461. Dragons

This episode is brought to you by Skye. So, Dominic, we are talking about dragons today, and I know that you are as excited as I am about the return of House of the Dragon, because it's been two years, almost two years, since we last saw Matt Smith, Emma Darcy, Olivia Cook, on House of the Dragon, and now they are returning for the biggest TV event of the summer. So, more characters and, best of all, five new dragons. So, Tom, you'll remember the big hullabaloo about King Aegon II's coronation, and you'll remember what happened to his cousin, Lucerius Targaryen, murdered by a dragon.

I do. So, season two will see the much anticipated civil war between the Greens and the Blacks unfold as Tom, the Dance of the Dragons, truly begins. The realm is divided, all of Westeros must choose aside. So, please tune in every Monday, and, Dominic, there are so many questions.

Who will win the war? Will Team Black or Team Green claim the Iron Throne? Which of these factions will triumph in the Dance of the Dragons? House of the Dragon is available now exclusively on Skye, and you can, of course, go to sky.com to find out more.

A dragon is no idle fancy. Whatever may be his origins, in fact, or invention, the dragon and legend is a potent creation of men's imagination. richer and significant than his Barrow is in gold. Even today, despite the critics, you may find men not ignorant of tragic legend and history, who have heard of heroes and indeed seen them, who have yet been caught by the fascination of the worm.

That was, of course, Gerard Tolkien, in his great essay, Beowulf, The Monsters and the Critics, which he published in 1936, and Tom, that was an essay that changed the way people thought about Anglo-Saxon literature, about fantasy literature more generally, I suppose, but also about dragons. Yeah, absolutely. So, he talks about people who've been caught by the fascination of the worm. He doesn't need, and I think pretty clearly that he's talking about himself.

Yeah. He's obviously a man who was obsessed by dragons, but since talking about that essay, dragons have gone completely mainstream. In part, these sacks are talking himself, but more recently, due to the global phenomenon that is Game of Thrones and House of the Dragon, so the novels first by George R.R. Martin, and then the TV series.

So, people were very excited about them when Game of Thrones first came out, I remember watching it, what is it, 10 years ago or something? The dragons and Game of Thrones, when they start off, dragons are extinct or they think they were all too vanished, and they're in these eggs, and then they hatch at the end of the first series. And they're very soon, they are, they are, they're very kind of gremlins, yeah, but actually Game of Thrones, in TV terms was groundbreaking because the CGI use for the dragons was extraordinary. I mean, it was the first time anyone had done anything like this, it didn't look a little bit fake.

And actually, as the series went on, the dragons became more and more important, because they sort of played the part of, well, we were talking about this before, we started recording, not me about whether or not the dragons can be likened to weapons and mass destruction. And at the end of Game of Thrones, without giving it away to people who haven't, well, actually, if you read the book, you haven't got to the end, but if you've seen the TV series, the dragons sort of full potential is exploited in a terrifying way. Yeah, unleashed in a kind of apocalyptic manner. And the reason that we're recording this is that today, going out on Sky is House of the Dragon, so series one has already gone out, and now series two is coming out.

And in that series, which you can see on Sky, House of the Dragon is, well, do you know what, we're being sponsored by Sky? Let's be upfront. I hope that they will allow me to say that it is quite like Henry VI part one, the Shakespeare play that shows us the opening of the Wars of the Roses. So it's like the Wars of the Roses.

It's very, very Shakespearean, kind of rival noble families quarreling over the crown. So it's like Shakespeare. I mean, you don't know what's going to happen. And as the name implies, it has a lot of dragons.

Right. So the dragons in House of the Dragon, it's not like in Game of Thrones where there's the mother of dragons and she has three dragons, and that makes a remarkable figure in the context of this world, Westeros, but in House of the Dragon, there's a sort of nuclear proliferation, isn't there, of dragons? And I think that dragons kind of play the role of tactical nuclear weapons, so battlefield, nuclear weapons. And we see the origins of the family of the Nares, the mother of dragons, so it's the Targaryens.

They have come from overseas, they've brought their dragons with them, and this has enabled them to conquer the continent of Westeros. And basically the plot of House of the Dragon is civil war within the Targaryen family. And it ends up, so the end of series one, one of the rival candidates who is a Targaryen herself and can ride a dragon, is wondering whether she should fight to defend her right to the throne. Because she knows what it will mean, and there are these very, very kind of chilling lines that you get in the final episode of series one, when dragons flew to war before, so she's talking about what happened even before this, everything burned.

I do not wish to rule over a kingdom of Ash and Bone. And you see in the final stages of season one, you see how dragons actually can't be controlled even by the people who supposedly can ride them. And I'm guessing that people listening to this, there will either be massive enthusiasm. I mean, Game of Thrones was a huge label phenomenon, and House of Dragons had massive critical success as well.

But there will also be kind of bewilderment, because there are lots of people, Tom, who would say, listen to this, say, oh, and history of past dragons, really. And actually, that itself is a historical phenomenon, just talking in 1936. Corrections, sober taste may refuse to admit that there can be an interest for us, the proud we that includes all intelligent living people, in ogres and dragons. And actually talking, when he wrote that essay in the 30s, was saying, as a society we have become indifferent to, we've lost sight of the, there I say, the weirdness, Tom, monsters of dragons.

And we think of them as childish, but actually they are a really, really interesting and important cultural and historical phenomenon that opens up all kinds of different avenues of inquiry. Well, the amazing thing is that even George RR Martin, the novelist who created Game of Thrones, even he had to be persuaded to include dragons. So it was his friend, the writer, Phyllis Eisenstein, wrote him and said, George, it's a fantasy. You've got to have dragons.

