Review : Penguin Dragons (2)

Welcome back to my self-indulgent review of all things dragon, based on the collection of stories in the Penguin Book of Dragons. Last time I looked at the more superficial dragon-stories : the simple moral warnings, the cautionary but curious traveller's tales, and the often baffling and comic surrealist claims and fictions. None of these tend to go into much into detail about what the dragon's themselves are like, but in this next set of categories, dragons and their nature are vital to the narrative. So here I move on to the more interesting and sophisticated ways dragons are used : their super/natural histories, in complex literature that goes beyond simple morality tales, and in "true" myth.

(You don't need to have read the first post before this one, but it might help.)

As I said, the stories themselves don't always divide as neatly as this : think of it more as a rough guide to how dragons are used in different literature instead. Sometimes even traveller's tales contain elements of high myth, and sometimes myths feature bizarre surrealism. Nevertheless, if nothing else than organising things this way at least prevents this post from being a totally unstructured dragon-dump.

4) Unnatural Histories

Some of the records in the book are apparently sincere attempts to document the natural history of dragons. They're nothing like modern scientific reports, of course, taking the traveller's tales very seriously (what with having no physical subjects to work with, presumably). Their speculation ranges in credibility, from the, "this makes sense so long as a I accept the premise" to the surrealism of the "dude seriously stop you're not supposed to take that much" variety.

Of the more credible sort, many are related to the dragon's habitat. Most would-be dragonologists locate their quarry in hot countries, in keeping with their fiery temperament. But one or two say the opposite, that of course because dragons are so naturally hot they want to avoid overheating, so only live in the cold countries – much as they seek out elephants for their cold blood. A few go the whole way and say that dragons are cold creatures that kill by causing freezing cold in their wake. None of the authors of differing opinions on this comment on the others, seemingly reaching their conclusions entirely independently. 

It's interesting to note that some modern magical practise is based around the idea of "like causes like". While this is in keeping with the idea of fiery dragons in hot regions and cold drakes in cold countries, the idea that hot dragons deliberately seek out cold places to offset their own nature would seem opposed to this. Similarly, the idea that they're not naturally poisonous but only become so because of their diet firmly grounds them as entirely natural animals. Dragons, then, can be found across the whole supernatural spectrum, from the absolutely mythical to the almost-credible. 

Physical descriptions of dragon vary wildly, from the tiny Macedonian specimens that women suckle and keep as pets (!), to the most typical being perhaps a few tens of feet in length (the oft-mentioned Bagrada river dragon was supposedly 120 feet long), to a few real giants that might be hundreds of metres in length. They're typically but not always scaly, occasionally with hair or feathers, sometimes with the teeth of pigs of other chimeric qualities. Wings and legs are optional and come in various numbers, as do heads. Giant serpents are not uncommon, sometimes with wings for flight but sometimes managing to fly through abjectly supernatural means instead. They don't always breathe fire, but nearly always seem to have at least a noxious breath, sometimes able to kill over large areas with their poisonous fumes alone. Overall, the serpentine nature seems by far the most common aspect of all dragons, much more so than being like lizards or crocodiles.

It's also interesting to see the pre-modern writers wrestling with critical thinking in age where evidence was hard to obtain and even harder to duplicate : they took the anecdotal reports seriously because they had absolutely nothing else to go on. Some describe dragons in wonderfully mythic terms as the origin of storms, or are even deliberately pursued by thunderstorms which are trying to attack the dragons. One theologian in particular rejected this, declaring that ignorance is dangerous and that if people would only read the holy scriptures they wouldn't fall for such obvious errors. He goes on to present a remarkably rational description of thunder resulting from wind inside clouds, though he also notes that others believe that dragons not only exist but are also intelligent creatures capable of speech.

Even more impressive is the case of rejecting the idea of a fire-breathing creature and instead suggesting that this nothing more than bioluminescence like other animals have. Their scales are like shells of perfectly ordinary creatures. And yet this same Edward Topsell also puts forward other, altogether weirder suggestions. One idea is that the dragon is a hybrid of the wolf and the eagle but can itself reproduce sexually*... Surely weirdest of all is perhaps the idea that dragons originate in eagles nests by the combination of sperm from the mingled bodies of their dead prey. It's a heady, complex mixture of credible, almost-scientific lines of reasoning together with the absolutely bizarre. 

* In a slightly earlier era, theologian John Beleth describes dragons getting "lustful" in the air, which results in them polluting the waters below with their sperm, causing crop failures. His recommendation to prevent this is to build fires of bones to ward off the horny beasts.

