"May I come in, St. George?" said the Boy politely, as he paused at the door. "I want to talk to you about this little matter of the dragon, if you're not too tired of it by this time." -- Kenneth Grahame, The Reluctant Dragon, 1898
Susan Sarah here, with a few thoughts on dragons, dragonslayers, and why we even bother reading about the nasty, scaly, slimy critters....
I wrote my dissertation on images of St. George in medieval art, so for years I was surrounded by...well, images of St. George: alone, with other saints, with the princess, on a horse, off a horse, with and without patrons, and of course...with a dragon.
While I was doing all this erudite research, I kept two Gary Larson Far Side cartoons tacked to the bulletin board over my desk. I couldn't find the images online (and my copies are too tattered to scan well), so let descriptions suffice:
Far Side cartoon #1: Artist at easel, painting an image of a knight in armor, with one hand on a spear, and one foot raised and resting on a little red wagon. A man is looking over the artist’s shoulder. “No, the king wanted St. George and the dragon! Dragon!”
Far Side cartoon #2: A dragon outside a cave, tossing a small armored knight in his forepaws. Steam is coming out of the knight’s very hot armor. Dragon: “Ow, ow, Phyllis, hurry up with them hot pads!”
Why dragons? Why do some people find them fascinating, and some do not (including some very fine authors on our Wenches team)? What is it about dragons? Dragons and dragon-like monsters exist in just about every culture and occur in innumerable myth cycles from cultures all over the world.
Y’all can relax, because I’m not going to info-dump my dissertation work here in the blog, but I thought I’d look at the symbolism, and ponder a little of why that dragon has so much appeal (and St. George too...in the 14th century, he was HOT, and not because the dragon roasted him in steel).
In most images, St. George is in the act of killing the dragon–-thrusting the spear into its side (yes, religious connotations there), or more commonly, down the poor critter’s throat “to breke its harte” as one medieval text put it. Truly, I felt sorry for the dragon, just doing its dragonian thang, and along comes this guy on a horse, and pow, it’s lights out.
St. George was well established early on as a martyred saint, his martyrdom involving not dragon-slaying, but various tortures and multiple executions that included fire, drowning, beheading (and he came back again), and, IIRC, rolling downhill in barrels. Somewhere around the 6th century, in Byzantian/Georgian imagery, he starts showing up with a dragon. In England, he quickly becomes an early favorite saint, his cult growing by leaps and bounds. Soon images of Saint George contain not only the dragon, but a princess being rescued. He starts popping up in medieval romance literature, and that dragon-and-princess thing gets rolling. St. George was a superstar hero in medieval England and parts of Europe. In images and in literature, he teams up with the Virgin Mary (a privilege reserved only for the creme de la creme), he marries his princess (who is pregnant before the wedding) and–-if you can believe this–-he’s secretly the twin brother of the dwarf Oberon, king of the fairies.
He was the only saint to cross over into the truly secular arena, the movie star hero of his day, killing dragons and rescuing princesses for the sake of adventure and chivalry, rather than religious fervor. Very likely the Saxon English responded to him early on because St. George reminded them of Beowulf and Grendel, and the various Viking and Germanic/Saxon tales that include dragons. They understood and could enjoy George, with his dragon and princess. Newly Christian Britain retained a pagan flavor in their beliefs (and that still exists today).
There are other dragon and monster slayers: Beowulf and Grendel, Siegfried and Fafnir, Lancelot, Sir Guy of Warwick, Sir Bevis of Hampton, the Archangel Michael –- the list goes on and on, and expands greatly as one looks at other cultures, Germanic, Norse, Celtic, Chinese, Japanese, and so on. We’re all aware of the dragons as sea-monsters that appeared on early maps before Columbus and others proved that they weren’t really there. Well, except for the Kraken, as Cap’n Jack Sparrow can attest....
What is it about dragons that had medieval people and others on the edge of their seats? And do they appeal to us today for the same reasons?
To the medieval mind, dragons represented evil, the devil, sin –- qualities and forces to be vanquished and conquered. Saint George and other dragonslayers had the strength, discipline, virtue, faith, and purity needed to defeat the dark forces of evil. That’s a large part of the dragon mythology –- that dark side of ourselves. Like vampires, werewolves, and so on, dragons too can be what Joseph Campbell called the shadow side of ourselves, and as he put it:
“The nature of your shadow is a function of the nature of your ego...It is the backside of your light side...the monster that has to be overcome, the dragon. It is the dark thing that comes up from the abyss and confronts you the minute you begin moving down into the unconscious.”
But dragons, unlike vampires and werewolves, have a positive side too. They are flexible monsters in that sense. They can even be cute ‘n cuddly, well, almost. A stuffed toy dragon for your kid? Sure! A cuddly toy werewolf? No thanks!
This positive side of the dragon is what I think so many of us respond to and find most fascinating. The dragon, even if it seems evil and violent, has enormous potential for greatness and goodness. Across cultures, dragons represent unlimited power, wisdom, knowledge, the unconscious, the potential of the soul. To tame or possess that power and wisdom is the best we can do for ourselves. Dragons hoard gold -– the treasure of the Self, the powerful life force. Dragons are not to be trusted when they dwell on the dark side, yet some dragons have a transcendant power.
The dragon, says Campbell, is the shadow–- “the landfill of the self...also a sort of a vault that holds great, unrealized potentialities within you.” The dragon hoards potential in that pile o’ gold – and it is up to the hero, or heroine, to salvage and release it somehow. No one comes away from a dragon encounter unchanged.
So the dragon has strongly positive, ideal, sublime qualities as well as the deepest, darkest nasty stuff, all combined in one. To read stories about dragons -– dragon quests, meeting dragons, befriending them or defeating them, stealing their treasure or being given a great gift from the dragon itself, to tame or be taught by the good dragons, or to slay the nasty dragons -– these aspects are symbols and metaphors of delving deep within ourselves, learning more about ourselves, and about life. Reading about dragons is exploring the darker, mysterious side of the soul, and vanquishing or befriending them means we emerge from the cave wiser and better than when we went inside.
Even those of us who say we don’t like dragons with scales and fire-breath, have read and enjoyed characters who have all the qualities of the dragon persona: Ebenezer Scrooge, for example, is a prime dragon character. He hoards gold, he snarls and spits fire, he goes down deep into the cave over one long night and emerges–-as we do, with him-–changed for the better, wiser, and willing to release that hoarded potential within himself.
There’s my dragonistic thoughts for a snowy Wednesday.
~Susan Sarah