George RR Martin was doing the Wars of the Roses, basically, in Lannisters and Starks, thanks to the New York. And I suppose he had an anxiety that putting dragons in it would mean that people thought it was childish, that it was silly and frivolous. But as we'll discover, there's nothing frivolous about dragons at all, is there? Well, I think also from the historical point of view, so looking at the dragon as a cultural phenomenon, there is a really obvious, strange factor about it, which obviously dragons are fantasy.

I mean, there's no disputing that, although I think secretly Tolkien kind of did believe that they might have existed. He kind of drops hints about that in that essay that you were quoting. But the weird thing is that, basically, everyone kind of knows what they look like, even though they never existed. So you know that they're reptilian, that they kind of have scales, that they have littlest eyes, that they have flickering tongue.

You know that they're long and snake-like, or you might say worm-like, so Tolkien in that passage, you've quoted the worm, that they breathe fire, that they have wings, that they can fly, that they have legs. Okay, just on legs. Yeah, two or four, Tom, because that is a among dragonologists, that is a crucial area of contention, isn't it? Well, dragon has two or four legs.

Actually, specifically among British heralds, which we'll come to. So for British heraldry, two-legged dragons are Wiven, and a four-legged dragon is a dragon. We'll be coming to that. And Martin's dragons, so the dragons that you see in the house of the dragon, are kind of mid-way between that.

So we'll be discussing three-legged, but so yeah. So everyone kind of, you know, if you say what's a dragon, someone in the West, they don't usually know it. But the even weird thing is that dragons are not confined to kind of medieval Europe. When people think of dragons, they think of China, dragons also in their effectively dragons and Greek myths and Babylonian legends and so on.

Yeah, and Egyptian. So you could say it's kind of pretty much a global phenomenon. So that raises your question. Where is this idea coming from?

It can't just be kind of cross-cultural contamination, because the Chinese are coming up with it at the same time as the Babylonians are, and they don't know each other. So an obvious theory, Tom, I don't want to send you into a seven-hour lecture about this, because I know this is your special subject. But an obvious theory would be that there's some kind of weirdly buried cultural memory of dinosaurs, which is, I mean, it's so text-to-my-boxes, and I would say love that to be true. And it was actually, it was proposed by Carl Sargam, who is the great popularizer of science, and he wrote a book with a brilliant title, The Dragons of Eden, where he proposes that the kind of seeming universality of the dragons and myth is a kind of legacy of our primordial ancestry in Mesozoic ecosystems, where we were tiny little shrews, kind of dodging tyrannosaurs.

How would that have been passed down, though, in pre-Aegristic age? So I think it's fair to say that that hasn't met with universal enthusiasm among scientists, so we're not the rest of science, aren't we? I don't know. I don't feel we're qualified to say about that.

But there is also another thesis, the discovery of dragon fossils might have inspired it, and there's a brilliant series of books by the scholar, called Adrian Mayer, who pursues this theme. And I think that actually there is a kind of definite case for this in the case of China and Mongolia, because there are quite a lot of dinosaur fossils that you find there kind of weathering out of the rocks. And you can kind of see how that might be something that might have worked. And we also do have examples in Mediterranean world.

You're made plenty. Plenty of the elder. We can't have an episode on mad kind of wonders without mentioning clearly. Yeah, so he writes about a Roman general who was in the train of Pompey the Great, who was campaigning in the East, in the 50s BC.

And in 58 BC, he comes back from the East, he's coming back from what's now Lebanon and Israel, and he exhibits in Rome the bones of a giant beast found at Joppa, which is now Jaffa. And plenty of records of this was 40 feet long, that it had ribs longer than those of an African elephant. And the assumption is that this is a sea monster that had been turned to stone by Perseus, who was the legendary hero with the head of Medusa. I love that theory.

Yeah, and had rescued the princess Andromeda. So this was the theory. And then there is another much more recent example of this happening, which happened in late medieval Austria. I love an Austrian dragon.

The town of Clagenford. So where in the 13th century, which is very late, there's reports that a dragon was kind of wrecking havoc as dragons tend to do. And the local Duke offers a reward for anyone who could capture it and kill it. And so a brave young man gets a bull, chains it up, and he kind of has a hook on the chain and he catches the dragon like a fish.

Fishing with a bull as bait. And he kills it. And then what turbo charges this? A huge excitement.

1355. People are digging around in a cave and it's called the dragons cave. And they find what seems to be the skull of the dragon. And they bring it out, it's made of stone, and they store it in the, it's kind of exhibited in the town hall.

It's one of the great wonders of Clagenford. And in 1590, the town father's commissioner statute of this dragon and the sculptor goes to look at this skull, and he models the head of the dragon on the contours of the skull. So it is reputed to be the first reconstruction of a prehistoric creature actually looking at the bones. But the question is, was that skull of a dinosaur?

Am I not right in thinking that actually neither of these collections of bones were dinosaurs. So the Pliny's thing or whatever it is, that's a whale, isn't it? Yeah, basically, there are no dinosaurs found in this region. And actually monsters don't actually exist.

And the, yes, that as well. You know, but it might have been a kind of, you know, a Tyrannosaurus. And so, for dragon in the cave is a willy rhinoceros. Also, of course, the issue with the fossils theory is that, so for example, dragons play huge part as we will go on to see in Norse sagas and things, don't they?

Worms and warms. But there aren't big fossils of dinosaurs in now, it's kind of maybe so they just where's it come from? Right. So I think that theory, I mean, the kind of elements of truth do it, but I think that there are, you know, it's inadequate to explain the whole phenomenon.

