Why a Dragon?

28 Wednesday May 2025

Tags

Beowulf, Bilbo, bilbo-burglar, Dragons, Dwarves, Fafnir, Fantasy, Hippogriff, Hoard, Marx Brothers, quest, Sigurd, Smaug, The Hobbit, The Reluctant Dragon, Thorin, Tolkien

As always, dear readers, welcome.

I think that I’ve always been a fan of the Marx brothers.

Their lack of respect for pompous men in silk hats,

opera-goers who are only interested because it gives them social status,

and self-important artists,

among many others, and their creative methods of deflating such people,

have always cheered me immensely.

There is another side to their comedy, however, which means just as much to me: their endless play with words, delivered always deadpan and with perfect timing—not to mention absolute absurdist nonsequiturism.

Take, for example, this fragment from The Cocoanuts, their first surviving film, from 1929. It’s set during the 1920s Florida land boom (read about that here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Florida_land_boom_of_the_1920s ) and, in this scene, “Mr. Hammer”, Groucho, is explaining the layout of a real estate plot to “Chico”, Chico,

saying, at one point:

“Groucho: Now, here is a little peninsula, and, eh, here is a viaduct leading over to the mainland.

Chico: Why a duck?

Groucho: I’m all right, how are you? I say, here is a little peninsula, and here is a viaduct leading over to the mainland.

Chico: All right, why a duck?

Groucho: I’m not playing ‘Ask Me Another’, I say that’s a viaduct.

[Ask Me Another was originally an early 1927 equivalent of “Trivia”. You can read about it here: https://www.thefedoralounge.com/threads/how-do-you-play-ask-me-another.62135/ and here’s a copy—

Chico: All right! It’s what…why a duck? Why no a chicken?

Groucho: I don’t know why no a chicken—I’m a stranger here myself. All I know is that it’s a viaduct. You try to cross over there a chicken and you’ll find out why a duck.”

(For the entire script see: https://www.marx-brothers.org/marxology/cocoanuts-script.htm )

By the same kind of logic which produced this, I found myself thinking about The Hobbit: and hence the title of this posting: why a dragon?

The plot of The Hobbit is, basically, a quest: a journey with a goal.

Quests are a familiar form of adventure story and still common—just think about Indiana Jones, with his Lost Ark

and his Holy Grail, for example.

Indiana has to travel to Tibet and Egypt and to an unnamed island in the Mediterranean for the Ark and to Germany and Turkey for the Grail.

Although Thorin doesn’t mention the travel in his “mission statement”, much of the story will be about travel, from the Shire to the Lonely Mountain and back again,

to reach the dwarves’ goal, as stated in the first chapter by Thorin:

“But we have never forgotten our stolen treasure. And even now, when I will allow we have a good bit laid by and are not so badly off…we still mean to get it back, and to bring our curses home to Smaug—if we can.” (The Hobbit, Chapter 1, “An Unexpected Party”)

The goal, then, is in two parts:

1. to regain the treasure taken from the dwarves by the dragon

2. to take revenge upon said dragon

Because they are aware that the dragon can be lying on top of the treasure (“Probably”, says Thorin, “for that is the dragons’ way, he has piled it all up in a great heap far inside, and sleeps on it for a bed.”), it’s clear that 1 and 2 have to be dealt with as a sequence: no getting the treasure without getting rid of the dragon.

Which brings us back to my title. Indiana Jones commonly has Nazis (and eventually Communists and even Neo-Nazis) as opponents,

these being the characters who compete for his goal and stand in the way of his achieving his quest.

Tolkien was a medievalist, writing a sort of fairy tale, so what would be his equivalent and why?

We know that Tolkien had been interested in dragons since far childhood—at least the age of 6, when he tried to write a poem about a “green, great dragon” (to the Houghton Mifflin Company [summer, 1955?], Letters, 321—JRRT tells a somewhat different version of this to W.H. Auden in a letter of 7 June, 1955, Letters, 313) and he confesses to an early love for them in his lecture “On Fairy-Stories” where he mentions Fafnir and Sigurd, suggesting that he may have had read to him or had read for himself from Andrew Lang’s The Red Fairy Book, 1890, the last chapter of which is “The Story of Sigurd”, and since, elsewhere, he mentions “Soria Moria Castle”, which is the third story in the same book.

(Your copy is here: https://archive.org/details/redfairybook00langiala/redfairybook00langiala/ )

Fafnir, the dragon in the Sigurd story, is described as, having killed his own father:

“he went and wallowed on the gold…and no man dared go near it.” (“The Story of Sigurd”, 360)

The next major dragon story with which Tolkien was probably involved saw the same draconic behavior, as, in Beowulf, we’re told that the unnamed dragon, having discovered a hoard in a tumulus:

“This hoarded loveliness did the old despoiler wandering

in the gloom find standing unprotected, even he who filled

with fire seeks out mounds (of burial), the naked dragon of

1915

fell heart that flies wrapped about in flame: him do earth’s

dwellers greatly dread. Treasure in the ground it is ever his

wont to seize, and there wise with many years he guards the

heathen gold – no whit doth it profit him.”

(from JRRT’s draft translation of 1920-26 in Christopher Tolkien’s 2014 publication)

Traditionally, then, dragons and gold go together—and, as JRRT admitted in a letter to the Editor of the Observer, “Beowulf is among my most valued sources” (letter to the Editor of the Observer, printed in the Observer, 28 February, 1938, Letters, 41)

There is a very interesting twist in Tolkien’s version of the story, however.

