A tall-standing, heavy serpent with claws and wings is perhaps the description that best fits the Dragon. It may be black, but it is essential that it also be shining; equally essen- tial is that it belch forth fire and smoke. The above descrip- tion refers, of course, to its present image; the Greeks seem to have applied the name Dragon to any considerable rep- tile. Pliny informs us that in summer the Dragon craves ele- phant blood, which is notably cool. It will make a sudden foray on the elephant, coil round it, and plunge its teeth into it. The bloodless elephant rolls on the ground and dies; so does the Dragon, crushed under the weight of its victim. We also read that Ethiopian Dragons, in search of better pas- turage, regularly cross the Red Sea and migrate to Arabia. To accomplish this, four or five Dragons coil together and form a kind of craft, with their heads lifted out of the water. In Pliny there is also a chapter devoted to remedies derived
from the Dragon. Here we read that its eyes, dried and then stirred with honey, make a liniment that is effective against nightmares. The fat of the Dragon’s heart stored in the hide of a gazelle and tied to the arm with the sinews of a stag assures success in litigation; Dragon teeth, also bound to the body, ensure the indulgence of masters and the mercy of kings. With some scepticism Pliny cites a preparation that renders men invincible. It is concocted of the skin of a lion, a lion’s marrow, the froth of a horse which has just won a race, the nails of a dog, and the tail and head of a Dragon.
In the eleventh book of the Iliad we read that there was a blue three-headed Dragon on Agamemnon’s shield; centuries later Norse pirates painted Dragons on their shields and carved Dragon heads on the prows of their long ships. Among the Romans, the Dragon was the insignia of the cohort, as the eagle was of the legion; this is the origin of present-day dragoons. On the standards of the Saxon kings of England there were Dragons; the object of such images was to impart fear to enemy ranks. In the ballad of Athis, we read:
Ce souloient Romains porter, Ce nous fait moult à redouter.
[This was what the Romans used to bear, this which makes us so feared.]
In the West, the Dragon was always thought of as evil. One of the stock exploits of heroes (Hercules, Sigurd, St Michael, St George) was to overcome and slay a Dragon. In Germanic myth, the Dragon kept watch over precious objects. And so in Beowulf, written in England in the sev- enth or eighth century, there is a Dragon that stands guard over a treasure for some three hundred years. A runaway slave hides in its lair and steals a cup. On waking, the Dragon notices the theft and resolves to kill the thief, but every once in a while goes back inside to make sure the cup
has not been merely mislaid. (How strange of the poet to attribute to his monster so human a misgiving.) The Dragon begins to ravage the kingdom; Beowulf searches it out, grapples with it, and kills it, dying himself soon after from a mortal wound inflicted by the Dragon’s tusks.
People believed in the reality of the Dragon. In the middle of the sixteenth century, the Dragon is recorded in Conrad Gesner’s Historia Animalium, a work of a scientific nature.
Time has notably worn away the Dragon’s prestige. We believe in the lion as reality and symbol; we believe in the Minotaur as symbol but no longer as reality. The Dragon is perhaps the best known but also the least fortunate of fan- tastic animals. It seems childish to us and usually spoils the stories in which it appears. It is worth remembering, how- ever, that we are dealing with a modern prejudice, due perhaps to a surfeit of Dragons in fairy tales. In the Revel- ations, St John speaks twice of the Dragon, ‘that old serpent, called the Devil and Satan . . .’ In the same spirit, St August- ine writes that the Devil ‘is lion and dragon; lion for its rage, dragon for its cunning’. Jung observes that in the Dragon are the reptile and the bird - the elements of earth and of air.
Youwarkee
In his Short History of English Literature, Saintsbury finds the flying girl Youwarkee one of the most charming hero- ines of the eighteenth-century novel. Half woman and half bird, or - as Browning was to write of his dead wife, Elizabeth Barrett - half angel and half bird, she can open her arms and make wings of them, and a silky down covers her body. She lives on an island lost in Antarctic seas and was
discovered there by Peter Wilkins, a shipwrecked sailor, who marries her. Youwarkee is a gawry (or flying woman) and belongs to a race of flying people known as glumms. Wilkins converts them to Christianity and, after the death of his wife, succeeds in making his way back to England.
The story of this strange love affair may be read in the novel Peter Wilkins () by Robert Paltock.
There is one story that has ranged the whole of geography and all epochs - the tale of mariners who land on an un- known island which then sinks into the sea and drowns them because it is a living creature. This invention is found in the first voyage of Sindbad and in Canto VI, Stanza , of Orlando Furioso (Ch’ella sia una isoletta ci credemo - ‘We believed it [the whale] to be a small island’); in the Irish legend of St Brendan and in the Greek bestiary of Alex- andria; in the Historia de Gentibus Septentrionalibus (Rome, ) by the Swedish ecclesiastic Olaus Magnus and in this passage from the opening of Paradise Lost, in which Satan, ‘stretched out huge in length’, is compared to a whale (-):
Him haply slumbering on the Norway foam, The pilot of some small night-foundered skiff Deeming some island, oft, as seamen tell, With fixed anchor in his scaly rind,
Moors by his side under the lee, while night Invests the sea . . .
Paradoxically, one of the earliest versions of the legend gives it in order to refute it. This is recorded in the Book of