And so what a lot of anthropologists and also Jungian psychologists love an archetype. They have proposed that dragons are an expression of the dread of the violence and danger of nature. And I think it's interesting that you get these legends emerging in Egypt, in Babylon, in China, all of which are kind of river-based civilizations, and therefore might be subject to violent flooding. So perhaps that explains why these stories are kind of appearing specifically in these legends.

Could you argue as well, that's why we're interested in dragons right now. The idea of the world being reduced to ash, the idea of fire in the climate crisis and all that stuff. People are more receptive to that. Yeah, that's a really interesting point.

But I think the argument for anthropologists would be that it could also be a reminder of an age when humans were the prey rather than the predator. And perhaps this is what explains the kind of reptilian and particularly serpentine quality of dragons. Because everybody hates a snake. Well, that's what we're going to see.

Not everybody hates a snake. So my hate snakes, I have no time for snakes. I hold them in very low regard. I can do on a Jones.

And actually, there's a snake. You don't mind a snake. Would you have a snake hung around your shoulders? Would you welcome that?

I think I wanted to intimidate people. But if you were strolling through the Suks of Marrakesh and a Barker, hung a snake around your shoulders. I think welcome to my home and I would, the Lord of snakes or something. The Lord of snakes.

I quite that. I would. That's how you'll be known from that one. So we've mentioned how Tolkien refers to dragons as worms.

The old English for dragon was, that was lovely. I really enjoyed that. And the old Norse is an orma. Yeah.

You're very rolling around. And actually in the dragon, the dragon written by the character played by Matt Smith. Yeah. That's why Dr.

Hu and Duke of Edinburgh is called the blood. Right. So the way in which dragons are serpentine in most of the myths, so they live in holes. So you get this in the dragon.

They live in dragon pits or caves. They, you know, they're liddless and snakes have no eyelids. They can't close their eyes. And so when you look at a snake, you know, it's unblinking.

It's quite intimidating. And of course, a lot of snakes are poisonous. And I think it's pretty clear that that's where the idea of fire comes from, the idea of poison coming out of the mouths. So I think that's all very convincing, but it still doesn't entirely get to the root of the issue of where the kind of the dragon that you get in, in the house of the dragon, the western dragon is coming from because not all dragons are fundamentally like snakes.

You know, they have other attributes. They have wings. They have legs. And also dragons are terrifying, right?

And snakes are obviously not always terrifying because sometimes I know you're, you love a Greek snake, you know, and Greek snakes, they can be wise and benevolent. Well, they can be. So there's a sacred snake on the croplist and Athens. Yeah.

Girls feed it with honey cakes. And when the persons invade in 480 BC and burn Athens, the coming incineration of the croplist is foretold by the sacred snake vanishing. And of course, you have a slapius, the god of healing, one of his symbols is kind of snakes coiled around a star. You've got a wound or a saw.

Yeah, he'll get a snake to come and lick it for you. Yeah, you can lie down at the temple of a slapius and the holy snakes will come out and lick your wings. If you had to choose between having a snake, if you had an open wound and you could have a snake come and lick it or Catherine of Siena suck at it, which would you go for? I think I'll give the snake.

You do. Yeah, it'd be sweet. Little snakes. I don't know.

I don't massively like Catherine of Siena. You're a big fan of a concept table as well, aren't you? Love concept. So in Byzantium, the city that Constantinople will kind of be built on, no one was allowed to attack a snake to kill a snake.

So some Patrick would have been unwelcome. Very unwelcome. Because snakes are seen by the Byzantines as benefactors of the city. So that's one tradition, obviously, where snakes are seen as quite positive.

But what about dragons? Of course, there is a very, very well-known dragon tradition in which dragons are very, very, very beneficent. And that causes the Chinese tradition. So the Chinese, the dragon brings rain, if you're a good emperor.

Yeah, it looks like dragons are a great charm of yours. And the dragon generally symbolizes sort of balance and well-being and sort of national prosperity and stuff like that, right? They are absolutely not wicked. I mean, quite the opposite.

As you say, they are symbols of that kind of sense of harmony that in a sense lies at the heart of Chinese civilization. And they are also incredibly old. So there are portrayals of what seem to be dragons that go right the way back to the nail effect. So thousands and thousands of years ago.

And all the way through the histories of China, right the way up to the present day, emperors are being visited by dragons as a sense in which dragons, I think, you know, people in China really do seem to believe that dragons existed. They're not seen as as merely fantastical. And there's an incredibly recent example of that. So you and Shikai, who is one of the kind of the leading figures in the the revolution movement that ends up toppling the empire in the 1910s.

In 1915, he decides it's all been terrible mistake. They should bring back the emperor and he nominates himself to be the emperor. And he actually makes an attempt to kind of unearth the bones of a dragon to demonstrate that in some way he has been chosen as emperor. And he's you know, he's casting his rule as something that because it's been blessed by a dragon.

Yeah. Therefore, yeah, brilliant. Does he have any different moments? He doesn't know.

He doesn't know. He has time to look for it. So that Chinese tradition is obviously very, very different to the Westerosi tradition that you get. And so, you know, we come back to this question.

Where is that, you know, the fire breathing winged hostile dragon coming from? And I think that you can actually trace it back to a very obvious point of origin. And it's talking. Oh, yeah.

I mean, when I think about when would I first encounter dragons, you know, as a boy, I guess they're in children's literature, generally, but they're only in children's literature and they're really after the Hobbit. Yeah. So the Hobbit is famously talking, starts writing it in the early 1920s when he's marking school certificate papers after he's come home from the first world boy, is that Oxford? And he sits down, he writes in the hall of the grounds that they lived a Hobbit and fibrillied don't know which I can't believe is anybody.