By lying in a pit below the dragon, Sigurd slays Fafnir

and Beowulf, along with his companion (and successor), Wiglaf, make an end of the nameless dragon,

Beowulf fighting against a dragon. Scene from the early medieval epic poem “Beowulf”. It is one of the most important works of Old English literature and was probably created after the year 700 and plays in the time before 600 AD in Scandinavia. Chromolithograph after drawing by Walter Zweigle (German painter, 1859 – 1904), published in 1896.

(This is a pretty silly version, with costumes and armor which look like they came from the original production of Der Ring des Nibelungen, but finding a depiction of the two attacking the dragon has seemed surprisingly difficult.)

but, in The Hobbit, although we have the traditional dragon on the traditional hoard, we don’t have the traditional dragon-slayer, a fact underlined by Thorin’s “to bring our curses home to Smaug, if we can”.

This has always struck me as the potential weak point in the quest: to travel hundreds of miles through dangerous territory filled with trolls, goblins, wolves, hostile elves, and even giant spiders, to come to a mountain inhabited by a fearsome dragon—but to have no plan in mind as to how to deal with it, especially when the other half of the plan—to get back the dwarvish treasure—requires somehow eliminating the current guardian of that treasure.

(JRRT)

Faced with that possible weak point, so much now may appear to have a certain haphazard happenstance about it, the kind of attempted slight-of-hand which indicates an author who hasn’t the skill to create a narrative in which every element seems to fall naturally into place, and this might make us question the finding of the Ring, the convenient rescue at Lake-town, even the ray of sun which indicates the opening to the back door of the Lonely Mountain (suppose it had been overcast).

But this is where the burglar comes in—and the story of Sigurd once more.

It seems that Bilbo was not Gandalf’s first choice for the quest when he came to visit him.

(the Hildebrandts)

Thorin has just mentioned the inconvenient dragon and the awkwardness of his sudden appearance, to which Gandalf replies:

“That would be no good…not without a mighty Warrior, even a Hero. I tried to find one; but warriors are busy fighting one another in distant lands, and in this neighbourhood heroes are scarce, or simply not to be found.”

And he continues:

“That is why I settled on burglary—especially when I remembered the existence of a Side-door. And here is our little Bilbo Baggins, the burglar, the chosen and selected burglar.”

Bilbo’s first attempt at burglary: picking a troll’s pocket,

(JRRT)

almost ends in disaster, but, with the eventual aid of the Ring, he even manages, first, to steal from Smaug, in a direct echo of Beowulf,

(artist? So far, I haven’t seen one credited.)

and then to confront Smaug in his lair and escape, at worst, with only a singeing.

(JRRT)

So far, it’s been burglary, with some help from the Ring, but then the Sigurd story comes in.

You’ll remember that, although the version in The Red Fairy Book doesn’t say so, it was clear that the vulnerable part of the dragon Fafnir was its underside, which is why Sigurd hid in a pit so that, when the dragon crawled over it, Sigurd could stab him in that unprotected underbelly.

Using his burglarious skills, as well as a fluent tongue, Bilbo actually persuades Smaug unknowingly to expose his own vulnerability:

“ ‘I have always understood…that dragons were softer underneath, especially in the region of the—er—chest; but doubtless one so fortified has thought of that.’

The dragon stopped short in his boasting. ‘Your information is antiquated,’ he snapped. ‘I am armoured above and below with iron scales and hard gems. No blade can pierce me.’”

And the smooth-tongued burglar actually flatters Smaug into rolling over, exposing “…a large patch in the hollow of his left breast as bare as a snail out of its shell”.

What to do with this potentially deadly piece of information requires the reverse of the Sigurd story.

In that story, Sigurd, having killed Fafnir, has been asked by his mentor, Regin, to roast the dragon’s heart and serve it to him. In the process, Sigurd burns a finger, puts it in his mouth, and suddenly understands that all of the birds above him are talking about him and telling him to beware of Regin.

In The Hobbit, the opposite happens: the thrush who had tapped the snail

(Alan Lee)

and therefore set off the chain of events which revealed the back door to the Lonely Mountain to Bilbo and the dwarves, overhears Bilbo telling the dwarves about Smaug’s vulnerable spot, which he then conveys to Bard the Archer, who is then the dragon-slayer

(Michael Hague—one of my favorite Hobbit illustrators)

needed to dispose of the one-time guardian of the hoard.

And so the dragon is disposed of—but he has one more use in the story: as a negative model.

Although Thorin has led the quest to retrieve the dwarves’ treasure, it seems that there’s only one which he craves, the Arkenstone,

(Donato Giancola)

and it’s clear that, in its pursuit, he becomes much like the Smaug who once reacted almost hysterically when he sensed that something was missing from his hoard:

“Thieves! Fire! Murder!…His rage passes description—the sort of rage that is only seen when rich folk that have more than they can enjoy suddenly lose something that they have long had but have never before used or wanted.” (The Hobbit, Chapter 12, “Inside Information”)

Here’s his dwarvish parallel:

“ ‘For the Arkenstone of my father,’ he said, ‘is worth more than a river of gold in itself, and to me it is beyond price. That stone of all the treasure I name unto myself, and I will be avenged on anyone who finds it and withholds it.” (The Hobbit, Chapter 16, “A Thief in the Night”)

And, when he finds that Bilbo has taken it as a way to make peace between the dwarves, the elves, and the Lake-town men, Thorin almost does take revenge:

“ ‘You! You!’ cried Thorin, turning upon him and grasping him with both hands. ‘You miserable hobbit! You undersized—burglar!…By the beard of Durin! I wish I had Gandalf here! Curse him for his choice of you! May his beard wither! As for you I will throw you to the rocks!’ he cried and lifted Bilbo in his arms.” (The Hobbit, Chapter 17, “The Clouds Burst”)

So why a dragon?

