was a panther whose sweet breath scared dragons, and viewed the dragon's hatred of elephants as a metaphor for the corrupting effects of sin.

Yes, well.

Then there's the story of the demon-dragon Rufus. This mainly fits the description of the warning tales, in which the heroine Maria defeats the dragon by making the sign of the cross... except in this case she's inside the dragon at the time, so rupturing his innards and killing him. Then his relative appears and Maria grabs him by the hair and beard, makes the sign of the cross, and the story ends with him declaring (and this is a direct quote), "Ow, my beard really hurts !".

An honourable mention must be made of Onachus. This beast is mentioned in passing as one of the parents of dragon (the other half being Leviathan, see "myths" next time). It's described as, "a native of the region of Galatia, which lets fly its dung like an arrow at anyone who gives chase and can shoot it up to an acre away, scorching whatever it touches as if it were fire." This particular story is otherwise a classic of the utterly boring heroine-easily-defeats-dragon variety.

The final ones I have to mention are bizarre through and through. The Japanese god "Rushing Raging Man" defeats a dragon by getting all eight of its heads really drunk, then he chops it up and finds inside a sword he decides to call the grass-cutter great sword. God knows why. Generously, I suppose it's testament to how Western myths have indeed shaped modern thought – that is, presumably it makes more sense if you've grown up in Japanese culture. I'm reaching though, it could well be just pure silliness for all I know. And a Ming dynasty tale describes a dragon with "the antlers of a deer, the eyes of a rabbit, the ears of an ox, the neck of a snake, the belly of a clam, the scales [81 of them] of a fish, the claws of an eagle, and the paws of a tiger". Perhaps unsurprisingly, this Frankensteinian concoction was afraid of coloured silk – well, I mean how could the poor thing know if it was coming or going ?

---

Dragons are indeed versatile plot devices able to fill a multitude of different roles. But the dragons in the stories considered thus far aren't really much developed. Even the tales purporting that they exist aren't really concerned with the the beasts themselves. For that, we need to go to the second set of stories, ones where not only are the dragons crucial to the tale but the whole nature of the dragon is often of fundamental importance. Dragons can be silly, comic, and fanciful, but sometimes they also raise very much deeper and more interesting questions about our place in reality and our rational and irrational mindsets.