Dragons

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Hello, here be dragons, it used to say, on the edges of maps when the world seemed flat, and almost wherever you look in the world, there are dragon legends, if not actual dragons.

Sometimes compared to snakes, alligators, lions and even dinosaurs, dragons have appeared on clay tablets in ancient Mesopotamia, in the Chinese zodiac, in the guise of the devil in Christian religious texts, and in the national symbolism of the countries of England and Wales.

They're often portrayed as terrifying, but sometimes appear as sacred or even benign creatures, and they continue to populate our cultural fantasies through blockbuster films, TV series, and children's books.

With me to discuss dragons are Kelsey Granger, post-doctoral researcher in Chinese history at the University of Edinburgh.

Daniel Ogden, Professor of Ancient History at the University of Exeter, and Juliet Wood, Associate Lecturer in the School of Welsh at the University of Wales.

Kelsey, why did the first dragons appear in China?

In China, dragons are typically depicted as having a long serpentine body, four legs, a fairly long tail, and then a large horned head.

And they're actually one of a number of fantastic Chinese beasts.

The earliest examples that we have of dragon-like creatures actually date back to Neolithic Chinese archaeological sites.

So the Hongshan and the Yangshao cultures, where we can see them, for instance, carved into jade.

There was a general tendency to depict hybrid animals at this time, and the dragon is one of these hybrid animals.

Theories and scholarship has tried to suggest that maybe these renderings might have been depictions of real-world reptiles like snakes or alligators, but this evidence is quite speculative, and it would overlook the fact that dragons, as I said, are hybrid animals in a Chinese context.

They're composite, a bit like a griffin, so they have multiple body parts from other types of animal.

And these vary across time periods and sources, but in 11th-century art manuals, for instance, the dragon has nine specific resemblances.

It has the ears of an ox, it has the claws of an eagle, the scales of a carp, and the antlers of a stag.

But the head and the eyes tend to vary.

Sometimes dragons have the head of a a horse, and sometimes they have the head of a camel, and sometimes they have the eyes of a demon, and sometimes they have the eyes of a shrimp.

But they are still hybrids, even if they're not so neatly prescribed for us.

But is it thought that there were creatures like this?

Absolutely.

They were thought to be real.

So while they seem very fantastical to us, they were perceived to be very much a real, visible, and physical animal.

So real-world phenomena would be interpreted as being signs of dragons.

For instance, if bones were excavated in early China, which might have been the remains of dinosaur or might have been the remains of large fauna, they would be understood as actually being dragon bones.

So the remains of dead dragons or even the moltings of living dragons.

And these have long been used in medicine, actually.

They are normally in a powdered form and they're used to treat illnesses up to and including leg paralysis, fever, abscesses, all sorts.

What they symbolize is rather than in maybe the European context where they're seen as very adversarial, they're actually very positive and beneficial figures in early China.

So sightings of dragons would be very much connected with great men and great reputations in the Warring States period, so that's 500 BC onwards, but especially in the Han Dynasty, so 200 BC onwards, they become very much connected with emperors and rulers, and that means emperors of the present and also of the distant past.

So emperors are said to be the sons or offspring of dragons.

They look like dragons.

When they take the throne, they might see dragons or dream of dragons.

And this is partly due to how rulership is conceived of in China.

So the emperor is positioned as a pivot between heaven and earth.

He balances those two things.

If a good ruler is on the throne, everything happens as it should and things like dragons appear.

If a bad ruler's on the throne, everything's out of balance, disasters, plagues, pestilence are sure to follow.

So the dragon is a very convincing sign of good rulership because it prospers in these balanced conditions.

and also it's very associated with rainfall, which means that it would stave off droughts and famine.

Daniel, what's a dragon in the Western tradition?

Is it related to the Chinese tradition?

That's a $64,000 question, isn't it?

Well, let's start with what the dragon in the Western tradition is.

The dragon in the West simile begins, I would say, in the probably late fourth millennium BC.

Our evidence for that is not archaeological, but linguistic and mythological.

There's reason, for example, for thinking that there was a dragon fight story in Indo-European language and culture.

So that puts us on maybe on the Russian steppe in the fourth millennium BC.

To move ahead and to come to something more tangible, in ancient Greece we have the dracone.

And the dracone is basically a big fiery snake, usually with some sort of supernatural context as well.

Well the complication here is that Greeks had a rather broad view of a Dracon.

So, in their myth and their cult, we have the big fiery thing.

In a cultic context, you could see them in your dreams.

For example, Asclepius, the great healing god Asclepius, when he wasn't in human form, he was a Dracon,

again, a massive snake, a wonderful bit of Ovid talking of him in this way.

So, seen in a dream, yeah.

Now, another aspect of this also is is that in their healing sanctuaries, in their Asclepian sanctuaries,

the Greeks did actually keep large snakes, large real snakes, which they called dracones.

