I like to believe that all the dragons in the world were magically cursed and turned into cats. But cats have never forgotten where they come from, hence the attitude.
I nearly didn’t reblog this but the above comment makes more sense than anything I’ve ever heard.
…that’s…that’s actually a story my mom used to tell me when I was little? That a dragon showed up at someone’s cottage so they gave it milk. And the dragon enjoyed the milk, so it kept coming back and got smaller and softer and purry-er until eventually it wasn’t a dragon anymore, it was a cat, and that’s where cats came from and why we keep giving them milk.
She might have gotten the story from Ursula K. Le Guin, or I have confused it with a different dragon story.
That’s also why cats tend to hoard their toys behind the couch!
Actually the story is even older. Written by a woman named Edith Nesbit, first published in 1899, it is called “The Dragon Tamers”. It predates Leguin and other fantasy biggies like Lewis and Tolkien.
Nesbit actually can be credited with being one of the first authors that began to shift myths and legends to more fantasy-like stories (fantasy as a genre how we know it, wasn’t around then because it was just part of literature, especially British literature). In fact, many scholars who study fantasy literature and children’s literature believe that, since her children’s stories were so popular with children in England, the stories and their content prompted Tolkien (the first to coin fantasy as its own genre in his essay “On Fairy Stories”) to take up the stories of dragons and elves and fairies as they’d have been children when she was writing.
Tolkien was born in 1892. He would have been 7 when “The Dragon Tamers” was first published. Edith Nesbit did a LOT for modernizing myths, legends, and lore as a children’s author, maybe more than we will ever know.
You’re a powerful dragon that lived next to a small kingdom. For centuries you ignored humanity and lived alone in a cave, and the humans also avoided you. As the kingdom fell to invaders, a dying soldier approaches you with the infant princess, begging you to take care of her.
She is devoid of any scales or fur, this tiny ball of squalling royalty.
The knight that holds her is bleeding out more sluggishly than before, running out of life and time as he begs me to take care of her.
“No revenge.” I murmur to him; that is not my way.
“No.” He agrees softly, kneeling before my bulk and drip-dripping his life onto my floor.
“No revenge. Just want her to live.”
He topples over suddenly, and I let him fall. The ball of swaddling is what I catch in my claws. A paltry offering of gold falls from the blankets, body-warm and forgotten as I lift this princess to observe her more closely.
I see aquamarine glittering in her face, eyes lit up with tears in the rose gold hue of her cheeks. She is snotty and soiled, bloodied and unhappy. And she is mine.
“You will need milk.” I sigh, walking best I can on three legs to the back of the cave to settle her in a cradle of smooth gems. Oddly befitting her status, though it means nothing anymore. I breathe hotly over her, the screaming quieting in the face of warm air and the white noise I make.
“Sleep, princess.” I murmur soothingly. “I will return with food.”
————
“Get down from there.”
I do not need to raise my voice, she knows well enough who I am speaking to and what I speak about. She jumps from the tree branch she had been climbing and lands on my head.
“I want to fly like you do.”
Oh, she is stubborn, with hair like fire and those aquamarine eyes. She pulls at my scales and bares her blunt little teeth in a copy of my own snarl.
“I could gobble you up.” I warn, unable to hide the smile in my voice. It is good she is stubborn; any dragon should be just a little head-strong.
“I would break your teeth with my skull!” She cackles back, scrabbling down to my back to nuzzle the soft leather of my wings.
“When will my wings grow?”
Always so full of questions.
“Maybe never. There are land dragons, sea dragons, dragons of the sky…perhaps you will lose your arms and legs and become a wyrm.”
She laughs her harsh cackle, biting at me playfully.
I love her so.
I cannot even bring myself to tell her she is not a dragon.
i cannot even bring myself to tell her she is not a dragon
^Haiku^bot^8. I detect haikus with 5-7-5 format. Sometimes I make mistakes.