This guy, Bilbo Baggins, he's a burglar. He goes off with some dwarves and a wizard and they're going to find this lost treasure in the lonely mountain, which is guarded by the dragon's smog. And the whole trajectory of the narrative is leading up to the great confrontation between Bilbo, a hero and the dragon's smog, who is actually a tremendous character. Yeah.

He's like his voice by George Sanders or Taylor Thomas, isn't he? So he's very, but actually in the film, he's threatening and his voice is very deep and stuff, but in the book, he's rather swivey and a bain and witty. Yeah. And so that obviously is drawing on kind of traditions as current in the 1930s, but Tolkien is the great scholar of Norse and Old English literature and mythology.

And he is very, very consciously drawing on these traditions for his portrayal of dragons. Well, there were two particular on the two dragons that basically influenced the language. But he says in Northern literature, there are only two dragons that are significant. And the first of these is a dragon called Fafnir.

And this is part of a kind of vast corpus of Norse legends that the Tolkien is completely fascinated by. And basically in this, there is a dwarf who has killed his father, who steals his treasure, who hides it in a cave, who squats down on this treasure. And over the course of time, he becomes a wyrm. A wyrm becomes a dragon.

And his brother, who's very cross about this, Reagan. So he forties a great sword and Wagner fans, this is kind of a great moment in the ring cycle. And he persuades the hero Sigurd, or Siegfried if you're watching Wagner, to take the sword and to dig a trench, which kind of runs by the water where Fafnir comes down to drink. And Sigurd lies in his trench and Fafnir is describing crawling down towards the water.

And as he crawls along, Sigurd stabs him in his unprotected underbelly. And Fafnir slowly dies. But as he dies, he talks to Sigurd to try and work out who it is who's killed him, trying to get his name kind of penetrating his riggles. He's very, very clever.

He's very, very cunning. And when he dies, Sigurd roasts his heart and eats it. And from that point on can understand the language of animals and birds. So there's a lot there that is in the Hobbits, right?

There is. So the riddles in particular. But there is also another tradition. So the second dragon that is significant in Northern literature appears in the Old English poem Beowulf.

And Beowulf is a great hero. He confronts three monsters. He confronts a monster called Grendel. He confronts Grendel's mum in lots of ways.

He's even more terrifying. At the end of his life, he confronts this dragon. And again, in this, the dragon lies on a great pile of treasure. A slave comes and steals a single golden cup.

And the dragon immediately notices this. Goes to the furos, lives it about it. Goes kind of growing up, burning everyone. And so Beowulf, eager to defend his people, despite being very old, goes up and he fights the dragon and kills the dragon.

But he himself dies of the wounds. So there's, I mean, those two dragons, you have, you have Tolkien's dragon. So the riddling. So when we first meet him, he does this riddle game of Bilbo.

And he's clever. And he's sort of well-spoken and stuff. The dragon guards stolen treasure. I mean, that's a theme in both of those stories.

The dragon is killed by having a vulnerable spot on his underbelly. So in the Hobbit, he's killed by Bardbowman and he's killed by Sigurd or Siegfried if you're a vognerian. So Tolkien obviously is, is, as Tolkien would, because he was a professor of English literature at Oxford. He's drawing on these traditions.

The one thing that obviously is here, but there's not in the Chinese dragons or any, or indeed in Game of Thrones, is the idea of the treasure that a dragon is inextricably linked to a kind of stolen treasure horde that is greed. Yeah. Well, I think even more than that, because Fafneh is originally human, becomes a dragon. And I think that there is absolutely a sense in Norse and Old English literature that dragons are basically humans who have been corrupted by avarice.

So you see this again and again in various epics that people who, who succumb to avarice will turn into a worm-like monster squatting on grape hiles of gold. And in the Hobbit, Tolkien refers to this as dragon sickness. And of course, Tolkien was great friends with C.S. Lewis.

In the Narni stories, there is a very similar episode where you used this in the door of Ester Sreta. Yes, for a progressive school, you went to a progressive school, you went to a, yes, and kind of drank prune juice. Yeah. And doesn't be of any of it.

Leftering parents. Yeah. Well, he turns into a dragon. Yeah.

That's a punishment. So, they go to a progressive school, and it's a dragon. It's basically the lesson of that. So, I mean, that is obviously a tradition that doesn't pass into houses, raga, and western ones.

But one of them that does is the fact that these are monsters that fly and that breathe fire. So the fire breathing is there from an early point, as well, isn't it? So when the Vikings are telling this, this is the famous, famous moment in kind of Viking history, the moment they're perceived as having erupted onto the European scene, people talk of flashes of lightning and storms and fiery dragons were seen flying in the air. Yeah.

And that idea of fire and slaughter and the storm clouds gathering in the East Thomas, they always do. Yeah. Those are all tied together in that kind of Norse Anglo-Saxon understanding of a dragon, right? Yeah, absolutely.

And this raises a kind of a puzzle because, you know, we've been saying that the idea of dragons as worms is a really fundamental part in both Old English and Norse literature. So, where is the idea of wings coming from? Because there is actually another famous kind of a dragon-esque monster in Norse mythology, which is the Midgard serpent, which is absolutely huge creature, which is so enormous that its coils unfold the earth and at Ragnarok at the end of days for the great, you know, the god with the hammer and the Midgard servant will kind of kill each other. But there's no hint that the Midgard serpent has legs.