First, to Tolkien the medievalist, gold and dragons go together: a quest for treasure needs a particularly powerful enemy and the dragon of Beowulf, who actually fatally wounds Beowulf,

who had previously defeated two terrible opponents in Grendel and his mother, provides a strong model.

Second, JRRT had, from childhood, a long-standing interest in dragons—he’ll return to them in his 1938/49 novella, “Farmer Giles of Ham”, where the practical farmer eventually not only tames the dragon, Chrysophylax (“Goldwatchman”, perhaps), but makes him disgorge much of his treasure—this time by doing nothing more than outfacing him and threatening him with his sword, “Tailbiter”.

It’s interesting, by the way, that, although, in “The Story of Sigurd”, the dragon talks, he has only one short speech: a curse on anyone who touches his gold, whereas, in perhaps the greatest draconic influence upon Tolkien, Beowulf, another wyrm who enjoys lying on a hoard, is mute.

Smaug, in The Hobbit, however, is not only positively talky, but, like Saruman in The Lord of the Rings, his voice and manner have their own dangerously persuasive power, at one point in his conversation with Bilbo even beginning to seed Bilbo’s mind with doubts about the dwarves Bilbo accompanies (The Hobbit, Chapter 12, “Inside Information”).

Chrysophylax, in “Farmer Giles of Ham” is even more talkative than Smaug, and I wonder about the model for these chatty beasts. Tolkien was a great fan of Kenneth Grahame (1859-1932) and of his well-known children’s book, The Wind in the Willows (1908),

mentioning in a letter to Christopher Tolkien that Elspeth Grahame, Grahame’s widow, is publishing a book with other stories about the main characters of The Wind in the Willows, a book which JRRT is very eager to obtain (letter to Christopher Tolkien, 31 July, 1944, Letters, 128). In 1898, Grahame published a collection of stories, Dream Days,

which included “The Reluctant Dragon”, in which we see another very loquacious beast,

(from the original book, illustrated by Maxfield Parrish)

(I couldn’t resist including E.H. Shepard’s 1938 version)

but rather more like the ultimately rather timid dragon of “Farmer Giles” than the grim and mute creature of Beowulf or the more-than-a-little-pleased-with-himself Smaug, but, in his garrulousness, could he have been a model for Smaug? (You can make your own comparison with: https://www.gutenberg.org/files/35187/35187-h/35187-h.htm )

To this we add perhaps not a model, but a parallel: Thorin as becoming a kind of dwarvish dragon in his obsession with the Arkenstone. Fafnir dies with a curse, however, the Beowulf beast dies killing Beowulf, and Smaug dies destroying Lake-town,

but, in his own last moments, Thorin escapes such a poisonous model, saying to Bilbo:

“Farewell, good thief…I go now to the halls of waiting to sit beside my fathers, until the world is renewed. Since I leave now all gold and silver, and go where it is of little worth, I wish to part in friendship from you, and I would take back my words and deeds at the Gate.” (The Hobbit, Chapter 18, “The Return Journey”)

(Darrell Sweet—you can read a little about him here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Darrell_K._Sweet )

And so “Why a dragon?”—and not “Why No a Hippogriff?”

(artist? so far, I haven’t found one–a pity, too, as it’s quite a splendid illustration and I’ll love to mention the author!)

Thanks, as ever, for reading.

Stay well,

Remember not to laugh at live dragons,

And remember, as well, that there’s

MTCIDC

Middle-under-earth

04 Wednesday Apr 2018

Posted by Ollamh in Artists and Illustrators, Heroes, J.R.R. Tolkien, Literary History, Narrative Methods

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Tags

Alan Lee, Andrew Lang, Barrow-downs, Beowulf, cyclops, Dragons, George Macdonald, Goblin Feet, Goblins, Great War, Grendel, Grendel's Mother, John Howe, monsters, Polyphemus, Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, Smaug, Storia Moria Castle, Tales of Troy and Greece, The Hobbit, The Lord of the Rings, The Princess and the Goblin, The Red Book of Animal Stories, The Red Fairy Book, Tolkien, trenches, tumulus

As always, dear readers, welcome!

One of us is currently teaching The Hobbit and, is always seems to be the case when we are teaching an old friend, we are struck by something new. In this case, it’s the idea of “what lurks beneath” and where it might come from.

What occurred to us now was that, virtually every time there is trouble for Bilbo and the dwarves, it is strongly linked with caves and hollowed-out places: trolls who came out of a cave (“Roast Mutton”), goblins who live in caves (“Over Hill and Under Hill”), Gollum (“Riddles in the Dark”), hostile elves (“Flies and Spiders” and “Barrels Out of Bond”), and, of course, Smaug (“On the Doorstep”, “Inside Information”, and “Not At Home”). Only the wargs, the overgrown spiders, and the men of Lake-town in the Battle of the Five Armies have above-ground origins, as, after all, the other forces—goblins, elves, and even Iron Hills dwarves (we assume), have subterranean dwellings.

