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Racing Turtles

@zenosanalytic / zenosanalytic.tumblr.com

"Why run, my little Phoenician?"
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reblogged
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kaijubrains

Most typical fantasy dragons are huge, powerful things. Discworld is hilarious for essentially making them this but reptillian:

They also explode and die when they are upset/frightened. Which is uhhh... a lot of the time. Fucking pathetic beasts

Paul Kidby’s art of them is amazing

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drachenwiki

Pratchett is one of my two favorite authors of all time. I practically spent my teenage years with him and also with spec evo stuff, often about dragons. So I really love what he did there. Fire as a natural weapon would require some pretty drastic adaptions for an animal.

What always struck me as weird, though, is how he decided that dragons, of all classic mythical creatures probably the one with the most spec evo attached to it, are just to unrealistic to play them straight in his fantasy world that also has luggage that runs around on dozens of little feet and has a will of its own, wizards and witches as basically normal jobs and a turtle and four elephants the size of planets.

It's not just Pratchett. There's also this scene in Hellboy: The Nature of the Beast, where Hellboy, a demon from hell who has fought cyborg nazis, witches, gods, ghosts, fairies and eldritch abominations, when he is told he has to fight a dragon, initially doesn't believe that dragons existed. This is, as far as I know, the only time when Hellboy doubts the existence of something supernatural.

What is it about dragons that makes Fantasy authors go: "This is far more unrealistic than all those other fantasy tropes"? And why is it the same kind of mythical creature that gets (often pseudoscientific) natural explanations from not only spec evo fans but also cryptozoologists and creationists far more often than any other kind of mythical creature (except for modern ones like cryptids or aliens)?

Time has notably worn away the Dragon's prestige. We believe in the lion as reality and symbol; we believe in the Minotaur as symbol but no longer as reality. The Dragon is perhaps the best known but also the least fortunate of fantastic animals. It seems childish to us and usually spoils the stories in which it appears. It is worth remembering, however, that we are dealing with a modern prejudice, due perhaps to a surfeit of Dragons in fairy tales.

J. L. Borges, di Giovanni translation

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drachenwiki

Chinese influences on European dragons in the early Middle Ages

Yesterday, I read a chapter about the Parisian saint Marcellus from the book  “Time, Work & Culture in the Middle Ages” by French historian Jacques Le Goff. In it, he alludes to the hypothesis, that dragon depictions from the Merovingian era have been influenced by Chinese motives that have come to Europe through cultures from the Central Asian steppe.

That certainly makes sense to me, since the Huns have had a presence in Europe up until the 5th century, but I’ve never heard of this hypothesis before. Le Goffs sources are all in French (for example “La Civilisation mérovingienne d'aprés les sépultures, les textes et le laboratoire” by Edmond Salin), which I can’t read, and a quick search in Google Scholar didn’t bring up anything interesting.

Does anybody know if this hypothesis is still considered? The book is from the late seventies, so maybe it’s something that never caught on or has been discredited since then, but I haven’t found anything on that, either.

Huh, you might be on to something interesting there. What are the sources?

He alludes to the theory on page 170-171, and mentions a source on page 333, the above mentioned  “La Civilisation mérovingienne d'aprés les sépultures, les textes et le laboratoire” by Edmond Salin, which is available online here: https://www.persee.fr/doc/crai_0065-0536_1959_num_103_2_11068

But I can’t read French and I don’t trust google translate on such complex texts.

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theload

I’ll reblog this too. Anyone know French who could help?

Speaking. The Salin paper linked above is not, in fact, the source cited, but rather a summary of findings in that book. So no emphasis on dragons, apart from (translated for your reading pleasure):

In the VIth Century, a wave of animal art came in from the Pontic regions (the fish, the hydra, the cicada, the eagle from High Asia). Then, with the Lombard invasion, a very important wave of animal art of Scytho-Sarmatian origin (griffons, various dragons, rolled up monsters, etc.) reached the West.

Not much on dragons here.

Fortunately, the entire four-volume set of La Civilisation Mérovingienne is available to borrow on Archive! I’ll see what I can find in it.

(Have I mentioned how important Archive is today? I’ll mention it)

Can’t be mentioned too often…

To be fair, Le Goff doesn’t seem to think much of Salin.

… the author, following J. Grimm, gives the rather improbable and in any case derivative interpretation of the dragon as guardian of a treasure.

Alright this was a ride. There’s a lot there about dragons and griffons in Merovingian art, the two-headed monster, the decorative dragon. I’m going to focus on the one you were specifically looking for though, the monstre enroulé (the curled-up or rolled-up monster).

Anyway! Translation my own, any errors are entirely my responsibility:

First of all, in Gaul and in the times of the Tène, the curled-up monster appears on a Boii stater (plate K, 4); a ball is found in the center of the circle drawn by its body. A similar depiction also evokes the monster Tiamat and with it the oldest myths of the Middle East. Oddly, the monster that adorns a jade Chinese ring from the Han period (plate K, 3) is so close to the Boii depiction, with its dorsal crest and its tail curled at the extremity, that a convergent phenomenon seems excluded: the two images must be issued from a common source.
We can distinguish similarly on the foot of a Chinese Zhou vase a curled-up monster (plate K, 2) singularly close to the monster which decorates the damasked Merovingian plaque without known provenance (plate K, 5b).
It is, as has happened before, the World of the Steppes which must have served in this case as a liaison between the East and the West. The Scythians had known in fact, the curled-up animal, as witnesses this median medallion from a bronze belt buckle, belonging to Scythian art from the VIth Century BC, found in the necropolis of Olbia (mouth of the Dniepr) (plate K, 1). More ancient than the preceding, this depiction here, does not seem monstrous yet; one would say it was a rabbit or a squirrel, but its tail already shows the curling that we found on the Han jade ring or the Boii stater.
Going back to the time period that concerns us, it is possible that the Merovingian curled monster is the Midgardsorm, distant descendant of Tiamat. But the sense attributed to the depictions has, as we know, evolved often, and we should retain another aspect of Germanic legend: the curled serpent holding its tail in its mouth is, effectively, the guardian of a treasure which it surrounds with its body; as it grows, the treasure increases as well; when the coils of the serpent loosen and a space exists between the mouth and the tail, then it is possible to slip through and steal the prey over which it watches. [footnote: cf. Grimm, Deutsche Mythologie] We find here the legend of the treasure-guarding dragons and this is the one that in this case seems to apply the most often to depictions of the Merovingian curled monster whose tail touches its mouth or even enters it. [italics in original]

The plate in question:

And that’s! @drachenwiki @theload anything else I can get you?

Awesome. Thank you very much for the translation. The similarities are indeed fascinating, but I’m not sure if they couldn’t habe appeared independently. I wonder why this hypothesis doesn’t appear in newer texts.

I’m going to guess lack of support and/or interest. Seems to have been a stretch.

However, history/folklore/ethnozoology grad students, if you’re looking for a paper to work on…

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reblogged

I would definitely recommend Ogden's books to anyone curious about dragons in Greek and Classical mythology.

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Oh yes, definitely! I can’t recommend them enough, although the cost may be a bit steep for the casual dragon dabbler.

I should go back to book reviews :/

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drachenwiki

I only read Drakon, which is really good, but I can also recommend Ogden's blog where he lists primary sources about dragons.

There's also at least one short article by him that's available online.

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