The start of the Year of the Dragon has made me think about dragons. Though I don’t really need to be encouraged to think about dragons – the book I’m deep in the middle of editing has seven speaking dragon parts, and any number of minor spear-carrying dragons. But this seems like a good time to celebrate other people’s dragons too!
My favourite dragon books include:
The wonderful heartrending dragon in CS Lewis’s The Voyage of the Dawn Treader, which is my earliest dragon memory.
The amazing How to Train Your Dragon series by Cressida Cowell, the funniest, cleverest, most exciting series of dragon books ever. Though I’m not sure I’d want Toothless under my helmet.
Philip Reeves’ No Such Thing As Dragons, which is dark, spiky, tantalisingly short, and a fabulous novel for slightly older readers.
And the very similarly titled, but for much smaller people: There’s No Such Thing As A Dragon by Jack Kent.
I also love the splendidly distant dragons in Vivien French’s Flight of Dragons.
I have mixed feelings about Eragon and its sequels, partly because they are almost too big to hold, but also because I thought I’d been really original, creating a friendly female dragon, making her blue and calling her Sapphire. Then shortly after First Aid for Fairies was published, I read Eragon, and met his friendly blue female dragon, called Saphira. I’m very relieved about that final vowel.
I have a couple of favourite dragon reference books too (I’m not sure if you can call them non-fiction!)
My first dragon collection was A Book of Dragons, edited by Roger Lancelyn Green (though I see it has my wee brother’s name on the first page, in pencil. Perhaps I could rub that out, because he’s not getting it back now!)
And more recently, I’ve loved the wonderful tactile Dragonology books by Dr Ernest Drake (which aren’t mine either – they belong to my kids.)
And finally, my favourite dragon myths.
I’ve enjoyed telling dragon myths for years, partly because they come with inbuilt excitement (a dragon! fire! teeth!), partly because they come from all over the world, and partly because it feels right to share dragon stories when I’m doing author sessions about the novels with Sapphire in them.
My favourite dragon stories to share include:
A seven-headed Chinese dragon
A Greek dragon who kept a shepherd boy company on the hills
A Viking dragon defeated by a sheepskin
A Polish dragon, also defeated by a sheepskin (some dragons are easily fooled)
A Persian dragon who teased a horse
A Georgian dragon who was sung to sleep
And an Irish dragon who lost his tongue
(If you want to find out more about these dragons, you’ll have to ask me to come and tell you the stories!)
Dragons are universal, appearing as the monster of choice in many cultures and countries, so I’m fascinated by theories about where our dragon stories come from. Do we need monsters for our heroes to prove themselves against? Did our ancestors need explanations for those big fossilised bones and teeth? Or maybe, just maybe, these stories are about real dragons, and they’re still out there, somewhere…
What are your favourite dragon books and stories? Please let me know!
(And here is the dragon who sits beside my computer – hand made for me by a Sapphire fan!)
I know they’re not books, but your fondness for dragons may also have been influenced in childhood by the Soup Dragon in the Clangers, and Idris the red dragon in Ivor the Engine.
Welcome to the blog! You’re right. I’d forgotten about the soup dragon. I don’t think I ever understood it, but I did like it. And I loved Idris. Even just saying his name brings on a terrible Welsh accent. So that’s interesting. My first two dragons were friendly dragons. Perhaps that’s why Sapphire is friendly too. Not all the dragons in the final First Aid book are friendly though…
There was an auld draigon in Krakow,
Thanks to whom, maidens, there was a lack of!
‘Til this guy called Krakus
Put a sheep ootside his hoose
Wi’ a bomb in it… and it blew hawf his back off!
Interesting entry. I think the universal appeal of dragons has a lot to do with the fact that they look awesome! It’s very hard to draw/ paint/ sculpt a dragon that doesn’t look awesome, and I’d say the aesthetics of them are largely responsible for their hold on my imagination.
I’ve been having a lot of dreams about dragons recently, which is likely to be because I’m writing about dragons and my mind is stuck in their world.
I love your limerick (I’m not good at identifying poetry – is it a limerick?) That is indeed the daft sheep-eating Polish dragon I had in mind!
You might be right about the physical fascination of dragons. Though I am slowly realising that the spiky scaly winged dragon that lives in my imagination (possibly from the old Voyage of the Dawn Treader illustrations) seems to have supplanted older and more varied dragon shapes in the popular imagination. Lots of old Scottish and English dragons were “Worms” – long, snaky, not winged at all. And the Chinese dragons still look very different. Do you think “dragon” was just a word we used for “most splendid and scary monster” in any given culture?
Really looking forward to your dragon story! Having your mind stuck in a dragon world is not a bad way to live!