Fafnir, when he's going down to the waterhole, is crawling. He doesn't seem to be kind of walking. So, he's certainly not flying. I mean, it seems to be kind of worm-like.

Right. And even in Beowulf, although the dragon is described as having wings, he never seems to use them. So, I think what you get there is a really strong sense that the tradition of winged dragons is being drafted onto the idea of purely serpentine dragons. Oh, so there are two different, that's interesting.

There are two different friends then. I think so. That leads to this. So, one is your wirrum, a wirrum, and then another is the dragon with wings, which is a different tradition.

Right. And in Beowulf, there are two words of dragon. So, there is a wirrum, but there is also draka. And this opens up the question of where is the word draka coming from?

And I think, yeah, I mean, we will explore this in the second half of this episode that the dragon of Westeros is a kind of fusion of the northern dragon, the worm, and the draka. And in the second half, we'll see where the draka comes from. Well, drama. Return after the break to find out the true roots of the modern dragon.

This episode is brought to you by Skye. Now, Tom, I was chatting to you a couple days ago, wasn't I? And you said to me just how unbelievably excited you were at the new season of House of the Dragon as the struggle for the Iron Throne descends into death and destruction. Because Dominic, I actually had the privilege of attending the House of the Dragon season two premiere in the heart of London's glittering West End in Leicester Square.

And there was a great Iron Throne, which I sat on and posed, I thought very fetchingly. You were on the red carpet. Incredible scenes. I was treading the red carpet.

And I don't want to give any spoilers away, but I can confirm that the desire to make short of dragon power is basically what both sides are all about. So the blacks, they have more dragons, but the problem is the greens have the most formidable dragon of all the world's largest dragon, Vaguar. So it's all about air power. So Tom, with the realm divided, all the Westeros must choose a side.

Would you pledge your allegiance Tom to the greens or to the blacks? Dominic, obviously the greens are usurpers. So I wouldn't pledge my allegiance to them. I pledge my sword to the blacks of House Targaryen.

And the fact that they have more dragons is nothing to do with that. But Tom, of course, the cats dragon will be the Vaguar is a lot bigger than the blacks largest dragon. So are you siding as often in your career with the Minnos, with the underdogs? No, I'm siding with the side that has right on its side, but also has lots of dragons and also has the backing of Westeros's greatest fleet led by Corlys Valerian, the Seesnake.

And he's an absolute tremendous chap and very much the kind of person you would want on side. And don't let you know, having done episodes on the Battle of Trafalgar with me, that I'm a great enthusiast for naval power. Well, that absolutely settles it, doesn't it? So, House of the Dragon is available now exclusively on Sky with new episodes every Monday.

Please go to Sky.com to find out more. As the serpent coiled, so Medea approached it. In a sweet voice she invoked sleep, highest of the gods to Helper. Jason followed her terrified.

But the monster was already bewitched by her song and had begun to unfold its long spiraling spine and straight in its countless circles, just as a black wave, silent and without noise, rolls over a calm sea. Even so, it raised its terrible head a lot from the eager to unfold a pair of them and it's ruinous jaws. But Medea sprinkled its eyes with a fresh-cut spring of Juniper, dimming it into her potions and a common amount of her incandations. The snake dropped its jaw and rested it just where it was.

Its endless coils were unfurled far behind it through the wood of many trees. Then, as the girl instructed him, Jason reached for the golden fleece from the oak and took it. So that one was Apollonius. Well, it was Apollonius actually.

It was Ian McKellen. We're very grateful to Sarion for joining us on the show and reading it in the voice of Gander. Oh, that was talking again. Yeah, well, that's the thing.

That's identical voices. Well, they are identical voices. Ian McKellen's Gandalf and Paul Keene, I think, is Sanbury Semana. And that's how Apollonius sounded.

Wow, you knew. So that's where the third century BC, Tom, as you all know. And Apollonius is describing that crucial moment in the story of Jason and the Argonauts when Medea, the sort of witch queen, has been witch, this serpent. Jason goes and gets the golden fleece.

So Jason and the Argonauts, one of the great Greek myths, Jason and all his pals, Heracles, all the lads. They've gone off across the black seas, Colchus. They've got the golden fleece, great scenes, some darkness to come. But I mean, it's an example of a snake that isn't.

Kind of lying around looking towards and being nice. This is a terrifying snake. It's a level terrifying monster. And there are a lot of these kind of serpentine monsters in Greek myths.

So there's the python, which Apollo shoots, it's been occupied inside of Delphi. So this is where Apollo's great oracle will be. And also there's the hydra, which is the kind of the multi-headed monster that Heracles kills, his second labor. And the Greek word for these kind of serpentine monsters is dracon.

And a dracon is different from an office, which is just a snake. And there's a wonderful book by a scholar called Daniel Ogden called the dragon in the west that zooms in on what is a dracon. And he basically says that a dracon is a snake and something more. So a hydra would be a dracon and not a snake because it's got loads of heads, that kind of thing.

And also the dracon is often portrayed on vases where he's shown with the beard. So he's found from Egypt. Did you kind of get bearded creatures? Like a bearded, like a snouser, like a dog?

No, because he's kind of like the beards that, you know, pharaohs have very long long-known ones. And Ogden in his book, he kind of lists all the various elements that characterize these stories draconae coming out. It lives in a cave. It will often kind of monopolize a water source.

So the hydra, for instance, lives in a swamp. The python inhabits a spring. It's always marauding around. So it's kind of nicking cattle and burning crops and all that kind of thing.

It's fiery and poisonous and kind of clouds of pestilence hang over it. But no treasure in this, right? So that's a big difference. So the treasure seems to be a kind of a northern, a product of the northern world.