Again, there was a sort of sacred context there.

Probably they were four-lined rat snakes, if you want to know exactly what they were.

They grow to about six feet.

And they're very placid, they're very phlegmatic, and they don't mind being mauled around.

And they were used in healing sanctuaries to

invited to lick or even nip the patient on the affected part as part of the healing process.

So you would encounter a dracone that way,

but I think perhaps today we're more interested in, as it were, the big mythical versions.

They were embraced very much by the Romans, so dracon became a draco in Latin, and just to take that linguistic story forward, in Norman French, dragon, and then of course our own dragon.

As Rome passed from paganism to Christianity, so the form of the dragon mutated a bit.

Because of things that happen in the Greek translation of the Bible, it got merged with the ancient Greek concept of the sea monster, and so it acquired a fat body, a more animalian head, and legs, sometimes flippers.

And then at a later stage, again, it acquired wings.

This was because, in getting Christian culture, dragons became identified with humanoid, winged, flying demons.

And so that's how it all came together.

So about 900 AD is when we first get the Wyvern, the the two-legged dragon, but a dragon that all your listeners will recognize.

Right.

I'm conscious that I didn't get as far as answering: is the Western dragon and the Chinese dragon the same thing?

It's impossible for us to see any common point of genesis.

So what's the more pressing question, therefore, the more interesting question is, are we right to put them in the same box conceptually?

And that depends on how we define a dragon.

Now, the working definition I have for a dragon is it's a snake plus, a snake and something more, whether that's size, behaviour, extra body parts, again, sort of supernatural or divine context.

And I would say that according to that definition, and now I don't know whether Kelsey accepts it, that would bring them together.

Because I do think the earliest Chinese texts to discuss the physiology of a dragon talk about it being typically a blend between a snake and a horse.

I would just add to that, actually, there's been a pushback in this recent year of the dragon with Chinese scholars actually wanting to translate long, which is the Chinese term for dragon as long l-o-o-n-g in English text to try and differentiate the Western dragon which is very adversarial and aggressive and the Chinese dragon with far more association with water than with fire.

So it creates interesting conversations to bring Chinese dragons into the frame.

Julia, they've been compared to real animals.

Can you run through the numbers of comparisons and how I'm still want the listeners to be quite sure that they're listening to not real things but dreams dreams and suppositions and so on.

Well, this is where it gets a little dicey.

Oh, good.

Because definitely you think of dragons as serpentine.

That's very, very common.

There's actually a wonderful Roman instance where they kill a dragon during the Punic Wars.

They skin it and send it back to Rome.

Obviously, we don't have it any longer, but what did they send?

Was it the skin of a Nile crocodile?

There's certainly a Nile crocodile hanging in Brno, which is the Berno dragon, which blew up when it was fed all sorts of horrible things.

So there is this sense of trying to find in the real world what these things were.

But there was this sense that they were somehow real.

And indeed, one of the saints sort of says, he's explaining a plague.

And he says, well, what happened is the Tiber overflowed, and all of these log-like things and serpents kind of floated down the Tiber.

They came out to sea and they were thrown back on the shore and they created a plague.

Well, what was he looking at?

Was he looking at logs floating down, dead animals floating down?

There is this sort of grey area.

When the Komodo dragon was first captured,

the Komodo dragon is a large lizard that you find in the islands of the Pacific.

It's not a dragon at all, it's a monitor lizard.

But the man who collected the specimens, which is still in the American Museum of Natural History, sort of said when he first saw them, he said it was like watching a dinosaur, and if only they stood up on two legs, they would be dinosaurs.

But, he says, when they were killed to be shipped over to be sort of taxidermed, he said they weren't all that big.

So you have this perception of seeing particularly the reptilian world in terms of these very powerful monsters.

Now, currently, not so long ago, someone suggested that dinosaurs and dragons look alike.

Some of them do.

And therefore, our idea of a dragon came from animal bones.

Now, the problem with that that is that unless you know what a dragon looks like, kind of a bone sort of coming out of it is not going to remind you of that.

So I think they've both reinforced the idea of dragons and they've helped us disenchant the world, erase this sort of barrier between the real and the imaginative.

There is, however, one really interesting thing.

In a town in Austria, Klagenfurt, you have a typical, I killed a dragon, that was sort of polluting the place.

And then many years later, as they were draining the swamp, they found a skull, which isn't a dinosaur.

It's an Ice Age rhinoceros or something, that they thought, aha, here's the skull of the dinosaur that so-and-so has killed.

And the fountain in the town is based on this skull.

And this skull was first put in the church and is now in the Natural History Museum.

So you have legend, relic, natural history.

What's the significance of dragons in Roman culture?

They were following on very much from the Greek culture.

But as so much of what the Romans did, they kind of not so much domesticated it, but turned it into a symbol for the empire, hence this dragon thing being sent back.

