“I desired dragons with a profound desire. Of course, I in my timid body did not wish to have them in the neighbourhood. But the world that contained even the imagination of Fáfnir was richer and more beautiful, at whatever the cost of peril.” The words of JRR Tolkien, of course, and in The Hobbit he created arguably the greatest dragon in all literature, Smaug the Tremendous, Chiefest and Greatest of Calamities (though The Hobbit is set in a time before Brexit, otherwise Smaug would only be the second Chiefest).
I find people can be divided into two camps: those who yearn in their secret hearts for dragons to be real, and those who see them primarily as allegories. In the former camp are most writers and readers of fantasy fiction, people who had their imaginative horizons enlarged by reading Tolkien and Beowulf and the Viking Sagas and who want more. In the other camp—well, I can’t tell you how disappointed I was to discover that Wagner had written a fantasy opera cycle with dwarves and dragons and magic rings, but that when it’s staged these days, they replace the dragon with something Freudian to symbolise the hero’s repressed Oedipus-complex or something (personally I think I’d be more afraid of a dragon). We live in a disappointingly prosaic age.
Cliff-clinging wildflowers
Dragons of course are majestic, mighty, and cunning. They can unbalance any work of fiction like nuclear weapons in a cold war thriller, which is why they have to be kept offstage for most of the action. In the tales of old they were too powerful to defeat in single combat—I still treasure an old cartoon where two dragons are talking and one describes his fondness for “tinned food”, i.e., a knight roasted in his armour—and even Beowulf is mortally wounded fighting his. So heroes had to be sneaky. In the Sagas Fáfnir was killed when Sigurd hid in a trench and stabbed him in the belly as he walked over him (this is the origin of Tolkien giving Smaug a weak spot in his chest). I read of one Welsh dragon that was killed when it was perched on top of a church and its tail was nailed to the spire so that it couldn’t fly away.
Nappin’ in the sunshine
Like Tolkien, I too desired dragons with a profound desire. And I’ve not altogether given up hope: legend has it that there’s still a dragon sleeping in Radnor Forest, surrounded by five churches named after St Michael the Archangel, who fought the Dragon of Revelation. If any of the churches that surround it are ever destroyed the dragon will wake up. Legend doesn’t say what the dragon will do then; if it’s anything like me it’ll just reset its alarm and go back to sleep. But if anything happens to any of those churches, I’ll be there. On the chance, you know, just on the chance…
I expect you will be overwhelmed with folk asking to be put on speed dial at the first sign….
Is it possible they exist in one of those other dimensions we are discovering…..
Their visits to our 3rd being a chance wind blowing them off course dimensionally……perhaps..
Beautiful knitting as usual xx
Hi Tamar, I suspect one’s admiration for a dragon would last about as long as it took for it to draw breath, and then exhale! I know they’re a physical impossibility, at least in the physical world. I suspect the dimension they occupy is that of the imagination only, alas…
Sometimes I like the unblocked knitting as much or more than the final, blocked version.
Is there a hidden reason for most of the photos this time having a vague resemblance to dragons? Or is it just my pareidolia?
I prefer my dragons to be very far away.
Hi Tamar, I know what you mean about preferring the ganseys unblocked. The happy medium comes once they’ve been washed and blocked, and then unpinned and allowed to relax a little.
I’ve got a photo somewhere of a tree in the Welsh borders that looked just like a dragon as you drive past it. I used to imagine it was a dragon out of legend that had been turned to wood by a magician, but the spell wasn’t permanent and the dragon could wake up at any time…