We knew that JRRT thought to become a classicist early in his academic career and we can imagine right away that one influence upon him for this underground menace would have been Polyphemus the Cyclops, who, after all, lives in a cave.

Before he read that part of Odysseus’ story in Greek, he might have seen it in Andrew Lang’s 1907 Tales of Troy and Greece—

Tolkien tells us that, as a child, he had read other Lang works and a story in one, The Red Fairy Book (1890), might even have influenced some Middle-earth geography, from “Storia Moria Castle”.

Another childhood favorite (although he appears to have changed his mind later in life) were the fantasy novels of George Macdonald

and his The Princess and the Goblin (1872),

as its title suggests, is full of goblins and their underground world. These goblins are powerful, but have one fatal flaw—tender feet—which JRRT said that he never believed (see Letters, 178)—although Tolkien’s first published poem was entitled “Goblin Feet” (Oxford Poetry 1915).

Beyond possible childhood reading, there is his career focus, which includes two other potential underground influences.

First, there is Beowulf. Grendel, the monster in this poem,

lives in a cave at the bottom of a pool with his mother and, in the second part of his monster-slaying, Beowulf has to dive into that pool to deal with her.

This illustration comes from another Andrew Lang book, The Red Book of Animal Stories (1899).

(The picture of Grendel is by Brian Froud. We found it on the website of K.T.Katzmann, I Write Monsters. Here’s a LINK.)

Then, of course, there’s that dragon, against whom Beowulf fights and dies—and which is the direct ancestor of another famous and familiar dragon…

We are told that it lives in an abandoned tumulus—that is, an ancient grave mound, like this one.

(This is, in fact, a famous Neolithic burial at Gavrinis, in Brittany.)

JRRT worked in Middle English, as well as Old English, and here we find one more possible source in his own edition (with E.V. Gordon) of the 14^th-century poem Sir Gawain and the Green Knight.

The Green Knight who challenges King Arthur’s court to a mutual head-chopping contest, is said, in the fourth part of the poem, to inhabit a “green chapel” and to appear out of a hole when Sir Gawain, who has accepted the challenge and cut off the Green Knight’s head, makes his appearance there to fulfill his half of the contest.

This chapel has sounded like a tumulus to generations of scholars and here’s John Howe’s 2003 illustration, complete with chapel as tumulus (not to mention a very large green man).

Tumuli also make their appearance, of course, in The Lord of the Rings, when Frodo and his party go astray on the Barrow Downs.

We can’t finish this posting without at least suggesting one more source, something even more personal than JRRT’s scholarly work: his experiences in the Great War.

By the time Tolkien entered the service in France, the Western Front was, basically, a 500-mile trench, from Switzerland to the North Sea.

Much of the entrenching was simply deep, reinforced ditching.

But some—particularly on the German side—could be elaborate, even built with stone or concrete, and set far enough into the ground as to be almost impervious to bombardment.

And we imagine that, with all of that earlier literary work in his mind, JRRT might have faced such defenses wondering whether what was inside them would be Germans

or something much worse.

And did this haunt his later writing as much as the Great War haunted the minds of soldiers all over the world?

Thanks, as ever, for reading!

MTCIDC

“Dragons, Other”

21 Wednesday Mar 2018

Posted by Ollamh in Artists and Illustrators, Fairy Tales and Myths, Heroes, J.R.R. Tolkien, Literary History, Maps

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Arthur Rackham, Beowulf, C.S. Lewis, Chrysophylax, Custard the Dragon, Dragons, Dream Days, Esgaroth, Farmer Giles of Ham, Jabberwock, Jabberwock-slayer, Kenneth Grahame, Lewis Carroll, Lonely Mountain, Luttrell Psalter, map, Middle-earth, Narnia, Ogden Nash, Pauline Baynes, Rumer Godden, Smaug, St George, The Chronicles of Narnia, The Dragon of Og, The Hobbit, The Lion The Witch and the Wardrobe, The Lord of the Rings, The Reluctant Dragon, Through the Looking-Glass, Tolkien, Walt Disney

As always, readers, welcome.

One of us is currently teaching a class where our present focus is upon The Hobbit.

At the center of the book is the Lonely Mountain and at the center of that is Smaug.

This got us to thinking about other dragons in our experience, and some of those are not quite of the same breed as the hoard-sitter faced by Bilbo and the dwarves. That dragon is closely related to the Beowulf variety

which, unlike Smaug, has neither a name nor (it seems) human speech, but it certainly has the same suspicious streak: when an escaped slave steals a cup from its hoard, it’s almost immediately aware that it’s missing and suspects a human.

And they are both vengeful. As Smaug devastates Esgaroth, even if he dies for it,

so Beowulf’s dragon scorches the countryside in revenge for the theft.

But what about those other dragons?

First, we thought of Kenneth Grahame’s Dream Days (1898),

a collection of short stories, the next-to-last of which is “The Reluctant Dragon”.

This is the story of a beast the very opposite of Smaug—no hoard, no suspicion, no flaming violence, and, in fact, a poetry lover. This story was then converted into a Disney cartoon of 1941.

