penguin classics
THE PENGUIN BOOK OF DRAGONS
scott g. bruce is a professor of history at Fordham University. He is the editor of The Penguin Book of the Undead and The Penguin Book of Hell, and the author of three books about the abbey of Cluny: Silence and Sign Language in Medieval Monasticism: The Cluniac Tradition, c. 900–1200 (2007); Cluny and the Muslims of La Garde-Freinet: Hagiography and the Problem of Islam in Medieval Europe (2015); and, with Christopher A. Jones, The Relatio metrica de duobus ducibus: A Twelfth-Century Cluniac Poem on Prayer for the Dead (2016). He has lectured throughout the United States, Canada, and Europe and has held visiting research appointments at the Technische Universität Dresden, in Germany; the Universiteit Gent, in Belgium; and Emmanuel College, University of Cambridge, in the United Kingdom. He worked his way through college as a grave digger.
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Introduction, notes, and selection copyright © 2021 Scott G. Bruce
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library of congress cataloging-in-publication data
Names: Bruce, Scott G. (Scott Gordon), 1967– editor.
Title: The Penguin book of dragons / edited by Scott G. Bruce.
Description: [New York, New York] : Penguin Books, [2021] | Includes bibliographical references and index.
Identifiers: LCCN 2021012200 (print) | LCCN 2021012201 (ebook) | ISBN 9780143135043 (paperback) | ISBN 9780525506690 (ebook)
Subjects: LCSH: Dragons—Folklore. | Dragons—Fiction. | Dragons in literature.
Classification: LCC GR830.D7 P454 2021 (print) | LCC GR830.D7 (ebook) |
DDC 398.24/54—dc23
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2021012200
LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2021012201
Adapted for ebook by Estelle Malmed
Cover illustration: Anato Finnstark
pid_prh_5.8.0_c0_r0
For Gary Gygax (1938–2008),
emperor of the imagination
A dragon is no idle fancy. Whatever may be his origins, in fact or invention, the dragon in legend is a potent creation of men’s imagination, richer in significance than his barrow is in gold.
—J. R. R. Tolkien
People who deny the existence of dragons are often eaten by dragons. From within.
—Ursula K. Le Guin
Contents
Introduction by SCOTT G. BRUCE
Suggestions for Further Reading
Acknowledgments
THE PENGUIN BOOK OF DRAGONS
ANCIENT ENEMIES: MONSTROUS SNAKES IN THE GRECO-ROMAN WORLD
The Hydra of Lerna: From Apollodorus’s The Library
Medusa, Mother of Monsters: From Lucan’s Pharsalia
Cadmus and the Dragon of Ares: From Ovid’s Metamorphoses
The Death of Laocoön: From Virgil’s Aeneid
The Dragon of Bagrada River: From Silius Italicus’s Punica
Dragons Against Elephants: From Pliny the Elder’s Natural History
SATANIC SERPENTS: DRAGONS AND SAINTS IN EARLY CHRISTIANITY
Biblical Beasts: From the Hebrew Scriptures and the New Testament
The Guardian of Heaven’s Ladder: From the Martyrdom of Perpetua and Felicity
Descendants of Darkness: From the Acts of Philip
The Dragon Became Her Tomb: From Venantius Fortunatus’s Life of Marcellus
Coiled Couriers of the Damned: From the Dialogues of Pope Gregory the Great
The Monster of the River Ness: From Adomnán of Iona’s Life of St. Columba
GUARDIANS OF THE HOARD: THE WYRMS OF NORTHERN LITERATURE
The Terror of Nations: From the Beowulf Poem
Sigurd, the Slayer of Fáfnir: From Völsunga saga
Winged Dragons of the North: From the Saga of Ketil Trout and the Saga of Þiðrekr of Bern
BOOKS OF MONSTERS: DRAGON LORE IN MEDIEVAL EUROPE
A Treasury of Ancient Dragon Lore: From Isidore of Seville’s Etymologies
Dark Age Creature Catalogues: From the Wonders of the East and the Book of Monsters
You Crushed Their Heads upon the Waters: From Hrabanus Maurus’s About Everything
Remembering a Pannonian Dragon: From Arnold of St. Emmeram’s Concerning the Miracles of St. Emmeram
God’s Fiery Vengeance: From Herman of Tournai’s Concerning the Miracles of Blessed Mary of Laon
Bone Fires and Dragon Sperm: From John Beleth’s Summa on Ecclesiastical Offices
The Prophecies of Merlin: From Geoffrey of Monmouth’s The History of the Kings of Britain
