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Dragons for Tolkien and Lewis Volume 11 Number 1 Article 21 Summer 7-15-1984 Dragons for Tolkien and Lewis Ruth Berman Follow this and additional works at: https://dc.swosu.edu/mythlore Part of the Children's and Young Adult Literature Commons Recommended Citation Berman, Ruth (1984) "Dragons for Tolkien and Lewis," Mythlore: A Journal of J.R.R. Tolkien, C.S. Lewis, Charles Williams, and Mythopoeic Literature: Vol. 11 : No. 1 , Article 21. Available at: https://dc.swosu.edu/mythlore/vol11/iss1/21 This Article is brought to you for free and open access by the Mythopoeic Society at SWOSU Digital Commons. It has been accepted for inclusion in Mythlore: A Journal of J.R.R. Tolkien, C.S. Lewis, Charles Williams, and Mythopoeic Literature by an authorized editor of SWOSU Digital Commons. An ADA compliant document is available upon request. For more information, please contact [email protected]. To join the Mythopoeic Society go to: http://www.mythsoc.org/join.htm Mythcon 51: A VIRTUAL “HALFLING” MYTHCON July 31 - August 1, 2021 (Saturday and Sunday) http://www.mythsoc.org/mythcon/mythcon-51.htm Mythcon 52: The Mythic, the Fantastic, and the Alien Albuquerque, New Mexico; July 29 - August 1, 2022 http://www.mythsoc.org/mythcon/mythcon-52.htm Abstract Discusses the revival of dragons in fantasy after a long hiatus (perhaps spurred by Victorian studies of dinosaur fossils), which both influenced and was further refined yb Tolkien and Lewis, with a brief look at dragons in fantasy since their time. Additional Keywords Dragons in C.S. Lewis; Dragons in J.R.R. Tolkien; Dragons in literature; Dragons in mythology; Lewis, C.S.—Characters—Dragons; Tolkien, J.R.R.—Characters—Dragons This article is available in Mythlore: A Journal of J.R.R. Tolkien, C.S. Lewis, Charles Williams, and Mythopoeic Literature: https://dc.swosu.edu/mythlore/vol11/iss1/21 Page 53 Dragons for Tolkien and Lewis Ruth Berman When J.R.R. Tolkien and C.S. Lewis were boys, Sigurd the Volsung, as well as in a version retold for dragons were only just beginning to come back into youngsters in The Red Fairy Book, edited by Andrew literature after a hiatus of more than two centuries. Lang. During the eighteenth century, most kinds o f fantasy were discouraged. During the nineteenth century, Tolkien has described his fascination with dragons fantasy became a genre, but the absence of dragons in his essay, "On Fairy-Stories": among the wealth of ghosts, witches, devils, mer-folk, fairies, etc., is striking. Monsters in general were I desired dragons with a profound desire. Of rare, but dragons were much rarer. Nineteenth century course, I in my timid body did not wish to fantasists invented original monsters -- Lewis have them in the neighbourhood, intruding Carroll's Jabberwock and Snark, Lina and the other into my relatively safe world, in which it patchwork beasts led by Curdie in George MacDonald's was, for instance, possible to read stories The Princess and Curdiel — or they made use o f less in peace o f mind, free from fear. But the familiar mythical beasts — Lewis Carroll's Gryphon, world that contained even the imagination of Frank R. Stockton's Griffin ("The G riffin and the Fafnir was richer and more beautiful, at Minor Canon"), the Salamander and his snake-daughter whatever cost of peril.2 in E.T.A Hoffman's "The Golden Pot," assorted snake- women in Coleridge's "Christabel," Keats' "Lamia," or There were a few Victorian dragons, most of them Oliver Wendell Holmes' Elsie Venner, or the unusually in poetry. William Morris was fond o f dragons in his varied menagerie of a sphinx, a phoenix, and an poetry, including several in the verse-narratives that ouroboros-snake/magnet in Novalis' Klingsohr's Tale make up The Earthly Paradise: the dragon-like Chimera (in Heinrich von Ofterdingen). In Andrew Lang's in "Bellerophon in Lycia," a dragon-woman in "The Lady Prince Prigio' there is a battle between a Firedrake of the Land," the dragon guarding the apples of the and a Remora. The former ought to be a dragon by its Hesperides in "The Golden Apples" (Tennyson also had a name, but it has horns and hooves; the la tter might as version of the Hesperidean dragon in "The well be a dragon by its description, a long snaky ice- Hesperides"). He also had several dragons in The Life creature coiling glacier-like over the land, but Lang and Death of Jason, which was to have been part of The did not choose to call it one. It was not until after Earthly Paradise, but grew too long for it: not only the turn o f the century that Lang included a dragon in the dragon guarding the golden fleece called for by one of his own stories, in "The Magician Who Wanted the