The Penguin Book of Dragons

 From the TBR stacks: The Penguin Book of Dragons, edited by Scott G. Bruce

I don't remember the first stories I heard or read about dragons, but they have always been my favorite mythical creatures. Maybe because I associate them with cats? My ideas of dragons were shaped first by Ursula Le Guin, in her Earthsea books. Then I fell deeply in love with Anne McCaffrey's Pern novels, with their dragons and fire lizards. I wrote what was technically fan-fiction when I wrote myself into the books - of course I Impressed a queen dragon. It was magical meeting someone at college who shared my love of those books. Just a couple of weeks ago, I discovered that my sister-in-law, whom I've known for almost 40 years, also read and loved the Pern books. And then there is J.R.R. Tolkien's Smaug.

I still read stories of dragons with delight, particularly when the dragons are complicated characters. Among my recent favorites:

• The Termeraire series by Naomi Novik - the Napoleonic Wars with dragons (at least the early books, I gave up on the series when the war moved to Russia)
• Tooth and Claw, by Jo Walton - Anthony Trollope's Framley Parsonage, with dragons
• When Women Were Dragons, by Kelly Barnhill - women become dragons to escape, to revenge themselves, to be free
• And one of the best books I read last year, To Shape a Dragon's Breath by Moniquill Blackgoose, which just won a Nebula award - Anequs, a Native American girl in an America colonized from Scandinavia, becomes bonded to a dragon hatchling - and is immediately forced to attend a colonizers' dragon academy.

I bought a copy of The Penguin Book of Dragons as soon as I saw it advertised, back in 2021. I finally picked it up a couple of days ago, thinking it would be a book to dip in and out of. To my surprise, I couldn't put it down. It covers so many aspects of how dragons have been written about and reported on, going back to ancient China, India, Greece, and Rome. It ends with stories by Kenneth Grahame and E. Nesbit, who were part of a trend of domesticating dragons, especially for children's stories. The editor, Scott Bruce, connects this to the current popularity of dragons in books and TV/film, down to Game of Thrones (which I couldn't read and didn't want to watch). 

I was familiar with the Christian connections of dragons to Satan and the fallen angels, from the Book of Revelation. I didn't realize though how seriously people took dragons. There are lengthy extracts from two 18th century naturalists whose books combined historical overviews of dragon lore down to current events involving dragons, which they firmly believed were authentic. I also enjoyed the stories from Asia, including one from the Rig Veda (1500-1200 BCE) of the storm deity Indra battling a dragon who is holding the world's water hostage - the earliest dragon story the editor has found.

One thing I didn't know: Edmund Spenser's The Faerie Queene is a political and religious allegory, where dragons represent the sins and evils of the Roman Catholic Church. The excerpts included from that were rather gruesome.