But you also get them sort of creating these war monuments, sometimes called dracos.

Some people say they were wolves, but let's go with the draco for this, as a symbol of the power of the Roman Empire.

So you have them kind of turning them into, subjecting them really, to being a symbol for the power of Rome.

Whereas in the Greek world, they were much more a power symbol, closer to a healing symbol.

The Romans kind of militarized them, I suppose, would be the answer.

Daniel, do you want to come in on that?

Well, the Romans absolutely loved dragons.

So, our best accounts of the dragons in Greek myth, and there are a great many dragons in Greek myth, but the best accounts, the juiciest, the ones that sort of psychologise the dragon, tell the story from his side, give him a bit of metal, you know, they're all in Latin.

And yet, the Romans were so reluctant to invent dragon myths off their own.

This is part of a wider problem in that, on the whole, the Romans didn't invent much myth.

You know, Romulus and Remus, that's it.

You know, and

I should actually go back to the begrada dragon, which Juliet was talking about before.

I mean, that is the case in point, really.

That is really the one example of the Romans inventing a mythical dragon, but it's more of a legend.

They really situated it in a historical context.

the First Punic War against Juliet said.

So a very real battle context, and the Roman army, Regulus's Roman army, defeats it with their massed catapults and ballistas.

And these were newfangled weapons at the time of the First Punic War.

I like to think of it as kind of like the equivalent of one of those 50s American B movies, you know, where you get the space alien invading and

the USA defeats it with their new nuclear weapons and things like that.

That sort of story.

So

that's kind of a unique event, isn't it?

It is, and you're right, it has a creature-feature element to it.

Here is this monstrous thing which civilization, military civilization, defeats.

The other interesting thing I think which happens to the Roman dragons is that as they get more Christian, you get these dragons associated with Roman ruins.

And a Christian saint will come in and defeat the dragon.

And that will then sort of symbolise paganism being overcome by Christianity, but specifically Roman paganism.

I'll come back to that in a second because I want to ask Elsie, go back to China, what's the relationship between the dragons and the zodiac in China?

So that's another usage of the dragon that's quite different to its use as an imperial symbol, as a symbol that's very much connected with the ruler.

Here instead, it's used as part of a 12-animal zodiac cycle that divides the lunar years.

So it doesn't exactly match up with our Gregorian calendar.

But it divides the lunar years, and the dragon is fifth in this cycle.

So we've had dragon years in 2000, 2012, and 2024.

But these are also used in combination with the five Chinese elements, which are earth, fire, water, metal and wood.

So each dragon year will be slightly different.

It will be a different combination of element and dragon.

So for instance this past year was the year of the wood dragon, the time before was the water dragon, time before that was the metal dragon.

What's the significance of it being the year of...

This would essentially be used not only to dictate the personalities and the successes and the compatibility of the people born in the year of the dragon.

So if I was born in the year of a dragon, what would it do to my personality?

You should be very auspicious and you should be very lucky.

It's funny because actually, in Thailand, Cambodia, and Malaysia, they don't have dragon years, despite following the same zodiac calendar.

They actually have a variant of Naga as their dragon year.

And the Naga was an Indian semi-divine serpent that guards Buddhist treasures and lives at the bottom of rivers and lakes.

But the zodiac was also actually used to divide the hours of the day in dynastic China.

So the 24 hours were actually divided into two-hour blocks, and these were colloquially referred to by the zodiac animals as a shorthand.

So the dragon, being fifth in the cycle, is the hours from 7 a.m.

to 9 a.m.

Daniel, let's go to the Bible.

How do dragons feature there?

Well, in the Old Testament, we have a number of big serpentine adversaries.

Of course, we have the serpent of Eden to start with.

We have...

So the serpent of Eden, you compare with the dragon, do you?

Yeah.

Now, to be scrupulous,

when you are.

Always.

When the Hebrew Bible is brought into Greek in the Septuagint, the word dracon is not actually applied at that point.

He's just an office, just as a word, a snake.

But when he's then taken up into early Christian art and in hagiography, he's certainly repackaged as a dracon at that point.

So

he does become a dracon pretty soon.

We then have Leviathan and Rahab, the great sea monster, serpentine sea monsters.

And then when they're again, when they're brought into Greek,

the name Leviathan is eliminated in the Greek version of the Bible.

He's sometimes called a dracon, and he's sometimes called a kertos, a sea monster.

And that actually is the origin of that merging that I mentioned earlier between the physical forms of the dragon and the sea monster in Greek and Latin culture.

And then in a slightly obscure bit of the Old Testament, we have the charming little book of Belle and the Dragon, only survives in Greek, second century AD probably, BC rather.

And in that we have Daniel, great name, fighting the dragon of Babylon.

And how does he fight this false idol, this dragon that's worshipped in Babylon?

He makes a little ball of pitch and fat and hair, and he feeds it to it, and that gums up the dragon, and its fire just inflates it internally until it explodes.