The Devil Is the Largest Serpent: From the Medieval Bestiary Tradition
Hunting Monsters in Kara-Jang: From Marco Polo’s The Travels of Marco Polo
DRACONIC DEMONS AND OGRES: DRAGONS IN BYZANTIUM
A Theologian Contemplates the Nature of Dragons: From Pseudo-John of Damascus’s On Dragons
Why Dragons Fear Lightning: From Michael Psellos’s On Meteorological Matters
A Demon in Disguise: From the Martyrdom of Saint Marina
The Treasury Dragon of Constantinople: From the Life and Martyrdom of Saint Hypatios of Gangra
The Terror of Trebizond: From the Life of Saint Eugenios
The Ogre-Dragon’s Pitiless Heart: From the Romance of Kallimachos and Chrysorrhoe
DRAGONS AND THEIR SLAYERS IN THE LATER MIDDLE AGES
The Dragon and the Lion: From Chrétien de Troyes’s Yvain, The Knight with the Lion
A Dragon with the Devil Inside: From The Captives
Four Saintly Dragon-Slayers: From Jacobus de Voragine’s Golden Legend
ANTICHRIST ASCENDANT: DRAGONS IN EARLY MODERN LITERATURE
The Dragons of Fairyland: From Edmund Spenser’s The Faerie Queene
A Farting Dragon Burlesque: “The Dragon of Wantley”
The Great Serpent Returns: From John Milton’s Paradise Lost
GODS AND MONSTERS: DRAGONS OF THE EAST
The Dragon of Drought: From the Rig Veda
A Black Wind from the Sea: From Al-Masudi’s Meadows of Gold and Mines of Gems
No One Ever Escapes My Claws: From Shahnameh: The Book of Kings by Abolqasem Ferdowsi
The Eight-Headed Serpent of Koshi: From Ō No Yasumaro’s Records of Ancient Matters
Chief of the Scaly Creatures: From Li Shizhen’s Collected Interpretations
My Lord Bag of Rice: A Japanese Folktale
The Fisherman and the Dragon Princess: A Japanese Folktale
HERE BE DRAGONS: MONSTROUS HABITATS IN EARLY MODERN THOUGHT
Strange, Yet Now a Neighbour to Us: From A Discourse Relating a Strange and Monstrous Serpent or Dragon
A World Full of Dragons: From Edward Topsell’s The History of Four-Footed Beasts and Serpents
Dwellers Below: From Athanasius Kircher’s Subterranean World
The Last American Dragons: Excerpts from Early American Newspapers
TER
ROR TAMED: DOMESTICATED DRAKES IN CHILDREN’S LITERATURE
A Lizardy Sort of Beast: Kenneth Grahame’s “The Reluctant Dragon”
Your Kindness Quite Undragons Me: Edith Nesbit’s “The Last of the Dragons”
Notes
Credits
Index
Introduction
We live in the golden age of dragons. The twentieth century witnessed the rapid ascent of these reptilian monsters in popular media and their momentum shows no sign of slowing down. In recent decades, readers have thrilled to the stories of heroes who sparred with weapons and words against dragons in the novels of J. R. R. Tolkien, Ursula K. Le Guin, George R. R. Martin, and J. K. Rowling. Through the magic of special effects, feature films like The 7th Voyage of Sinbad (1958) and Dragonslayer (1981) have allowed the viewer to experience wonder and awe at the might and majesty of these legendary creatures. Since the 1970s, tabletop role-playing games like Dungeons & Dragons (D&D) have introduced generations of aspiring adventurers to the perils and promises of doing battle with fire-breathing red dragons, poison-spewing black dragons, and lightning-shooting blue dragons. Building on the foundation of D&D, modern video games have gone one step further, allowing players to step into the role of fantasy heroes in imaginary worlds rendered in exquisite digital detail. Since the launch of World of Warcraft in 2004, millions of gamers have fought cooperatively against dragons, whether venturing into the dark lairs of Onyxia and Nefarian or launching their assault against the undead frost wyrm Sapphiron in the floating necropolis known as Naxxramas. In the past decade, dragons have featured prominently as “bosses” in many popular video game franchises, including Dark Souls, Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim, and Minecraft, the highest-selling video game in history. Most recently, the HBO series Game of Thrones captivated television audiences worldwide and made one of its lead characters Daenerys Targaryen, “Mother of Dragons,” a household name.