And the worm, the dragon, is more sort of pestilential, water-based eating oxen, that kind of thing. Also doesn't have wings and doesn't have legs. So how are these kind of Greek draconae? If these are also part of the ancestry, what is going on?

And the first thing to say is that these myths are massively, massively influential. So everyone in the Greek world knows them. And of course, they're under the Romans. Everyone basically knows them.

And the Romans love these kind of stories of draconae, dragons. That's called them dragons. Because a draconae is the word from which dragon comes. And they even tell stories themselves.

So there's a very, very Roman dragon story where regulars, people who listen to our episode on the First Punic War, regulars is a console who leads an invasion of Africa fighting against the Carthaginians. And they come up against a draco. So a terrible fire flashed forth from its twin eyes. The height of its raised crests exceeded that of the grove and the high tree drops of the wood.

It's tongue flickered and flashed through the air. And I think it's very Roman that rather than sending out a champion to fight it, which is obviously what happened in a Greek myth or a kind of medieval romance, they break off their catapults and batter it to death with stones. That is very Roman. Very, very Roman.

But the Romans, I think they kind of really like the draco. So in their stories, the draco invariably has kind of character. He's an individual, often has a certain sense of dignity. So that's something that the Romans add to the mix.

And because they are so keen on the figure of the draco, they're always putting them into bars, into mosaics, paintings, putting them into their poetry. And over the course of time, you get kind of various other elements that join the mix. And we've talked about sea monsters, you know, the sea monster that Scarus brought from Joppa that's supposed to have been turned stone by Perseus. And sea monsters can be like snakes, but they can also kind of be like whales, and whales have flippers.

And so over the course of the history of the Roman Empire, you start to get dragons with kind of flippers, which then start to kind of become legs. So it's almost, it's so basically you're saying that Roman interior decorators create the idea of the the legged dragon. I mean, what they're doing, so you think about the wall paintings you get in Pompeii, for instance, they like monsters, and you have the draco, and you have the sea monster, and if the sea monster can be a whale, then you can give it flippers or give it legs. Yeah, I would give a whale legs.

And if you want to, you could, you know, give it wings perhaps or whatever. But I don't think that the interior decoration of living rooms is where the wings come from. Okay. Because Dominique, it will thrill you to know that I think that the wings are derived from Christianity.

I knew this would, I feared. I genuinely dreaded that this would, this would be the case. So obviously there are kind of dragonish creatures in Greek mythology, but there are also a lot in the Bible. So I was wondering why you didn't mention the, well, you haven't mentioned the serpent in the Garden of Eden.

I guess you're going to now. So that's not a worm. I mean, that could be very worm-like, isn't it? Well, it does, it does, it makes elliptical obscure references.

It's kind of seductive, like these kind of like smoggers. Yeah, and in rabbinical traditions, which you don't actually get in Genesis, there are accounts that the serpent in in the Garden of Eden had legs and part of its punishment when it's, you know, it has to kind of cool on the ground of dust that the legs go. So there's something there, but I think an even kind of more menacing dragonish figure in the Bible is the figure of Leviathan, which is a kind of giant monster that clearly in the traditions from which the biblical traditions are deriving, the figure of God is fighting the Leviathan. And those traditions, they have a ghostly presence in the biblical texts.

And in Revelation, in the book of Revelation, is there not a dragon? There is a dragon. And I think that that that portrait of the dragon is definitely drawing on the figure of the Vython. So there's a kind of brilliant kind of elephant in the book of Job where God appears and basically kind of tells Dabor for Moaning.

And this is God describing the Python. Out of his mouth go burning lamps and sparks a fire leap out. Out of his nostrils go with smoke as out of a seething pot of cauldron. His breath kindlith coals and a flame go with out of his mouth.

I don't know if I've always been a killer in that. Well, all right. We may be usually read that. But as you say, this is then an influence on a book in the New Testament, which is clearly drawing on all these traditions.

And in the book of Revelation, there is a vision of the future that is to come. And there are quite a lot of kind of dragon-like monsters in it. And the most sinister that my sinister dragon is a red dragon. It has seven heads, ten horns, each is crowned with a diadem.

And this is the very embodiment of evil. So fame as passage, and there was war in heaven. Michael, who is the captain of heaven, the great archangel, and his angels fought against the dragon and the dragon fought and his angels and prevailed not. Neither was their place found anymore in heaven.

And the great dragon was cast out that old serpent called the devil and Satan, which deceived the whole world. He was cast out into the earth and his angels were cast out with him. And I think that this is the crucial development for fans of dragon wings because this is directly identifying the figure of the draca, the dragon with the demonic and demons according to Christian tradition right from the beginning. So that's in the book of Revelation, the centuries that follow.

So we're in the Roman, at the time of the Roman Empire, and people are obviously, people believe that demons exist, don't they? I mean, references to the church fathers and times. And they think demons have the form of serpents or dragons. And that must be also clearly reflecting the fact that they are dealing with a tradition in which the foundable evil is the servant in the god and the beeth.

So it must be reptilian. But so the church fathers are obviously drawing on the biblical traditions, they're drawing on the tradition that demons have wings, but they are also of course living in the Roman Empire. So they have all these traditions about dracones as well. So Augustin, who's writing in Latin, at the beginning of the fifth century, AD, he's writing about dracones.

And he says that they live in the region of water, which is obviously... No, the Greek method. Yeah, I mean, that's coming from Greek tradition. They come forth from caves.

Again, that's very much in the Greek tradition. And they launch themselves into the air. This is the Christian contribution to the figure of the draco. The air is made turbulent by them.