Needless to say, although the core of the plot is the same, what makes the Grahame distinctive is the language. All of the major characters: the dragon, the little boy who finds him, and St. George, who is brought in as a dragon-slayer, are thoughtful and articulate late Victorians who would rather discuss literature than do battle—a far cry not only from Beowulf’s encounter, but also from every other earlier depiction we could think of.

The sword in this last one looks like it actually belongs in the hands of the jabberwock-slayer

in Lewis Carroll’s Through the Looking-Glass (1872).

Here’s a LINK to Dream Days so that you can enjoy the story for yourselves.

Nearly sixty years later, the comic verse writer, Ogden Nash,

produced not a literary dragon, but a timid one in “Custard the Dragon” (1959).

This is a poem in 15 stanzas and is a story about Belinda and her pets, including a dragon, who is taunted by the other pets as being less than brave. To underline this, the last line in a number of stanzas is a variation upon the first version of the line, “But Custard cried for a nice safe cage”. (Here’s a LINK to the poem.)

The surprise is that, when a pirate climbs in through the window (this happens all the time here—possibly they escape from dreams?), Custard promptly eats him—and the cries of “Coward!” disappear immediately.

In contrast to the unnamed dragon in “The Reluctant Dragon” and in “Custard the Dragon”, our next dragon is a talker—like Smaug, but also like Smaug, potentially malevolent. This is Chrysophylax in JRRT’s 1937/1949 Farmer Giles of Ham. (JRRT is having a quiet joke here—“Chrysophylax” is Ancient Greek for “Goldguard”.)

The artwork is by Pauline Baynes (1922-2008).

If, like us, you’ve loved the Narnia books, then you know her as their original illustrator.

She was also the artist for an early Middle-earth map.

Her 2008 obituary in The Daily Telegraph tells of how they came to work together:

“In 1948 Tolkien was visiting his publishers, George Allen & Unwin, to discuss some disappointing artwork that they had commissioned for his novella Farmer Giles of Ham, when he spotted, lying on a desk, some witty reinterpretations of medieval marginalia from the Luttrell Psalter that greatly appealed to him. These, it turned out, had been sent to the publishers “on spec”by the then unknown Pauline Baynes.” (The Daily Telegraph, 8 August, 2008)

JRRT was then so impressed with her work that it appeared both in other later publications and his recommendation led to her being engaged by CS Lewis’ publisher for the Narnia books, as well. (And here’s a LINK to that obituary, which has more on Tolkien and Baynes, as well as Lewis.)

And the Baynes connection leads us to one further dragon, that in Rumer Godden’s (1902-1998) 1981 The Dragon of Og, for which Baynes provided the cover art.

It’s not our practice to discuss work we haven’t read, but we’ve just discovered this novel and have already put it on our spring reading list. The little we know about it comes from a blurb or two, but it looks promising: this is more of the reluctant dragon, but one who is in danger of being provoked by a new local lord until his wife steps in and cleverly changes the situation.

Before we close, however, we want to look back for a second at the Tolkien/Baynes connection and add two further things. First off, here’s the first page of JRRT’s graceful letter of thanks and praise to Baynes for her work in illustrating Farmer Giles.

Second, as the Telegraph obituary says, Tolkien was impressed with her versions of the marginalia from the Luttrell Psalter, which is high on our list of favorite medieval manuscripts.

In our next, we want to spend some time looking at that work, thinking about marginalia, and not only there, but also in the work of another favorite illustrator, Arthur Rackham (1867-1939).

Till then, thanks, as always, for reading.

MTCIDC

The Nazgul Brothers?

27 Wednesday Sep 2017

Posted by Ollamh in J.R.R. Tolkien, Military History, Military History of Middle-earth, Narrative Methods

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aircraft, anti-aircraft gun, Aviation, Bellerophon, bombers, British Army, dogfights, Dragons, early airships, flight, flying machines, Great War, harpies, Hermes, machine gun, manoeuvres, military intelligence, Nazgul, Paris, Pegasus, Schlieffen Plan of 1914, Sir Douglas Haig, Sir James Grierson, The Blitz, The Lord of the Rings, Tolkien, trench fever, trenches, Wraiths, Wright Brothers, WWI Trenches

Welcome, dear readers, as ever.

Imagine a world where there were no airports, no contrails, no roar of engines, no small silver objects crossing the skies, the sound of their flight trailed behind them. The only flying things would be birds and those in different seasons, some permanent, some migratory (or used to be—where we live in North America the Canada Geese, whose great chevrons across our skies used to be powerful signs of winter to come or spring soon to appear, now squat here year round).

This would have been England in 1892, the year JRRT was born. There were early airships—basically big balloons of various sorts, but they were primarily stationary and used for (limited) military intelligence.

Then came the Wright brothers

who, in December, 1903, produced the first engine-propelled, manned flight in their enlarged kite.

Thereafter, flight would, literally, take off, but the Wrights, who were idealistically inclined, believed that such an invention would actually end war by making it too terrible.

The British army thought differently, however, and there were soon aerial observation units attached to military formations. In fact, Sir James Grierson

tactically outfoxed his rival, Sir Douglas Haig,

not only by his skillful use of aircraft for observation, but also by his keen understanding of how to conceal his own movements from Haig’s aircraft

in the army manoeuvres of 1912.