So it's a great little story.

So that's the Old Testament dragon fight.

Jordan, you're coming, Julia.

Yes, the exploding dragon, I think, is one of the most fascinating ones because it's such an appealing story as a way to sort of defeat a dragon.

Yes, the dragon being blown up.

That you get it in folklore, you you get it in what are known as migratory legends, legends that are localized in various places.

I think the most famous one is the dragon of Krakow,

which lived at the bottom of a hill.

And eventually, the shepherd fills a sheep, it had a taste for sheep, fills a sheepskin with sort of gunpowder, and the dragon swallows it, and of course the fire makes it explode.

And so this becomes the Krakow dragon, one of many, but this is certainly, I think, the most elaborate.

Let's turn to British folklore, Juliet.

How do dragons feature here?

We have lots of them, is the answer.

Again, they share the same sort of mythology and motifs that go back to Greek and Roman times, basically, but they become anglicised.

What I think is very striking about the dragons, particularly in Britain, is they're often linked to a carving in a church.

So you will have a carving of some sort of monster or a carving of someone killing a monster.

And what develops is the idea: oh, is that person is St.

George or Saint Michael if he has wings, and this is the dragon.

And then you'll have someone say, Ah, yes, it was a dragon who lived in the well, and he used to come out at certain times, and he did this and that.

And by the end of this, you have a whole elaborate story attached to a carving in church, which actually may have had nothing to do with the dragon.

But this is the way of kind of numanizing, making numinous the world around you.

You defang it in a sense, and sounds rather strange by making sort of monsters.

You say it's part of folklore.

Very much so.

Very much so.

So you'd be talking of folklore, though.

Absolutely, because what happens is these motifs are actually independent in many ways of the stories that are told.

So they can move around, which is why they're called migratory, because they literally move.

And they become attached to things.

But people have this collection of motifs and stories to draw on.

And so it's very, very easy to have some of them associated with saint george some with saint michael some with all kinds of saints some very obscure saints and occasionally you get a female saint associated with the dragons as well they're not common but they were very popular

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Can we talk about dragons and women with you?

Absolutely.

So dragons, when I've been talking about them as a kind of imperial symbol, they have largely been, therefore, a symbol of male imperial power.

Because in China, it was thought that only men could be emperors.

But this was all upended by China's only female emperor who reigned over her own dynasty, the Zhou dynasty from 690 to 705 AD which was Emperor Wu Zetian.

She first starts out as an empress with her husband the Emperor Guardzong from the mid-7th century.

He dies in 683 and she becomes regent and it's at this point that she starts to think about taking the throne for herself which puts her in direct competition with her sons for the throne.

Rumours conveniently begin to spread that maybe she is also the daughter of a dragon and this was, as I've mentioned earlier, the marker of the future Emperor.

However, she couldn't really lean into the dragon imagery because it's something that her sons could really use far more effectively than she could because of this kind of gendering, despite the fact that there were male and female dragons.

They were still very much associated with the male emperor.

So she instead really leans into the phoenix imagery.

If the emperor was the dragon, was the sun, was the yang of yin and yang and the masculine energy, as it were, then the phoenix is the empress.

it's the moon, it's the Yin of Yin and Yang, it's the softer, the feminine, in this case second to the dragon.

But she leans into the Phoenix instead.

She has Phoenix pavilions built, she has phoenixes placed on top of these amazing architectural wonders that she has built, and she also makes sure that the phoenixes are at the top and the dragons are below.

She comes to rule her own dynasty, it's very avian, lots of avian imagery throughout, but she's forced to abdicate in 705, dies shortly thereafter, and is buried with her late husband, the Emperor Galdzong.

It's the only tomb we have in China where two emperors are actually buried together in the same tomb.

And it's also the only case we have of a phoenix being placed above a dragon outside the tomb.

And this shows not only that she inverts expectations to be a woman on the throne, but also that she symbolically inverted and challenges the supremacy of the dragon in her own reign by putting the phoenix on top.

Thank you.

We come back to you, Daniel and then Julia.

Can you give us one or two praises of the dragon tales from Anglo-Saxon and Germanic literature?

Well, to start with Old Norse, then, the the most famous story by far is that of Sigurd or Siegfried, as he's known in German, and Fafner.

Again, Wagner fans will know this story well.

So Fafner was a human identity of some sort in origin, and he retreated into a cave with

his gold.

He was very miserly,

couldn't bear the thought of anybody else touching this gold, and he sat upon it and he mutated into a dragon.

It's possible that he died there, and then a dragon was born out of his body.

That seems to be quite a common Norse idea.

But anyway, we end up with this great dragon sitting on the gold in the cave.

And along comes Sigurd with the idea of getting his hands on it.

He waits for Fafna to crawl down.

Whether

Fafna is a crawling dragon, a worm dragon or a wing dragon is debatable.