5) Literature

Moving on to more substantial tales, there are of course plenty with good literary aspects to them. The medieval French poem Les Chétifs has at least some excitement to it, with the hero's life at last in genuine danger – piety alone will not save him, unlike in the simpler moral warning messages. Even some of the very early tales sometimes contain interesting snippets, such as the story of a fourth-century bishop who describes a dragon in the treasury of Constantinople that "killed many people by depriving them of wealth or through his breath". This direct association with money is far more interesting that the hoard in Beowulf, which is just an ancient, pre-existing collection that the dragon takes over to nobody's disadvantage. A later Byzantine tale also features a dragon which causes dreadful economic disruption as well as the more literal physical sort of destruction.

Two more famous tales are a bit disappointing in terms of their famous dragons. The story of Fáfnir I found rather plodding and dull, but quite possibly only because the extract here is simply too short to provide any context : it becomes a case of "this happened, and then this happened, and this happened as well for some reason." I reserve this for a future post, though, since the description in my current read The Norse Myths That Shape The Way We Think is much fuller. The curse of the gold is certainly interesting enough, the but the dragon himself is more incidental (in contrast the reverse is true of Beowulf, where the dragon is of pivotal importance to the story but the hoard is of almost no relevance, lurking as it was in the barrow anyway before the dragon came along).

The story of St George, as mentioned last time, also features the dragon only as a minor plot device, but with the rest of the story similarly much more interesting. The sacrifices in the original story aren't necessarily virgins or even exclusively female, they're just people to make up the numbers of the dwindling supply of sheep the townspeople can afford to placate the dragon*. There's also a genuinely tragic aspect to the king, who is sincerely torn between his duty and his love for his daughter. Perhaps most interestingly of all, St George only agrees to kill the dragon if the villagers convert from their heathen ways. One wonders what he would have done if they hadn't : to release the beast and let it devour them would hardly be an act of saintly forgiveness, whereas if this was an idle threat, than George is a big fat liar.

* This must say a lot about a town : either we'll run out of sheep faster, or we'll feed it some people instead. Presumably there's some Welsh influence at work here.

There's a distinctly fairytale aspect to the Asian stories presented. The case of the fishermen who rescues a turtle and is taken to the house of a dragon-god under the sea has a particularly tragic development. A kindly and virtuous man, he is taken by the turtle (who is actually a princess in disguise) to the undersea house of a dragon-god, where he marries her, forgets his family, and loses track of time. When he awakens from his dream-like state, he thinks three days have passed, but on returning to the world he finds it's actually been three centuries. He does nothing wrong, commits no sin, but loses everything, being now unable to return to his underwater home.

The acme of literary dragons here, the crowning jewel in the collection, is for me the excerpt from Edward Spencer's poem The Faerie Queen. This, now, this is proper stuff. Majestic language, terrific excitement, adventure and danger, and with dragons who are far more than plot devices, being fully realised characters described at considerable length – I immediately downloaded the rest of the epic (400 page) poem for later reading. Notably, the knight's virtues and Christianity are now fully recognised as insufficient in themselves to save him : it is no longer enough to simply believe but also necessary to act with chivalry and courage, and even this might not be enough ! Christian symbolism is delivered at last with some subtlety, with the knight rejuvenated by sacred wells rather than simple prayer. It's a fantastic piece, far more engaging than the excerpt of Paradise Lost (which briefly features a dragon), and definitely one of those, "why didn't anyone tell me about this before ?" moments. 

6) Myth

And so we come to the final and most potent use of dragons in storytelling : as truly mythic creatures. Here they act as literary devices of the deepest kind of symbolism, something intensely mysterious. Often they act as metaphors with explanatory power, be that the origins of specific phenomena (often aspects of human nature) or the whole cosmos. The sincerity of the belief in the story, I think, may be of critical importance. Everyone knew that Spencer's tale was pure fiction, whereas for the true myths this was not necessarily so. Either way, myths are the greatest and most noble forms of storytelling.

One of the earliest examples of myth in the book is also the most badly-told. A "South Asian" myth tells of the storm god Indra slaying the dragon Vrta, "a monstrous manifestation of drought who held the waters of the world captive in a mountain". When Indra killed the dragon, the waters are released and become the rivers. It's told in epic imagery but in short, disjointed and highly repetitive phrases, but what can you expect for ~1500 BC ?