The Great War, when it came, two years later, would then be the proving ground for all sorts of aerial experimentation.

First, it was just observation.

A British aviator, flying north of the army, first spotted the massive German columns which were designed to outflank the British and French armies and capture Paris in the Schlieffen Plan of 1914.

Because observation was their task, the earliest aircraft were unarmed, but this changed and soon there was aerial combat, the so-called “dog fights”, the popular images being “knights of the sky” who jousted with manoeuvres and machine guns, rather than with lances, maces, and swords.

Next came the use of aircraft to disrupt enemy formations and their movements, bombing and strafing, sometimes as part of major attacks, the whole idea being to dominate the sky over the enemy’s trenches, while protecting your own.

And this is where we imagine 2^nd Lieutenant JRR Tolkien

in the summer of 1916, standing in such a trench,

looking up, and thinking…

We can also imagine him imagining—not seeing flying machines, but something much earlier. After all, with his education, background, and interests, it would have been difficult not to think of classical harpies

or Hermes

or Bellerophon, mounted on Pegasus.

And, with his Norse passion, there would also, of course, be dragons…

And, perhaps a combination: a Bellerophon mounted on a miniature dragon?

In the world of the trenches, there were two defences against aircraft: friendly aircraft in the air

and anti-aircraft guns on the ground.

But the war ended fairly quickly for the scholarly lieutenant, laid low by a more primitive enemy than Industrial Age Germans with bombs: lice.

JRRT became sick with what was then called “trench fever”, an illness conveyed, like typhus, by the bite of the tiny insects who colonized the clothing and bodies of soldiers in every dugout in Europe. Wracked with recurring fevers, headaches, and complete exhaustion, among other complaints, men ill with trench fever were brought to base hospitals and, if sick enough, were sent home, as there was no cure, to recover as best they could. Tolkien spent the rest of the war in the hospital or in garrison in England and thus escaped the last and perhaps worst years of the war in the trenches.

At home, he became Professor Tolkien, taught his classes, fathered four children, and then a second war came, one in which the primitive air war of the first war was intensified by more sophisticated aircraft, more powerful explosives, and plans to bomb Britain into ruin and submission in what was called “The Blitz”.

JRRT went back into service, this time as an air raid warden, even as two of his sons were more directly involved in the war.

Night after night, the bombers came,

to be met with the same weapons as the previous war: aircraft,

anti-aircraft guns

and, because the enemy began to attack at night,

searchlights.

And this brings us back to our imaginings. Working on The Lord of the Rings, staring into the night sky, listening for enemy bombers, would Tolkien have thought of danger to Middle-earth in the form of flying things, not machines but terrible figures mounted on even more loathsome creatures—and what could be done about them? Magic, perhaps?

Thanks, as always, for reading!

MTCIDC

Hoards of the Things

28 Wednesday Jun 2017

Posted by Ollamh in Fairy Tales and Myths, Imaginary History, J.R.R. Tolkien, Literary History, Narrative Methods

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A Christmas Carol, A Visit to William Blake's Inn, Aeetes, Alexander Deruchenko, Alice and Martin Provensen, Argo, Barrow-downs, Barrow-wights, Beowulf, Bilbo, Charles Dickens, Cinderella's Dress, Colchis, Collyer Brothers, David Gwillim, dragon-sickness, Dragons, Dwarves, Ebenezer Scrooge, Eurystheus, Hera, Heracles, Hoard, hordweard, Jack Gwillim, Jane Dyer, Jason and the Argonauts, Jason and the Golden Fleece, Kinder und Hausmaerchen, Ladon, Lonely Mountain, magpie, Nancy Willard, Neolithic, Scrooge McDuck, Scythians, Ted Nasmith, The Hobbit, The Lord of the Rings, Tolkien, Treasure

Welcome, dear readers, as always.

Recently, we’ve had a couple of posts on dragons and hoards, but, having done a certain amount of research and thinking and writing, we’ve come back once again to the subject, with the question: why would a dragon want a hoard to begin with?

The earliest Western European stories we know in which dragons (or serpents—the Greek word can apply to either) are associated with valuables are:

the 11^th labor of Heracles, in which his cousin, Eurystheus, demands that Heracles bring him the Golden Apples of the Hesperides (“children of the evening star”)—which are on an island guarded by a 100-headed (in some versions of the story) dragon/serpent called Ladon

the story of Jason and the Argo, in which Jason must bring back to Greece the Golden Fleece, also guarded by a dragon/serpent (a sleepless one this time)

In both of these stories, the dragon is the agent for someone else—Hera, in the case of the Golden Apples,

and Aeetes, the king of Colchis, in that of the Golden Fleece.

(We’ve always loved the curly beard of Jack Gwillim in Jason and the Argonauts—1963. His son, David, by the way, was a perfect Prince Hal and Henry V in BBC productions from 1979—if you can find them, we highly recommend them.)

After these, we see the dragon of Beowulf.

In his case, although he’s called hordweard, “hoard guardian/watchman”, we are told that he has come upon a treasure in a barrow, piled in for safe-keeping several hundred years before. Europeans in the Neolithic Period and long beyond buried high-status people in such places—like this, in Denmark.