But anyway, so he's crawling down to the river for his drink.

Sigurd sits in a little ditch, ditch, and as the great serpentine body passes over the top, up he goes with a sword into Fafna, and that's how he kills Fafna.

And what happens after that?

Well, there are various versions.

According to one version, he's cooking the dragon's heart.

He tests it with his finger, burns his finger, sucks it, and in ingesting the dragon's blood in that way, suddenly acquires the ability to understand the language of birds, nut hatches in particular.

And he hears the birds telling him that his companion is about to kill him, and so he whips off his head first.

In another version, he coats himself in the dragon's blood, and that gives him a horny skin, makes him invulnerable.

Of course, he misses one spot, either a linden leaf falls on his back, or he can't reach his agnesis, the bit in the middle of his back, and that's that's the spot through which the wicked Hagen will eventually kill him.

Can we go now, Julia, to the best known of these tales of Beowulf?

Well, Beowulf is the end of the Beowulf story.

You've stated for our listeners.

With Beowulf, the story is about 800, and Beowulf has a very successful time ruling his kingdom.

Then what happens is suddenly someone steals from a dragon hoard.

And this, as I say, reflects the Norse notion that very often dragons are associated with hoards and with burial mounds.

So you get gold and death.

Someone steals a piece of the dragon's hoard, the dragon comes out and starts burning and ravaging the country.

So Beowulf goes goes and takes the dragon on.

Now, this is an old Beowulf.

He only has one companion who is willing to stay with him.

And the dragon spits his fire and Beowulf is wounded.

Beowulf kills the dragon, but is poisoned by it, is wounded by it.

And so the poison gets into Beowulf and Beowulf dies.

The dragon's body is thrown into the water.

It has so many other motifs that we know from earlier and are going to continue later.

One of them is this notion that the hero kills the dragon, but something about the dragon's poison catches him.

So that you have this notion of this great culture hero who saves his people but sacrifices himself, but always with the idea that something better can come along.

You have the fiery dragon, of which there are famous ones, but they don't actually dominate.

A lot of the local dragons are just nasty, but they aren't necessarily fire-spitting.

This one definitely is.

And of course, Tolkien takes up this wonderful one, and we have it in France.

Can you tell us about the role of the dragon in Welsh culture?

In Welsh culture, the one that is best known is the story of the red and the white dragon, in which either Ambrosius or Melinus, depending on what the source is, is going to be sacrificed because Vortigern is building this tower which keeps falling down and is told that the blood of a fatherless child will save it.

And Merlin says, No, get me these two little things which you'll find under Dinis Embrus.

And they bring two little pots in which are tiny little creatures that jump out and get bigger and bigger and bigger.

One is white, one is red, and they fight.

And the red seems to be losing and suddenly pulls itself together and sees off the white one.

And Merlinus Ambrosius says, This is what's going to happen.

You're going to lose to the Saxons, but eventually the Britons will be secure.

Now, that's the famous one.

But what people sometimes don't recognise is that Geoffrey of Monmouth had three dragons, and they were really important.

The second one is a comet, a gold dragon, that Uther Uther sees in the sky and Merlin says this is you, you are pen dragon, chief dragon.

However, the little comets are your son and your descendants who will be better.

And so he takes this gold dragon and puts it on his helmet.

The third time is just before Arthur sort of tries to win and he has dreams of a dragon.

So you have the white dragon, the gold dragon and the dream dragon.

all sort of framing the Arthurian legend.

I was just going to come in on the colour there because colour colour is such an important part of dragons in a Chinese context: of whether it's a positive sighting of a dragon or a negative sighting for the emperor's fate really is dictated by the colour.

There's this idea that there are five colours, they work in a system along with the five elements, and each dynasty frames themselves on one of these colours.

So, for instance, this starts with the first emperor, Qin Shu Huang, in 221 BC.

So, for instance, in 579 AD, a black dragon was said to drop dead out of the sky, And this is already very bad.

It already indicates something bad's going to happen to the emperor, that he might fall, because the emperor and the dragon are so closely and symbolically intertwined.

But because it's a black dragon specifically, it's deemed doubly as bad because the dynasty at the time has taken black as their colour.

That's the northern Zhou dynasty.

So it's not just that the emperor will fall, but the entire dynasty will fall.

And it does two years later.

So the colour of the dragon is very important in China as well.

Perhaps on a lighter touch here, what's the relationship between dragons and the weather in China?

They have an incredibly strong relationship with rain.

So, dragons are actually aquatic creatures in China.

They live in lakes, rivers, seas, strongly associated with water and have this ability to summon rain, which is something that's actually shared by Japanese dragons as well, and also the Indian nagas that I mentioned earlier.

So, local dragons can be worshipped at shrines or even at the rivers and lakes in which they're said to reside.

And this reveals a tension between people and the weather.

