Paul Newman

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A TRIPTYCH OF DRAGONS

Dragons of the West

Nigel Pennick

(Capall Bahn £10.95)

Sky Dragons and Celestial Serpents

    Alastair McBeath

(Dragon’s Head Press £4.99)

Dragon Slaying Myths Ancient and Modern

 Bob Trubshaw

(Dragon’s Head Press £1.99)

Diversity rather than unity is the key note of Nigel Pennick’s book which is one of the most thorough and inclusive works on dragonlore I have ever read and attractively produced and priced by Capall Bahn. Illustrations drawn from alchemy, chapbooks, memorial stones, devotional prints, tomb-slabs and folklore museums enhance a lucid, wide-ranging text and, for added value, there are Nigel’s own drawings, bold, elegant, with those emphatic Celtic borders that give one a feeling of security.

In Dragons of the West, we feel the scorching breath of every creepy crawly, wiry fiery one could imagine: dragons, snakes, worms, wyverns, fire-drakes and salamanders are all present and correct.

Many things I was delighted to learn from this book, including the existence of early dragon-mouthed flamethrowers that blasted the enemy or cooked him inside his suit of armour. There is a section covering dragons on coins and dragons as propaganda – demonising the enemy – and dragons in civic ceremonies like the celebrated Snap of Norwich. Furthermore we have the golden oldies: the Lambton Worm, St George, St Martha, St Michael, Cadmus of Thebes, Hercules, Guy of Warwick, plus a host of lesser-known dispatchers like Pier Shonks of Hertforshire: a drawing shows the knight’s tomb at Brent Pelham with a dragon at the base spouting floreate flames that lick a similarly patterned cross.

Dragons of the West is a compact, sensible (not that sensible, for you’ve got to be slightly bonkers to write about dragons), well-written study. It does not ignore the wilder shores of speculation, but stops short of getting asphyxiated in the coils of New Age serpent-speak. The only criticism – by no means a wholehearted one – is that, in embracing so much variety, a slightly bitty effect is achieved. There is little sense of an image evolving through time. Instead we stare at a flat canvas, alive with busy, fascinating details, but lacking a strong perspectival sense. Nevertheless, this is really not Nigel’s fault – the difficulty is inherent in the bewildering, hydra-headed fluidity of the subject. I cannot think of a better introductory volume and Nigel concludes by judicially reminding us, “The dragon is a fresh symbol for each age, representing the fears, failures and triumphs particular to the time that people must undergo in their lives.”

By contrast, Alastair McBeath’s book does not attempt epic inclusiveness. He sensibly restricts his study to constellations that have draconic and serpentine characteristics. Writing as an astronomer and mythologist, he explains – and provides star charts of - the various beasts and hero-figures that feature in ancient zodiacs. For this one has to be genuinely grateful. Through various studies, I was familiar with the constellation Draco, but I did not have a clue where to look for it, nor the best night to see it (around 21 June), nor that it stood for the Babylonian dragon, Tiamat, slain by the sun-god, Marduk. The second chapter deals with ‘Cetus the Sea Monster’ and is equally informative, followed by Hydra, Serpens and Ophiucus and other items relating to the Perseid meteor-train and the Aurora Borealis. For the astronomically inclined and the astronomically illiterate, this is a real bath of erudition in which to wallow, a rare compendium of celestial and mythological arcana, united by a common symbol. Congratulations!

Bob Trubshaw’s book is the skinniest of the three. It too is nevertheless a sane (or only moderately deranged) survey of the dragon, ranging over tympani, St Michael, ophiolatry, Avebury’s serpentine avenues, the Cretan snake-goddess and the Celtic god Lugh. Bob considers the relationship of dragon-serpent legends to the Goddess of the Meditteranean. The tone is scholarly, civilised and infused by a discursive reasonability. It stabs at difficult questions but sensibly leaves the solutions open. Undoubtedly a connection exists between goddess-worship and snake cults but it cannot be proved that the dragon of Western Europe relates to ophiolatry in, say, early Crete or Babylon. What of the Germanic dragon dispatched by Siegfried? Does that go back to the traditional chaos-monsters of the Near East? Or is it a descendant of the World Serpent slain by Thor?

It is not always easy to sort out our native fire-spouters from the numerous exotic importations and, of course, threshold-guarding and fire-and-famine monsters are common to most cultures. But the light-bearing heroes of  the Indo Europeans and Christian saints do seem to be locked in this perpetual dust-up with dragons. Apollo killed the enormous serpent, Pythia, and annexed her shrine at Delphi. Perseus – very similar to St George - dispatched the snaky-haired Gorgon Medusa. Not only does Bob invoke these frenzied tussles, he is also diverting on Celtic saints, the good-versus-evil schism, our Saxon and Norman forbears and Welsh literature. He does not sort all this out in a mere 24 pages, but at least the diverse strands are laid out plainly and backed by illustrations that are apt and striking. And as an added delight, the booklet is a treasury of the most creative spelling imaginable: ‘impalled’, ‘interchangably’; ‘conquor’ – all on the first page. Surely Bob meant to write impayled, interchaingeably and conkor!