As it was the custom for high-status people to be buried with at least some of their riches, it’s easy to see how singers might be inspired to create a barrow like that of the Beowulf dragon. Some of our favorite grave goods come from the Scythians, a horse-people who once lived north of the Black Sea, and who had buried them in grave mounds with their dead.

(A wonderfully atmospheric picture by Alexander Deruchenko.)

The Beowulf dragon is not the proper owner of the hoard: rather, he has taken possession (the poem may even be suggesting that dragons—or this dragon, at least– have a special affection for barrows (2270-2278), rather as the barrow wights have taken over the tumuli on the Barrow Downs, both places being much older and long-abandoned. You may remember this striking image by one of our favorite Tolkien artists, Ted Nasmith–

In contrast, Smaug has taken possession of the Lonely Mountain by force, burning out the rightful owners.

In both cases, however, the latest owner is very sensitive about his new property: the removal of one object, as Beowulf and Bilbo find out.

(And we can’t resist this item—it’s copy of a cup used in the 2007 Beowulf film. We don’t see that it would be very useful for drinking from, but it’s certainly fun to look at!)

It’s one thing if it’s your job to guard gold: you’re like a sheepdog with a flock. (Here’s a Maremma, in fact, with a flock.)

It’s another if you are occupying, seized or not, someone else’s gold. In the latter case, however, we are still left with our initial question: why is this important to a dragon?

Perhaps they just like the look of it. After all, Smaug seems quite proud of what he sees as a waistcoat of precious things. When Bilbo says: “What a magnificence to possess a waistcoat of fine diamonds!” Smaug replies “Yes, it is rare and wonderful, indeed.” (The Hobbit, Chapter 12, “Inside Information”) Yet there is the darker side:

“To say that Bilbo’s breath was taken away is no description at all. There are no words left to express his staggerment, since Men changed the language that they learned of elves in the days when all the world was wonderful. Bilbo had heard tell and sing of dragon-hoards before, but the splendor, the lust, the glory of such treasure had never yet come home to him. His heart was filled and pierced with enchantment and with the desire of dwarves; and he gazed motionless, almost forgetting the frightful guardian, at the gold beyond price and count.” (The Hobbit, Chapter 12, “Inside Information”)

Just seeing such wealth brought on “lust” and “the desire of dwarves” and it’s clear that this is what infects Thorin after Smaug’s death and eventually brings on the “dragon-sickness” which leads to the end of the Master of Laketown (The Hobbit, Chapter 19, “The Last Stage”). As this “lust” for beautiful, valuable things seems inherent in the dwarves, it strikes us that we might imagine dragons as somehow enablers or carriers—like anopheles mosquitoes and malaria—

rather than originators of the disease and that the name is derived from that combination of acquisitiveness and sensitivity we noted earlier and which so clearly disturbs Thorin’s judgement.

But perhaps there is something in the idea of hoarding itself. In our world, “hoarding” has come to have a different meaning, being a kind of psychological condition in which a person acquires and acquires and has lost the ability to discard anything for complex internal reasons. In literature, one might imagine that misers have something of this—think of Ebenezer Scrooge, in Charles Dickens’ A Christmas Carol (1843).

Or, Uncle Scrooge McDuck, from Walt Disney comics. Who, as you can see, takes this to an extreme even Dickens’ Scrooge might find a bit excessive.

Underneath this, however, is the sad side: those who become imprisoned by their possessions, a famous case being that of the Collyer brothers in New York, whose apartment, after their joint deaths in 1947, was a subject both of curiosity and of mild horror in the New York newspapers of the time.

Is it possible that the Beowulf dragon and Smaug both suffer from this condition? Is that why the theft of a single piece from an uncountable hoard seems to mean so much?

We never want to shy away from serious subjects—after all, all of the best fantasy/adventure writers never did—but it’s an early summer day where we live—just after Midsummer’s Day, in fact, and so we’d like to end with another kind of acquisitor—the magpie.

Traditionally, magpies are famous for being attracted to—and collecting—shiny objects. Our favorite magpie story, however, isn’t about obsession, but about generosity. It’s a beautiful children’s book by Nancy Willard and Jane Dyer, entitled Cinderella’s Dress.

image21cind'sdress.jpg

In this book, told in light, easy verse, we see a magpie couple as fairy godparents for Cinderella, using their cache of shiny things to—but we’ll leave that to you to discover (although the title is a bit of a give-away). Here’s another page to tease you…

Thanks, as ever, for reading.

MTCIDC

Another Nancy Willard book you might enjoy is A Visit to William Blake’s Inn (1981), illustrated by Alice and Martin Provensen.

And Then the Dragon Came

14 Wednesday Jun 2017

Posted by Ollamh in Artists and Illustrators, Fairy Tales and Myths, Heroes, Imaginary History, J.R.R. Tolkien, Literary History, Narrative Methods, Villains

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A.A. Milne, Apollonius, Arthur Rackham, Beowulf, Chrysophylax, Cressida Cowell, Dragons, Drawn From Life, Drawn From Memory, Dream Days, E.H. Shepard, Edwardian, Farmer Giles of Ham, How to Train Your Dragon, Kenneth Grahame, Maxfield Parrish, Nine Dragons, Now We Are Six, Octavian, Prince Valiant, Renaissance, Sir Gawain, Smaug, St. George and the Dragon, The Argonautica, The Hobbit, The House at Pooh Corners, The Reluctant Dragon, The Wind in the Willows, Tolkien, Victorian, Walt Disney, Western Medieval, When We Were Very Young, Winnie the Pooh

Welcome, dear readers, as always.
One of us is in the midst of creating a course for the fall term. It’s called “Handling Monsters: A Handbook” and several of those monsters are dragons—the “Sleepless Serpent/Dragon” of the ancient Greek literary epic by Apollonius, The Argonautica,

the dragon which Beowulf fights,

(when small, we always imagined this as looking like the one which Sir Gawain, Prince Valiant’s master, fights)

Smaug,

and Toothless, from How to Train Your Dragon (by Cressida Cowell—there’s also a movie by that name, which is fun—great flying scenes–but it’s so different from the book that it really should have another title!)