original legend, but a swarm o f marsh dragons More" (Tales of a Fairy Court, 1906), and even then it along the river north of Colchis, and a glimpse of the was a dragon that wasn't real but only the Magician in Hesperides and their guardian dragon. (He omitted the disgu ise. dragons that draw Medea's chariot when she flees Iolcos.) In his prose fiction, however, Morris Until almost the end o f the century, the only preferred humanoid wonders — witches, magicians, un­ major nineteenth century dragon was Tolkien's own earthly maidens. favorite, Fafnir, appearing not only in Wagner's Ring Cycle of operas, but also in William Morris' The reluctance to use dragons was probably a translation of The Volsung Saga, and in his poem result of the too rigid identification of the dragon Pag‘ 54 with the dragon of the Book of Revelations, that is, mortal men. And at this point we should also Satan. The most important uses of the dragon before realise that dragons and snakes did not have dragons disappeared in literature had been the dragon a uniformly bad reputation in Greece and the which is the devil, fought by St. George, who is Near East. Greece too had its benevolent Holiness, in Book I of Spenser's Faerie Queene reptilian deities: snakes that were spirits (sixteenth century) and the dragon which is the shape ofsprings, genii loci, embodiments or imposed upon the devil when he reports the Fall in attributes o f gods, e.g., Asklepios, Athena, Book X of Milton's Paradise Lost (seventeenth cen­ Apollo .... Zeus h im self.4 tury). The allegorical identification of the dragon with Tolkien implicitly complained of this identifica­ Satan made it difficu lt to make use o f the ambiguity tion in Beowulf: the Monsters and the Critics, which properly belonged to dragons. Some of the the essay in which he successfully defended the monsters in nineteenth century fantasy were not evil structural integrity of the monsters of Beowulf at all, and some were hostile without being morally against earlier critics who had thought the poem evil (Jabberwocks must be killed, and it may be a good chaotic. Tolkien stressed the dragon's non- idea to try to eliminate Snarks from the ecology, but allegorical nature in the poem: whiffling in tulgy woods and looking grave at puns are not sins). Some were evil, but not evil enough to be The dragon wields a physical fire, and covets represented as Satanic: the patchwork monsters in The gold not souls, he is slain with iron in his Princess and Curdie are expiating their sins, and one belly . Beowulf's by me was made by Weland, is a little like a dragon in appearance — a winged and the iron shield he bore against the serpent with tiny legs -- but to call it a dragon serpent by his own smiths; it was not yet the would be to grant it an absolute, and inappropriate breastplate of righteousness, nor the shield degree of evil. By contrast, when C.S. Lewis had a of faith for the quenching of all the fiery human devolved into a monster and working back to darts of the wicked.3 humanity through grace, he felt free to turn Eustace into a straightforward dragon (The Voyage of the Dawn He had already commented that conscious allegory in Treader). MacDonald included the corpse o f an actual general might have harmed the poem: "had the matter dragon in Phantasies, but only briefly, described in (of the theme of man at war with the world, doomed to one paragraph ( in chapter 23). overthrow in Time] been so explicit, his poem would certainly have been the worse" (p. 16). In theory, When nineteenth century writers did want to write there is perhaps no reason why allegory should be less about Satanic evil, they generally chose a human effective than subconscious symbol; in the practice of shape. The use of a monster to represent absolute such a poet as Spenser (but Tolkien did not like evil, after all, implies that evil is an outside Spenser) allegory was supremely effective. influence imposed upon innocent humanity. The writers Nevertheless, it is true in practice for many writers in the same age that produced Freud were more that a conscious allegory is harder to develop than a interested in evil as an element of humanity — the concrete figure with perhaps unconscious significance. Doppelganger of James Hogg's Justified Sinner, Mary Certainly, nineteenth century writers drew no Shelley's embittered Monster, Goethe's Mephistopheles, inspiration from the equation of dragon and Satan. Stevenson's Mr. Hyde. Still, the equation was natural enough, given the Dragons were thus inappropriate symbols for most primary attitude toward dragons in previous Western nineteenth century fantasy writers, and even where mythologies.
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