Agriculture really needs consistent, predictable rainfall but weather does not follow human timetables.

So in China they position dragons as this intermediary to whom they can ask for rain particularly in times of drought and these ceremonies which start in very early China can be incredibly simple or they can be the most convoluted affairs possible that last multiple days and they pray usually to a clay figurine of a dragon or sometimes they use live substitutes like a small lizard or a small snake.

That's not to say necessarily that dragons are reptilian in in a Chinese context.

There's something between a reptile and a fish.

So fish can become dragons and also so can lizards and snakes.

And if the rain still doesn't come, people get increasingly desperate to have the dragons bring forth the rain.

So you can start by, for instance, demoting the dragon or you can threaten to close their shrine.

So the founder of the Ming dynasty, no less, Emperor Taizu, in the 14th century, he prays for rain at a dragon shrine.

No rain comes and he's furious and he declares, in three days' time, if it doesn't rain, I'm going to come back and I'm going to personally destroy this shrine.

And luckily, it does rain within the three days, which spares the dragon's dignity.

But it also shows that this emperor has the power to move the supernatural and to move the weather.

Now, a big shift now here, Daniel.

Can we talk about how dragons figure in the lives of the Christian saints?

Right.

Well, if we see if you say saint and dragon, the first big idea that everyone's going to get in their mind is St.

George on a horse slaying the dragon below him and saving the damsel in distress, who in some earlier accounts is called Princess Sabra.

It must be said that St.

George is almost unique.

There's another saint, a military saint like George, that kills a dragon by martial means, and that's Theodore Tiran.

He's slightly obscure now.

Particularly St.

George, there's plenty to say about him.

Yeah, well, again, I think actually the interesting thing about St.

George is how abnormal he is.

I mean, there are just so many saintly dragon-slaying stories.

I mean, I on a just a casual trawl, I found 200.

I'm aware that I've only just scratched the surface.

What do you go to we talking about?

Well, basically, it starts 200 AD, even before that, really, with the apocryphal lives of the apostles.

And I suppose hagiography kind of peters out around 1500 AD.

So I've turned up 200 narratives, and

I'm aware that I've only scratched the surface.

I wouldn't be surprised if there were over a thousand in the Western Christian tradition.

Now, as I say, St.

George and Theodore are military saints and they kill their dragon by martial means, but they are really quite distinctive.

So, the great bulk of the saints, all the other saints, they kill them in a different way.

And actually, it's rather less dramatic.

They typically just, I mean, so you have a marauding dragon, the saint comes along, he presents himself outside the dragon's cave, he prays, the dragon comes out, you know, in an aggressive mode, and again, the saint just prays to God, and he, and either the dragon just drops dead, or scarpers off into the wilderness, or is sent down into the sea, or into the abyss, or something like that.

So, these saints are just sort of putting themselves in the footsteps of St.

Michael.

We didn't quite get to the New Testament before, but I mean, the big dragon of the New Testament is the Revelation dragon, which

the Archangel Michael confines to the abyss.

And these saints are sort of re-enacting that, really, so it's an easy, quick way of expressing their ability to triumph over the ultimate evil.

And now, as Juliet was saying, some of these saints are female.

Victoria is dealing with the dragon of Tribula is a good interesting early example.

The most famous would be Margaret of Antioch, Margaret of Pisigian Antioch, who again faces a dragon in her martyr cell.

And so because it's normally a non-contact sport,

a saintly dragon slaying or banishing, it's equal opportunity.

So women saints can do it just as men saints can.

And the interesting thing about St.

Margaret is, in fact,

she's actually swallowed.

She does come into contact with a dragon.

She's actually swallowed by her dragon, but Jesus precedes her down into the dragon's stomach.

This is about a 9th-century tradition, by the way.

Jesus precedes her down into the dragon's stomach and bursts it open for her, and so she pops out of the dragon's stomach.

And because of that, amazingly, this virgin Christian saint becomes the patron saint of childbirth.

Can I just, I think we skipped over St.

George.

We did.

And I'd rather not skip over St.

George.

So can you tell us a bit more about him and why he figured so heavily in the canon?

Well, St.

George initially really is a healing saint, really before he becomes attached to the dragon.

He's associated sometimes with storms, with healing and healing disease.

So having him switch to overcoming evil is not all that big a jump.

But the first story we get which we would recognize St.

George, the dragon, and the girl, is from the Legenda Aurea, which is a collection of saints' lives, about the 1400, just at the point where hagiography was going to start to change.

And there we get this notion of the warrior saint saving a woman.

He in that one doesn't actually kill the saint.

She is killed the dragon, rather.

She wraps her belt around it, and they lead it into the town to be killed.

But then George kind of becomes really, really popular.

The Crusaders probably had something to do with him moving from the east to Europe.

Eventually, of course, he becomes the symbol of Britain.

He becomes very much a British saint.