By any measure, dragons are currently the most popular mythological creature in the human imagination, but our infatuation with these creatures is deeply rooted in the distant past. From classical antiquity to the dawn of the modern age, stories about the menace and mystery of dragons have been told and retold in the heroic and historical literature of Europe and Asia. Ranging from ancient Greece and India to medieval Europe and China to the badlands of modern America, this anthology collects legends and lore about dragons and explores the meaning of these monsters in religious myths and popular folklore. While dragons are ubiquitous around the globe, their character and habitat differ considerably from place to place, from author to author. Modern storytellers have so successfully distilled the essence of the great wyrms of northern European literature sung in mead-halls a millennium ago that it is easy to lose perspective on the rich diversity of dragons in world literature. From the dark halls of the Lonely Mountain to the blue skies of Westeros to the hidden vaults of Gringotts Wizarding Bank, we expect dragons to be gigantic, reptilian predators with massive, batlike wings, who wreak havoc and ruin by breathing fire to defend the gold and other treasures they have hoarded in the deep places of the earth. But dragons are full of surprises. Indeed, many of the stories collected here defy these expectations about the appearance and character of these creatures, their habitat and diet, and their relationship to human beings. As we will see, every culture shaped its dragons according to its needs and fears.
Dragons have a long and storied history that dates back to the earliest human civilizations in the eastern Mediterranean and the Near East. In the ancient world, they took the form of enormous serpents ready to crush with their coils and kill with their venomous breath. They stood guard over sacred groves and springs, their watchfulness implicit in their name in ancient Greek (drakon), which derived from the verb derkomai, “to see.” Roman encyclopedists like Pliny classified dragons as exotic fauna inhabiting distant lands, a tradition that persisted among medieval authors. The currency of dragons did not diminish with the arrival of Christianity, which transformed these winged giants from living perils into agents of an older evil and amplified their importance on a cosmic scale by depicting them as harbingers of the last days. Northern pagan cultures of medieval Europe nurtured their own traditions about the meaning of these great reptiles, from the Midgard serpent Jörmungandr of Norse mythology to the fire-breathing dragon of Beowulf, the earliest extant poem in English literature.
Christian authors in premodern Europe were keenly interested in the natural history of dragons and ruminated at length on their diet and habitats. Borrowing from ancient authorities, medieval monks classified dragons as the largest of serpents, recounted their relationship with other animals (especially their enmity toward elephants), and recorded sightings of them as portents of evil tidings. Time and again, however, these natural explanations gave way to allegorical interpretations: dragons almost always represented the Devil in the medieval worldview. This interpretation was dominant in medieval Byzantium as well, but with some surprising differences. Like their western counterparts, medieval Greek authors were fascinated with dragons, but in contrast to the Latin tradition, they sometimes presented them as monstrous ogres rather than giant serpents. By the later Middle Ages, dragons featured prominently as the adversaries of Christian heroes in Arthurian legend, story cycles related to the crusades, and the lives of holy champions like Saint George and Saint Margaret.
Far from the world of medieval Europe, the literature of premodern Arabia, South Asia, China, and Japan presented an altogether different image of dragons. To be sure, eastern tales often depicted these creatures as fearful enemies to highlight the martial prowess of noble heroes, but in the Asian imagination dragons could also be vulnerable victims who recruited human allies to fight for them against even greater foes. In these stories, eastern dragons shared remarkable affinities with human beings by assuming the form of beautiful men and women and living in sumptuous dwellings with all the accoutrements of aristocratic life. Their attraction to humans could even lead to romantic relationships. Unlike the tales about their western cousins, legends about Asian dragons featured water rather than fire as a prominent motif. These eastern dragons controlled the flow of rivers, sometimes to the detriment of humankind; and they were often aquatic creatures themselves, who lived at the bottom of lakes and oceans. Moreover, as Chinese medical texts show, the body parts of dragons, particularly their bones, were highly prized for their curative properties, an aspect of dragon lore that held little interest for most European authors.