We must confess that we’ve never been big saurian fans, either dinosaurs or dragons, but, as monsters go, they have their uses. Saying that, however, we do have to add that we’ve always loved the “Nine Dragons” scroll, a 13th-century Chinese painting…

[And here’s a LINK to a site at the Center for the Art of East Asia which you can see the whole scroll—well worth the visit—and revisit, if you’re like us and love Chinese painting.]
While putting together this course, we’ve been spending some time gathering dragon images. Sometimes, they seem pretty fantastic—painters with wild imaginations—

And sometimes they look like someone once saw a crocodile.

[Perhaps on an old coin? For example, Octavian—the Emperor Augustus-to-be—after the defeat of Antonius and Cleopatra, issued this coin, which reads “Egypt Taken”,

suggesting that, when a Roman thought of Egypt, it wasn’t the pyramids which came to mind, but a scaly, many-toothed amphibian!]
And the image before the coin reminds us that, in Western medieval/early Renaissance art, a major source of dragon pictures is religious, being depictions of St. George and his dragon-slaying.

We’ve mentioned JRRT and Smaug, but that it only his first dragon story. There is another, Farmer Giles of Ham, written in 1937 and published in 1949.

If you haven’t read it, we recommend it as a look at JRRT at play, more Hobbit than Lord of the Rings. The story is about a very practical, but hardly adventurous farmer, Giles, who, after chasing off a giant from his village, is given the job of dealing with an invading dragon, Chrysophylax (maybe something like “Watchman of the Gold”).

Although the dragon is tricksy, Giles eventually overcomes him with a combination of shrewdness and a famous sword, Caudimordax (“Tailbiter”). In the process, he becomes not only wealthy, but also founds his own kingdom-within-a-kingdom. As well, though JRRT, more than once in his letters, lets us know that he is not an enthusiast for democracy, he provides a very critical view of monarchy and its pretensions. (This may also explain why, although those in the Shire may refer to “the king” and “the rules”, which presumably came with that monarch, their own local form of government is more familial than bureaucratic.)
Chrysophylax is chatty, rather like Smaug, but there is a much lighter touch here, and Chrysophylax reminds us of our favorite dragon after Tolkien’s, the unnamed dragon in Kenneth Grahame’s

short story, “The Reluctant Dragon”, from his 1898 collection, Dream Days.

If you recognize Grahame’s name, you probably know it from his 1908 novel, The Wind in the Willows, with its well-known characters, Toad, Rat, Mole, and Badger—not to mention the wicked weasels!–

first illustrated by E.H. Shepard

whom you may also know as the illustrator of A.A. Milne’s Winnie the Pooh, The House at Pooh Corners, When We Were Very Young, and Now We are Six.

[Shepard also wrote two volumes of autobiography—which he illustrated, of course—Drawn from Memory (1957) and Drawn from Life (1961)

and, for a picture of a growing up in the later Victorian world, beautifully written and illustrated, we very much recommend both.]
[And a second footnote here: Arthur Rackham—one of our favorite late-19th-early-20th-century illustrators– also illustrated The Wind in the Willows,

his last project before his death in 1939. It was published a year later, in 1940.]
The title gives away a great deal of the plot of Grahame’s “The Reluctant Dragon”. Instead of being a murderous hoarder, like Beowulf’s dragon, or Smaug, this is dragon-as-pacifist, (as depicted by his original illustrator, Maxfield Parrish):

not in the least interested in plundering and burning, but rather in viewing sunsets and living a peaceful existence—until St. George appears. As to what happens next, we’re not going to issue a spoiler alert here, but rather provide links to three works by Grahame: two collections of stories and essays, The Golden Age (1895), Dream Days (1898), and The Wind in the Willows (1908), inviting you to read for yourself and to enjoy Grahame’s elegant Edwardian prose and gentle approach.
With thanks, dear readers, for…reading.
MTCIDC
CD

PS
Walt Disney studios made cartoons of “The Reluctant Dragon” (1941) and “The Wind in the Willows” (1949), which are currently available in Disney collections. They both stray rather far from the original stories, but are fun in themselves (and Eric Blore’s voice is perfect for “the handsome and popular Toad”).
PPS
One of us has written what we might immodestly call a very good short story based upon Arthur Rackham’s last days and his determination to finish his illustrations to The Wind in the Willows before his death and we plan to publish it here next week as a kind of “Summer Holidays Extra”. We hope you’ll enjoy it.

doubtfulsea

~ adventure fantasy

Tag Archives: Dragons

Why a Dragon?

Middle-under-earth

“Dragons, Other”

The Nazgul Brothers?

Hoards of the Things

And Then the Dragon Came