Rambling On with History Explored: A beginner's guide to Dragons

By DAVID MYTON

Dear Subscribers: This is my regular Rambling On history post - not the usual referenced, research-essay style. Instead, I just ramble on: what I’ve been thinking about and/or reading in recent days.

What’s been on my mind lately is: Dragons.

A few days ago I inadvertently slipped down a rabbit hole that just happened to be home to fire-breathing monsters. It began like this:

I was browsing through my copy of The Anglo-Saxon Chronicles when my eye fell on the entry for 793CE. It read:

“In this year fierce, foreboding omens came over the land of Northumbria, and wretchedly terrified the people. There were excessive whirlwinds, lightning storms, and fiery dragons were seen flying in the sky …”

Wait a minute, I thought, did that say “fiery dragons were seen flying in the sky”? And indeed it did say that, continuing …

“… These signs were followed by great famine, and shortly after the ravaging heathen men destroyed God’s church at Lindisfarne through brutal robbery and slaughter …”

It surprised me because it was reported in such a matter-of-fact way, along with the fierce, foreboding omens, the whirlwinds, lightning, and ravaging heathen men committing brutal robbery and slaughter. Just another year in not-so-sunny England.

But according to Robert Lacey & Danny Danziger writing in The Year 1000. What life was like at the turn of the First Millennium (Abacus, 1999): “Weather was a subject of intense interest to the Anglo-Saxons … they reckoned they understood it well.”

They record that one 9th Century manuscript was dedicated exclusively to thunder and what it might mean …

“In May, thunder presages a hungry year … In July, thunder signifies crops turning out well but livestock perishing … If it thunders on a Sunday many monks and nuns will die … Of thunder on Wednesday, there is no doubt it presages the death of idle and scandalous prostitutes”.

“… Auguries have an eternal fascination, and for those who took them seriously it never seemed to matter if cold reality proved them wrong … It was an acknowledgment that they did not know all the answers …” (p140)

The countryside: where the magic lived on

As Lacey and Danziger write … “ The old gods still stalked the furrows of Anglo-Saxon England. The word pagan comes from pagus, Latin for ‘the countryside’ .. and it was there that the old magic lived on.”

In January when the ploughman went to the fields to cut his first furrow, “he might say this prayer as he knelt to scoop a shallow nest in the soil for a cake that his wife had baked”:

Earth, Earth, Earth! Oh Earth our Mother!

May the all wielder, Ever Lord grant thee

Acres a-waxing, upwards a-growing,

Pregnant with corn and plenteous in strength

(Lacey & Danziger pp140-141)

Anyway, where was I … So, how did the Chroniclers know about the dragons? Was there some kind of ancient dragon hotline on which citizens could report their sightings? Perhaps the Chronicler monks heard it from travelers who dropped into the monastery to tell their stories? Did they actually believe in dragons? Maybe they believed in dragons because … they’d actually seen one?

I don’t know. But it got me thinking about dragons. I will admit up front that I’m not a dragon person; dealing with humans is sufficient trial for me. But something stirred in the echoey darkness of my brain in the form of a question: Didn’t Beowulf fight a dragon at the end of that great old saga, and didn’t the dragon, er, kill him? Indeed it did …

“… But [Beowulf] was wounded unto death. The dragon’s venom boiled in his blood, and he knew well that his end was nigh. Faint and heart-weary he went and sat down, gazing on the rocky arches of the dragon’s lair, which giants had made. . . . Wiglaf came and washed the bloodstained king, who was weary after the conflict, and unloosed his helmet and took it off. Tenderly he ministered unto Beowulf in his last hour. Well knew the king that he was nigh unto death.” (From Teutonic Myth and Legend - Beowulf and the Dragon)

My quest led me to a man who knows a thing or two about dragons - and he’s not some quirky nutter with a thing for legendary serpentine-reptilian fire-breathing leviathans. No, indeed - he is Professor Ronald Hutton, a world-leading authority on ancient and medieval paganism and magic, and on “the global context of witchcraft beliefs”.