A massively more sophisticated piece of literary storytelling is found in Pharsalia, a first century AD poem by Lucan. The extract here concerns Medusa, who though not a dragon herself, is here depicted as the Mother of Dragons. Now I will here mention again that the evolving Medusa myth is a fascinating example of a benevolent guardian figure transmuting into an evil sorceress, but for all the damning effects of the patriarchy, the evil version is still a damn good story. And Lucan tells it well, claiming that it was Medusa who turned Atlas to stone and giants into mountains. This makes her massively more dangerous than a snake-headed lady, with her gaze being a weapon of unstoppable force. As Perseus flies back with her severed head, it releases "the poison of Medusa's dripping gore", which gives birth to a whole clutch of monsters, dragons included. 

A much later Dark Age retelling of the old pagan myths makes similarly dramatic claims, with the the River Styx itself being purported not to be a river at all, but a dragon : "the largest serpent in the entire world, so huge that it wraps its black coils nine times around Tartarus through the dark fen of wailing souls in such a way as to invoke tears." In the Bible, Leviathan and the dragon of Revalations are described in even more demonic terms : "He will consider the deep as though it grows old. There is no power upon the earth compared to him, who was made to fear no-one. He will see everything that is high. He is the king over all the children of pride."

Swords are no more use against such creatures : they are literal embodiments of the forces of nature and the soul. In some cases they almost seem to be sin incarnate. One late Roman story describes a dragon as consuming the corpse of an adulterous sinner to torture their soul in the afterlife, providing a physical and graphical connection with hell itself. 

In many medieval tales dragons are comet-like portents of doom and change, no mere large scaly beasts but truly monstrous, some aspect of them which is fundamentally, unfathomably different from material, observable reality. An 11th century monk recounted the story of a Pannonian dragon which was a creature of air and darkness, the stuff of which storms are made, killing widely with its cold until blown away in the clouds by God. Geoffrey of Monmouth relates dragons to the truly cosmic, describing shapeshifting "incubus demons" that live between the Earth and the Moon, purporting one of those to be the father of Merlin. Merlin, of course, uncovers the reason that Vortigen's castle is falling down is because of the dragons underneath it, though Geoffrey is obviously quite wrong to claim that the red dragon (i.e. the Welsh) will ultimately be defeated by the white (the English). Though in fairness he does at least depict this as a tragic outcome. 

Merlin's dragons seem neutral towards mankind, and while most European dragons are hostile, a few are benevolent. Edward Topsell, who we previously saw relating some examples of both commendable critical thinking and fanciful nonsense, gives a tale of a saint who was crucified and his body protected thereafter by a dragon. He goes even further, noting that some people (though not himself) claim that dragons actually originate from the bone marrow of noblemen. Mother of dragons indeed !

Conclusions

I find the end of the Penguin Book a bit depressing. Dragons were for millennia a vital literary force, potent, ancient and dread. Yet to make them acceptable to modern audiences they became the stuff only of children's stories, and the examples given in the book are just... bad writing. I'm being a little unfair. I don't say I wouldn't have enjoyed them myself as a kid (I liked very much the Dragon in Class 4 books when I was very young), but they are definitely only enjoyable for children*.

* The Norse Myths book, however, makes it clear that mythical-fantasy tales for grown-ups were always a thing, though perhaps there was a period when inventing new material was frowned upon. Retellings were fine, but making up new dragons, not so much.

Of course dragons were sometimes comic and parodied throughout history. Mercifully, any bias in including dragons in modern serious literature appears to have diminished, and if the literatii might still turn up their noses, it's clear that the plethora of science fiction and fantasy writing means that this other-worldly writing still speaks to a wide audience.

The range of uses to which the dragon has been put in literature is enormous. They've been surreal, comic, cautionary stories about sticking to the path, moral tales about what will happen if you leave the abbey, demons who torture your soul by consuming your body, the source of storms, creatures of the deep, beasts easily killed by a sufficiently sharp sword, and dark monsters born of hell. 

One of the fascinating aspects of these tales to me is how literally people believed in them. Some traveller's tales read like obvious fiction today, but were reported for centuries as being actual truth. And myths embody this most fully : did people really in believe Leviathan in the deeps as a physical creature, or was it always understood to be a metaphor ? Did they actually think of dragons causing wind and storms ? Were these sorts of explanations and interpretations viewed as literal truth or known generally to be placeholders, perhaps reflecting human tendencies to see patterns ? Or in other words, did these stories actually help us distinguish fantasy from reality, as Tolkien thought, or did they only muddy the waters ?

There is surely no one answer to this. All are valid in different circumstances. Even the word "myth" itself has (at least !) a dual meaning, sometimes being a thing that's in need of disproving and sometimes something actively intended "only" as a story. Like dragons themselves, the nature of human belief just isn't so easy to pin down, but remains, nonetheless, an endless source of fascination.