Dracones are massive creatures. They're a nun greater on the air. A question here. So Augustin, he's in North Africa.

I think it's fair to say, I mean, obviously we can't say this for sure, but I think we can be reasonably sure that Augustin never actually saw a dragon. I think we can be relatively sure of that. But does he believe that they physically literally exist? Yes.

I think he does. And where does he think they are? I think that that is a kind of possibly overly 21st century question. I think he thinks that they live in the dimension of the infernal.

So they're in hell. But when they appear in dreams and visions, they are not fantasies. He doesn't think there's like a cave in modern day Tunisia where there's plausibly a dragon. Well, I don't know about Augustin himself, but there are definitely lots of traditions in which saints confront dragons.

And I think that people absolutely believe in these. And also that saints can have visions of dragons that are completely authentic. So around the time that Augustin is writing, there's a Greek text that describes Saint Bartholomew who's one of Christ's disciples, he's with Jesus and he can ask Jesus anything he wants. And so he does what I think I would do, which is say, I'd love to see the dragon that will fight with Saint Michael at the end of day.

That would be a one way. I'd like to do a dragon. And Jesus says, I don't, I don't think it's right. And Saint Bartholomew says, I'll go on.

So Jesus says, fine. And so Saint Bartholomew sees the greatest of all dragons that is Satan, the old serpent. And the dragon is bound in chains of fire. It has a face like a lightning bolt, very sinister.

Foul smelling smoke is drifting from its nostrils. Lightning bolts, shapes nostrils. Like exactly, it is enormous. And it has one wing.

It's very weird. I find that most sinister and unsettling. It's like kind of helicopter. I mean, I don't quite know how it works.

Yeah. A one-wing dragon actually, by such a troubling thought. Yeah. So Augustin is writing at a time when the western eastern half of the empire still part of a single geopolitical entity.

But obviously, over the centuries that follow, the west very much goes on a kind of separate route from the eastern half, because it's been conquered by incoming barbarian wards and whatnot, and New Kingdoms emerge on the rubble of water being the Roman Empire. And so the traditions of the dragon become very specifically Latin, very specific western. Although there are kind of influences coming from the Greek world. So by AD 800, which is year that Charlemagne has been crowned Emperor in Rome.

But also, round about the time that the fiery dragons are appearing above this. Yes, absolutely. So and Alkwin, who is Charlemagne's great advisor, is an orthumbrian. And it's terribly upset that Lindisfarne has been sacked.

So he's aware of these dragons. Around this time, you are getting a manuscript of Revelation, which includes eight pictures of a drakko. And it's serpentine without his body legs. So this has got wings.

So this is the first portrayal of a dragon that you can say. Yeah. It's obvious. It's a modern dragon.

And by the end of the ninth century, you are starting to get illustrations of kind of serpentine reptilian creatures with wings, with legs, the tuberousing fire. These are clearly dragons of the kind that you get in the house of the dragon. So at this point, you have got the union of maybe three different traditions, Greek or Roman, the classical, then you've got your biblical demonic dragon, as it were. And then you've got the Norse, the idea of the dragon with this treasure, sort of incarnation of greed or that kind of thing.

So listen, maybe wondering well, how does this Greco-Roman Christian figure of the dragon, the drakko, merge with the worm that we get in Seybaelv? And I think it's because for the Vikings, the Christian world, although it's something to prey on, is also something that is a kind of well-spring of prestige and authority, which is why, over the course of the Viking Age, the Viking kings and then the Viking themselves start to convert to Christianity. And I think that the Latin dragon is a marker of prestige. It's the kind, you know, if you have a dragon, you want it to have wings because that's the kind of the cutting edge.

We could get really bogged down in this so we can save this for another podcast. But Beowulf itself, the Raul of Stolets, who would argue that Beowulf itself is a fusion of Norse and Christian traditions. And so the dragon may be in Beowulf, may be slightly imported. Yeah.

Well, so the date of Beowulf is much contested, but I think it's entirely possible that the tradition of the worm, the tradition of the drakko, the way in which even though the dragon in Beowulf has wings but can't fly, what you're seeing is a kind of writer in Old English wanting to give it a bit of kind of sophisticated, lacking garnishing. And so the thing is that the dragon, say, around the time of the millennium in Latin Europe is not seen as something primordial. I mean, it's only been around for maybe a century. It's seen as very, very cutting edge.

And there are a lot of dragons that are recorded in Chronicles of this age. The previous episode that went out, we were talking about the oftenu, the mother of the emperor Otto III, who rules at the time of the millennium. And he dies, but his death is presaged by the sight of a massive dragon flying overhead. And often these descriptions are incredibly matter of fact.

So there's a wonderful one recorded by a monk who is crossing the Hungarian plane. And he says, you know, there was this dragon that was flying overhead, his plumed head was the height of a mountain. Its body was covered with scales like shields of iron. And he's recording it as, you know, as you might have saw an interesting cow or kind of interesting storm or something.

And I think that it's the fusion of the matter of fact and the apocalyptic, because this is the millennial age, loads of pilgrims crossing the plane of Hungary to go to Jerusalem in this period, and thoughts of dragons of Satan of the kind of confrontation at the end of the world is absolutely part of their own religious enthusiasm. Well, you might say that or you might say that you might say that. You might say that. I mean, that's certainly what I think Tolkien would say.

They don't have four legs, these dragons that they know. So these, these are what heralds in Britain and Ireland would call the Wither. So the distinction is made by basically British heralds. And the idea of that comes from a Viper, right?