How does that manage?

Well, it's a question really of sort of incremental interest.

Suddenly, he becomes popular with the English aristocracy, with the British aristocracy.

Warriors, basically.

He's a great big manly warrior saint riding a horse.

And he becomes associated with this, particularly strongly after the Reformation, when, of course, the Christian, the sort of Catholic business, becomes less popular.

But there is one wonderful printed tale called The Heroes of Christendom, and George leads them.

It's a real boy's own adventure.

And George and St.

Patrick and all of the sort of national saints go off to save this girl, and only George manages to do it.

So you can imagine that it's obviously written from an English point of view, and it is an English story.

So he becomes both a symbol of the nation and a kind of symbol of warrior culture, but also on a softer level this notion of healing, this notion of someone who will protect us.

And it's very interesting, in New York, on the side of one of the buildings of the UN is a Saint George and the Dragon made up of bits of weapons that are supposed to symbol peace.

So you have bits of ballistic missiles in this very, very modernistic George and the Dragon, and it's supposed to sort of see George as a protector rather than a murderer.

Can we go back to China

and more contemporary mood?

Do dragons have any significance in modern-day China?

Absolutely, they have huge significance, particularly in, I would say, three different areas.

The first is language.

So, thousands of place names and river names still contain the word dragon, and stories and references to dragons are still very much used in day-to-day language.

So, there's a very popular idiom, which is Li Yu Tiao Longmen, which is the carp leaps over the dragon gate.

And this tells the story of a carp that leaps over an incredibly high waterfall on the Yellow River, and by this feat it becomes a dragon.

And this is often said to students who are about to face their own imposing waterfall, which is the intense Gaokao examinations, to encourage them to persevere so that they will become dragons on the other side.

Another area where we see dragons a lot is the Dragon Boat Festival, which is celebrated on the fifth day of the fifth lunar month.

So it's normally around May or June.

It was the 31st of May this year.

It's celebrated across East Asia, Southeast Asia, and also London.

And this probably started out as an agricultural festival in South China to bring the rains forth.

So when we think of this kind of chaos of dragon boat racing and the noise of it, it should call to mind this idea in late Imperial China and Japan that if the dragons just weren't bringing the rain, they should be made to wake up and bring the rain out.

So people would throw rubbish and they would even throw iron.

Dragons hate iron in China.

They hate the metal.

It dazzles them.

So you would throw rubbish, you'd throw iron into the water to try and vex them and make them wake up and cleanse the waters.

And finally, we've also just said goodbye to the year of the dragon in China, which ended at the end of January this year.

And actually, this is hugely significant in contemporary Asia as a whole.

There's actually been a noticeable uptick since 1976, which was a year of the dragon.

There's been a noticeable uptick in birth rates in countries that follow the zodiac calendar for dragon years.

So one expert even predicted an extra million babies would be born in this last dragon year in China because people that believe in this this calendrical system, in this astrology system, believe that dragon children will be lucky, auspicious, and fortunate.

They invest very heavily in their education.

So, dragon children actually have higher graduation rates, higher test scores, and fewer chores than their other zodiac cohorts.

So, they're still very much relevant in contemporary Asia.

Daniel, why have dragons become such important symbols?

I'm

very hesitant about the idea that dragons symbolize any one thing, really.

I mean,

I think that like the middle of the Greek verb, it's the dragon is a form, not a meaning.

And you can load whatever you want onto that form.

But in some cultures they're terrifying.

In other cultures and other stages of people's lives they're very lovable.

Where do you stand?

Oh I love them of course.

Even looking on them as villainous, I mean we love the great villains don't we?

And also there are

again focusing on the Western dragon, in some ways it's just a bizarre thing cobbled together in these arbitrary body parts from other animals.

And yet it's become a design classic, hasn't it?

Refined over the centuries to something that we regard as absolutely beautiful.

That's why there's so much sort of fantasy art on the internet.

Do you want to take this up to it?

Yes, this idea of dragons is being sort of multivariate.

Leonardo da Vinci draws cats, and one of those cats is actually a little dragon.

Now, that's really unusual.

And I think it kind of anticipates what's really interesting about a a lot of contemporary dragon lore is that it's become part of fantasy.

Now the Tolkien fantasies, the dragon is still very much the dragon that you find in Beowulf and the Norse.

But what's interesting is how much dragon you now get in children's fantasy and how very different it is.

Apart from anything else, they talk.

They provide children with an opportunity to mature, basically.

They become companions, guardians, more than anything else.

And I think it starts actually with Kenneth Graham, the tale of Custard the Dragon.

The dragon there is an esthete.

He doesn't really want to fight George at all.

And this little boy, this innocent little boy, who really anticipates the figure that you get in a lot of children's fantasy literature, kind of mediates between them.

So I think this has really, really changed the nature of how we look at the dragon in the West.