On top of all that, he is my favourite historian. And he gets bonus points for actually looking and talking like a fellow who knows about magic and all things weird.

Check out this brilliant YouTube lecture on Dragons: A History. Or you can read the lecture here (pdf).

But if you don’t have the time for that, I’ll give you a taster with his introduction to the topic:

Dragons: a beginner’s guide …

Hutton says there are two main kinds of European dragon in popular folklore and medieval literature. One is the firedrake, a reptile with wings, a horned or crested head, a spined tail and fiery breath - the classic dragon of medieval heraldry, chronicles, and romances, also of J. R. R. Tolkien, C. S. Lewis, and J. K. Rowling.

“… The other is the worm or colddrake, a huge snake which spits venom or breathes poisonous gas and can sometimes crush with its coils. There are however many other kinds of dragon that appear in European folklore, literature, and heraldry. [One is] the basilisk or cockatrice. There is a thoroughly misleading description of one in Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets, where it takes the form of a gigantic serpent. The classic medieval basilisk was a winged snake only a few feet long. It was formed from an egg hatched by a toad. What J. K. Rowling got absolutely right was its most famous characteristic: that it kills with its stare.

England has the largest number of dragon legends for a country its size anywhere in the world: sixty-eight in all. They are found all over the country, although some areas are richer than others: Somerset comes top, with eleven. The chief narrative function of English dragons is to get killed, and killing them is a very tough, one-off, activity. English dragonslayers include five saints, above all the national one, St George. He was possibly a real person, a Roman soldier martyred for his Christian faith. He is first recorded in the sixth century. He first got mixed up with a dragon, however, six hundred years later, during the Crusades. This is because the Crusaders captured Joppa, in Palestine, which was both a cult centre of George and the ancient setting for the story of Perseus and Andromeda. Perseus rescued Andromeda from a sea monster, and his legend got built into George’s, with the sea beast turned into the more familiar European dragon. The Crusaders then brought this story home.

Dragonslayers also include 24 knights, but 26 commoners, mostly from artisan trades that require skill and independence. Ingenuity was needed to kill a dragon, because its hide could not be pierced by conventional weapons. Methods of dispatching them therefore consisted of getting inside the animal, or stabbing it through the mouth, or poisoning it, or putting on spiked armour on which it would dash and impale itself. This last method was actually one which hedgehogs use against adders, by rolling into spiny balls.

Dragonkilling legends served two purposes: a monster slaying, which is one of the most primeval kinds of human story, and a heroic howdunnit, in which we find out how good triumphs over a much more powerful evil. It is also clear that there was a particular boom period in the creation of English dragon legends: between 1350 and 1500, when they got attached to a range of families and communities, were carved in churches and appeared in games and processions. This was because it was the time at which St George was adopted as the national saint, and his legend spread across the country. It is he who is responsible for the exceptional popularity of dragon-slaying in English folklore.

Behind all these traditions lay much older precursors. Ancient Greek heroes regularly killed giant serpents, which later translators called dragons. Greeks called them pythons, a word which has remained used for a class of real snakes. The Romans had a mythical class of winged snake, which they called ‘draco’, the basis for the English word dragon. There is also a distinctively Norse version of the dragon: the ‘lindworm’, which is a giant snake like the English or Germanic worm. The Norse kind, however, takes to water when grown, to become the sea serpent or lake monster. The greatest in legend is the Midgard serpent, which encircles the whole earth. Unlike dragons in general, lindworms continue to be sighted right up to the present. In 1894, for example, two of them were reported to have blocked the entrance to the Norwegian fishing village of Ervinken, until a whaling ship arrived to fight them, and they disappeared …

Anyway, just a day or two ago I knew next to nothing about dragons. I didn’t even know that anyone took them seriously enough to want to find out more about them.

I know better now!