I usually don’t like posting low resolution images (for me: anything below 5MB) but this photo of the pulpit of Saint Hedwig’s parish church in Dobroszow, Poland was too good to pass up. Its corpulent cetacean form no doubt alludes to the Biblical tale of Jonah and the whale, and could have been a warning to rambling clerics to “say what needs to be said.”
in my one original universe dragons are just shitty possums that don’t really do anything, you just find them in your garden or bathtub making this expression
You know. It’d explain a lot if dragon eggs were this impenetrable substance that only could break down and safely release the fledgling if it was sufficiently surrounded by gold. And for centuries dragons just needed to dig down and find a gold vein in the mountains, and they’d return and return and return to the same area, up until human were like: hey, we have no actual use for this super soft inert metal, but we like it, so it’s ours now.
And the dragons were then forced to go: hello! I see your capitalist nightmare society is hoarding gold because it decided it had value for no reason. We need it for actual reasons. We would like ti back now.
Humanity: We sort of based our entire value system off it? So no?
Dragons: But you aren’t using it and we need it.
Humanity: Sweet. Can you pay us for it?
Dragons: Do you accept UNENDING FIRE TERROR as payment?
So humanity was just like: ooh noooo. The dragons just like sleeping on top of gold for no reeeeason. They stole all of it because they are just terrible and greedy. So terrible. Our gold. Oh no. We need it. For richness. Oh nooooooo. You have to save us then you can be rich too.
George R.R. Martin: dragons are huge ferocious beasts who answer to a master
Tolkien: dragons are annoying, talking assholes
One interesting thought on this:
Fairy tale dragons? They’re like Smaug. They’re arrogant, talkative, they hoard treasure, they eat virgins. They’re amoral rather than evil, but they are intelligent monsters.
The dragon in Voyage Of The Dawn Treader, the one indirectly responsible for Eustace’s draconic curse is along the same lines.
At that time that is what a dragon was. There was a general consensus in western literature that dragons were, well, that.
In Medieval stories, dragons are to be killed by brave men. Gawain fights “wyrms” – a kind of wingless dragon. St. George slays a dragon. So does Beowulf. So does King Arthur. To be a worthwhile myth hero you have, at some point, to slay a dragon.
Early modern and nineteenth century dragons – we see one counter example – Faustus chariot is drawn by dragons in “Doctor Faustus.” The first really solid “friendly dragon” story is The Reluctant Dragon, which became a 1941 Disney film. That is the first story I can find about a dragon that befriends a human – but it’s friendship, not “human masters dragon.”
The second friendly dragon is E. Nesbit’s “The Last of the Dragons” who decides he’d rather hang out with the princess than fight the prince (the first example of subversion of the dragons eat maidens trope that I can find).
But they’re the minority.
In the 1930s, when Lewis and Tolkien were writing, dragons were the bad guys. The rare exceptions were dragons deciding not to act like dragons.
Then something happened.
That something probably started with a 1948 children’s book called “My Father’s Dragon – about a kid who runs away to Wild Island and rescues a baby dragon. Heard of it? If you’ve studied kid lit, sure, it won a ton of awards. Otherwise…nope, and certainly in Dawn Treader, written in 1950, dragons were still bad.
In the 1960s we start to see a couple more “good” dragons. But it’s almost always the same thing. Dragons are bad, except this one. This is a special dragon.
Then in 1967 John Campbell ran a story in Analog named Weyr Search. Heard of that one? Yup.
It was part of a novel called Dragonsflight, written by Grand Master Anne McCaffrey.
And she completely changed what dragons were.
Anne’s dragons were gentle, genetically engineered protectors who bonded to a human rider at birth and were “mastered” by that rider – the dragons offered instinct, but the reason came from the humans.
Anne McCaffrey was one of the first female authors to write science fiction by women about women – and while she had a number of flaws and was honestly a better worldbuilder than writer she inspired a lot of people.
And changed our view of dragons as a fantasy trope.
Since then most fantasy writers that include dragons have them as friendly and willing to be ridden by humans. Even the “good” dragons in the DragonLance novels.
In other words: In the space between Tolkein and Martin, who’s first short story collection was published in 1976, almost a decade after Weyr Search Anne McCaffrey turned dragons on their head.
Daenerys’ dragons owe more in their lineage to Ramoth than they do to Grendel, the dragon slain by Beowulf.
(In other words, literary evolution is fascinating).
Urocyon's Jaunts 2.0 
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