And I have to say, you're now also getting fantasy literature written from the point of view of Japanese dragons and Chinese dragons.

So we're beginning to open this up.

The dragons within internet games.

So they've become something quite different, but still retained the fascination and fierceness that they had when they first appeared.

Would you agree with that?

I think in the West we tend to be quite guided by our close contact with the Qing dynasty of what a dragon is in a Chinese context.

The Qing dynasty, which ruled from 1644 to 1911 in China, really intensified the connection between the emperor and the dragon.

So we were dealing with an emperor who was very visually connected to dragons.

He was wearing dragon robes on a dragon throne in a dragon room with dragon in his name and even was ruling an empire with dragon on the flag.

So the flag of China until 1911 was a yellow background with a blue dragon on it.

So we very strongly associate the dragon in China with the emperor and I suppose we associate it and conflate it with our own ideas of dragons being very fierce and aggressive.

And that's obviously not quite the case with the Chinese dragon.

Not only is it not always just a symbol of the emperor, it has many other roles in local religious practices, in rainmaking, in religious art, architecture.

It doesn't always have that connection to the emperor, but it also was never restricted just for the emperor's use.

The emperor only restricted the usage of the five-clawed dragon.

That was the imperial dragon.

But the others were fair game.

So I think sometimes we're misled down that route of seeing the dragon as a national symbol of China, but not always perhaps appreciating the other aspects of Chinese dragons.

Well, thank you all very much.

Thank you, Juliet, Juliet Wood, Daniel Ogden, and Kelsey Grange.

And next week we'll be discussing ideas on civility since the Renaissance, how to talk to those you disagree with and why that matters.

Thank you for listening.

And the In Our Time podcast gets some extra time now with a few minutes of bonus material from Melvin and his guests.

What did you not get a chance to say, starting with you, Daniel?

Just one more point on the relationship between snake and dragon in a Western context is that some of the most important things we associate with dragons actually derive from snakes.

Why are dragons fiery?

Why do they breathe fire?

Because viper venom has a burning effect when it's injected.

Why are they so often guardians of things, whether they're their own gold or other people's gold?

Because snakes can't close their eyes.

They're always on.

They're believed to be always awake, as it were.

They're unsleeping.

They're the best guard dogs.

Another folk attribute, not a genuine attribute, but a folk attribute of snakes is that they hypnotise their prey.

Again, that's connected with the always staring eyes and freeze it before they, you know, as they freeze the rabbit before they leap upon it.

And if we go back to Greek mythology, Medusa, she didn't have snake hair, she had dracone hair.

They were dracones, and I'm sure that that is the origin of the notion that Medusa could turn people to stone.

That was basically a snakey capability that she had.

I'd like to sort of mention the dragons that are non-Western at all.

You have sort of serpent creators, particularly prominent in South America.

Now, I'm not sure whether I pronounce this correctly, but Serra Ga starts off as a woman who becomes a serpent.

And she becomes a powerful creator by swallowing and regurgitating things.

Again, this kind of Python-esque thing, her husband, her brother, various things.

So you get this notion of kind of female cosmology.

And again, not a dragon.

a dragon in the in a in the sense of a western dragon but very much part of this cosmic element And the other thing, too, are the orishas, the dambalas, the snakes that you find in, again, in West African culture, which are very positive and very creative.

So I think one has to sort of say that very often the non-Western dragons actually have quite a different significance.

And as I say, they tend to be stay more serpentine, with the exception perhaps of the feathered serpent, who is very much part of Aztec mythology.

So I think when one talks about dragons, you've got Western dragons, Chinese dragons, Japanese dragons, dragons, and others.

I was just going to say, actually, it's very interesting because early Chinese philosophical texts tend to position the dragon as the point of creation, actually.

All things evolve out of a dragon as a start point.

One text particularly focuses on that.

So we do have that same kind of concept of a dragon as a creative force.

So that's really interesting parallels.

I also wanted to touch on the idea of has anyone ever seen a dragon?

Because they managed to find a very clever way of getting around it, actually, in early China, because they felt that Chinese dragons could shapeshift.

And so they could be not only as large as you like, but they could be as small as a silkworm.

So that could get around it, and they could also take on different guises.

So you could be talking potentially to a dragon, or you could kill a fish, but it's actually a dragon in disguise.

So maybe they really did see dragons everywhere.

Well, you've certainly covered the territory.

Thank you all very much indeed.

Thank you.

That was terrific.

That was smashing.

Kelsey, can I offer you tea or coffee?

Oh, I'm okay, thank you.

Tea will be great, thank you.

Tea Ts and a coffee and that.

I love tea fish.

Three teas and one coffee.

That was excellent.

In Our Time with Melvin Bragg was produced by Eliane Glazer, and it is a BBC Studios audio production for Radio 4.

Hello, it's Lucy Worsley here, and we're back with a brand new series of lady swindlers.

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