By the early modern period, dragons were on the wane in the western tradition. In literature, they retreated to the realm of allegory, like the serpentine adversaries in Edmund Spenser’s poem The Faerie Queene, which were metaphors for vices in opposition to the virtues of the knights who vanquished them. Drawing on the work of ancient and medieval authors, Renaissance polymaths treated dragons as living creatures, but they pushed their habitats to the unexplored places of the earth, like distant oceans or deep underground. By the late nineteenth century, the march of human progress had all but eroded the last refuges of the premodern dragon. It was at this moment, however, that a remarkable inversion occurred. In contrast to ancient and medieval literary traditions, for the first time European authors began to domesticate dragons in stories that depicted these creatures as friends to humankind rather than enemies, with children playing a leading role in these narratives.
Stories about dragons have endured in cultures around the globe for over two millennia, their appeal tenacious for several reasons. Rippling with power and snorting flames, dragons are the test against which we measure the limits of the heroes we venerate. Inhabiting the fringes of the world, first in distant countries and then in places deep below the earth, dragons mark the boundary between the known and the unknown. Providing a malleable template for mythmakers and storytellers, dragons persist in our imagination both as flesh-and-blood monsters and as powerful metaphors for sin and other destructive forces. By the dawn of modernity,
dragons were already in full retreat before the advance of human knowledge, but the domestication of these monsters in children’s literature gave them a new lease on life, ensuring their survival as friends and as foes for generations to come.
scott g. bruce
Suggestions for Further Reading
Arnold, Martin. The Dragon: Fear and Power. London: Reaktion Books, 2018.
Good Dragons Are Rare: An Inquiry into Literary Dragons East and West. Ed. Fanfan Chen and Thomas Honegger. Frankfurt: Peter Lang, 2009.
Honegger, Thomas. Introducing the Medieval Dragon. Cardiff: University of Wales Press, 2019.
Jones, David E. An Instinct for Dragons. New York and London: Routledge, 2002.
Lionarons, Joyce Tally. The Medieval Dragon: The Nature of the Beast in Germanic Literature. Enfield Lock, Middlesex: Hisarlik Press, 1998.
Ogden, Daniel. Drakōn: Dragon Myth and Serpent Cult in the Greek and Roman Worlds. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013.
Rauer, Christine. Beowulf and the Dragon: Parallels and Analogues. Rochester, NY: D. S. Brewer, 2000.
Acknowledgments
This book completes a trilogy of historical anthologies about the frontiers of the premodern imagination begun with The Penguin Book of the Undead (Penguin Classics, 2016) and continued with The Penguin Book of Hell (Penguin Classics, 2018). The scope and contents of each of these books developed in conversation with my editor John Siciliano, whose guidance and encouragement have been essential. I am also deeply indebted to numerous collaborators, colleagues, and students, who contributed to this book in meaningful ways. Professor Paul Acker (Saint Louis University) and Professor Anthony Kaldellis (Ohio State University) skillfully rendered the translations in chapters 3 and 5, respectively. Dr. Darius M. Klein kindly allowed me to adapt his translation of Athanasius Kircher’s discussion of dragons for inclusion in chapter 9. Three PhD candidates in the Department of History at Fordham University lent their linguistic expertise and enthusiasm as well: Benjamin Bertrand, Douglass Hamilton, and W. Tanner Smoot. I am grateful to Professor Carla Nappi (University of Pittsburgh) and Professor Timothy Brook (University of British Columbia) for their assistance with Asian dragons. Professor Nick Paul (Fordham University) directed me to Herman of Tournai’s dragon story in chapter 4, while Shannon Chakraborty recommended that I read The Book of Kings by Abolqasem Ferdowsi for chapter 8. I am also indebted to the undergraduate students who read and discussed many of these texts with me in History 3213 (Monsters, Magic, and the Undead: Stranger Things in Medieval Europe), which I taught at Fordham University in the fall semester of 2019. I completed this book with the support of a Faculty Fellowship from Fordham University, which relieved me from the burdens of teaching in the fall of 2020. Professor Christopher A. Jones (Ohio State University) and Dr. Julie Barrau (University of Cambridge) provided last-minute bibliographical assistance at a moment’s notice, as good friends do. My thanks to Benjamin Bertrand, Amanda Racine, and W. Tanner Smoot for checking the page proofs of the manuscript. I owe my greatest thanks, as always, to Anne, Mira, and Vivienne, who love stories about dragons just as much as I do.
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