So it's more serpentine, it only has two legs. But in the rest of Europe, they don't make a distinction. They're all dragons. And so people may be wondering, well, the last kind of piece of the Dixor is how these two-legged creatures, the wifons, become four-legged.

And I suppose it's probably because people are kind of thinking, if they've got two legs, maybe they're more like lizards than snakes and so giving them four legs is kind of obvious. But again, it takes a long time for this to happen. So there is one, there's a manuscript in the 12th century that I think is the first show, four-legged dragon. But the image of dragons as having four legs is really late 14th century and particularly 15th century.

This is the dragon like Smaug that you get. And I think that the reason why this image gets imprinted for centuries and centuries to come is because of course this is the age of printing. So printed books, the first book, the first book, have dragons in because people love dragons. They're the canonical monster at the time.

And they have the four legs, the wings, the littlest reptilian face, breathing fire, I guess, but it's not also that people in England in particular are very excited about dragons because the dragon is the symbol of the Tudors. Henry Tudor wins battle of Bosworth, the idea of the red dragon and the white and the union of all of that stuff. So dragons start appearing on flags and start appearing on the Royal Heads of Arms. So that also kind of bends it down.

So he takes on Henry VIII. Henry VIII is obsessed with heraldry. He loves tournaments. He loves the romance of Arthur, all of that kind of thing.

And in his iconography, I guess, the dragon is a really important part of the play. And so I think that this is why the combination of printing, the fact that you're starting to get books now, so Mallory, Thomas Mallory writing about King Arthur, you're getting Tudor heraldry. I think that that's why the backdrop to dragon stories tends to be 15th century and early 16th century. And I think this is the genius of House of the Dragon.

And in fact, Game of Thrones as well is that when we did our episode of Game of Thrones ages ago, one of the points we made was that King's Landing, the center of action is 15th century. And in the House of the Dragon and in Game of Thrones, there is definitely a kind of war of the roses element, which is a great division. I struggled with the 15th century. So in the first series of other houses of dragon, you have tournaments in Berry, 15th century armor, you have kind of a Mallory-esque quest for a white heart, you have a Richard III figure who wears black and is lame and is scheming and plotting in the background, and you have a feud between an elder sister and a kind of younger sibling, very reminiscent of the reign of Henry VIII.

And I think that it's that that makes the dragons so appropriate to the setting. And isn't that interesting? Because probably some of that is unconscious, right? That it's actually just a buried association.

And I'm sure not all of it is unconscious. But when we think of dragons and knights, we think of them in their slightly decadent, 15th century, very fancy armor. We don't think of a bear wolf. We don't think of 10th, 11th century or something.

It means that in a weird way, even though it's a 21st century creation, it is true to the founding to the foundational principles of dragonology. I would like to think that there is. And I think also, you know, we talked about how printing kind of cements a certain image of the dragon and how many legs it has. It's possible, I think, that the popularity of Game of Thrones and House of the Dragon may recalibrate that because in House of the Dragon, the dragons have two legs, but they also have kind of wings that can be used as legs, so the joints of their wing membranes are kind of like the front legs.

So they kind of have two legs, they kind of have four legs. And I guess the reason for that is partly because they look more realistic like that. They look more credible. But possibly also, and this is going back to dinosaurs, or the age of the dinosaurs, rather, they're a giant winged creatures, pterosaurs, vast, vast, pterosaurs, quite so quite less, it's called 12 foot tall, kind of 40 foot wingspan.

And these are often shown on kind of CGI-generated portrayals of prehistoric life going around like the dragons in Game of Thrones and House of the Dragon. And I wonder whether perhaps that is an influence on it. And so I wonder whether when you watch House of the Dragon and you see the kind of dragons that you have there, maybe history is being made in exactly the way that it was being made in the 15th century when Mallory was writing about dragons in the Moldafel. Just on dragons, more generally, as we reach the end, how much do you think the popularity of these dragon stories, so particularly the most recent iterations, how much does that reflect the kind of fear of the apocalyptic?

We talked at the beginning about them as tactical nuclear weapons, so obviously we live in an age of tremendous anxiety about weapons of mass destruction, about the climate, about all those kinds of things. How much do you think that dragons have become avatars for a deeper, more profound fears about humanity in the world and what not? I mean, Tolkien was writing The Hobbit in the 30s, so before the development of the atom bomb, I think that the portrayal of dragons in Jorda R. Martin must be influenced by that in particular, by the kind of dread of nuclear war, because that's the role that they play in Tolkien.

It's about anxieties, about avarice and about accumulation of wealth, and in Jorda R. Martin, the dragons are emblems of power. Yeah, actually, that's something that talking Jorda R. Martin, I mean, the fear of power and the human capacity to abuse power.

All right, so that was absolutely fascinating, brilliant, interweaving of all these different traditions and forensic work on your parts. Thank you for that. I can say is it draconian? Because I've got a different route, isn't it?

I was going to say draconian Tour de Force. I mean, if you burned down a town with a dragon, it's quite draconian, but that's very game of thrones. Right, so on that bomb shell, as it were, Tom, what are you doing this evening? Reading up on St George for our next book, Gaspberries and R.

No, I will be watching season two of House of Dragon. Well, so will I. I'm very excited about it, because I understand that the great houses of Westeros are heading for a final showdown, for a confrontation for the throne, the Greens Against the Blacks, five new dragons, Tom? Love a dragon dragons.

It's going to be tremendous scenes, so I'm very much looking forward to that, and I'll be tuning in on Sky Tonight with the realm divided, and on the brink of civil war, Tom, almost choose their side. Brilliant. Bye-bye. Goodbye.