Carole Wilkinson's Blog, page 5

I love getting overseas editions of my books. It’s always a surprise. With the Australian editions, the publisher always sends cover roughs and I get to make comments. (They don’t always take up my suggestions!) Then, I see the final draft before it goes to press. But with foreign editions there is no consultation. One day, I go to the letterbox and there it is, finished, published, done. 

There have been a few that I didn’t like, but in most cases I have enjoyed seeing the different graphic interpretations of my stories. Yesterday, I received a copy of the  Japanese edition of Ramose, and just like the Japanese Dragonkeeper covers, I love it. I really like the manga design and the bold colours.

This is actually the third and fourth  books of the series, Ramose: Sting of the Scorpion and Ramose: Wrath of Ra together in one volume. I haven’t received the volume containing the first two books yet, so I still have that  to look forward to.

The other great thing about the Japanese editions is that each chapter has its own unique little black and white picture which is relevant to that chapter. They are lovely.

If only I could read them!

Warning: This blogpost is not for the squeamish, or those who think that dragons are cute and cuddly. 

Though modern dragon stories are often about good dragons, most myths and legends of dragons  are all about bad dragons. These tales are really about the hero who kills the dragon. Over the centuries there has been one sure way to boost your self-confidence, resurrect your career or impress the love of your life — kill a dragon. Whether you are a knight, a priest, a farmer or a condemned criminal, if you can put ‘dragonslayer’ on your CV your reputation is sealed.

You might think that all you need to dispatch a dragon is a sharp weapon and a dose of courage, but they are wily beasts. Dragonslayers often have to be much more inventive.

This is the first part of a study of 50 different ways to slay a dragon.

All types of weapons have been used by the less imaginative dragonslayer.

St George favoured the sword, but then his sword, Ascalon, was no ordinary blade. A gift from a baby-eating enchrantress, George used Ascalon to kill two dragons, but in his last dragon fight, the sword ‘shivered into a thousand pieces’ when it penetrated the dragon’s flesh.

A lance of good length has the advantage of keeping the dragon at a relatively safe distance, which is advisable when facing dragons with fiery or poisonous breath. English farmer John Aller was particularly cautious, using a wooden spear nine feet long. (Though in this image he looks uncomfortably close to me.)

Dragon mosaic on Aller Village Hall

Iranian slayers often favoured the scimitar—a sword with a curved blade, often widening towards the end before ending in a sharp point. General and national hero Rustam killed the Mazandaran dragon with a scimitar as the third of his seven trials.

Tokoyo kills the dragon Yofune-nushi

One of only a handful of female slayers, was a young Japanese girl called Tokoyo. She swam to the bottom of the sea off the west coast of Japan to kill the dragon Yofune-nushi with nothing more than a small dagger.

Another weapon peculiar to the Iranian dragonslayer, the ox-head mace is a huge club with a double axe-blade. Iranian champion ‘One Blow’ Sam used this weapon to confront the Tus Dragon, a beast large enough to swallow him and his horse whole. Sam smashed the dragon’s skull with a single blow of his ox-head mace.

With a sheath of sharp arrows a bow is deadly in the right hands. If you ask “Who killed the dragon Smaug in The Hobbit?” many people will probably reply “Bilbo”, but actually it was a bit-part player Bard of Dale who slew the wily dragon with his last arrow.

Three-time dragonslayer and hero of Greek mythology, Heracles, knew a simple arrow wouldn’t kill the dragon Ladon, offspring of the monsters Typhon and Echidna. When he previously killed the multi-headed Hydra, he had dipped some arrows in the creature’s poisonous blood and prudently set them aside for just such an occasion.

Thor about to kill Jorgamundr. He doesn’t succeed. Hymir the giant stops him.

Norse god of thunder, Thor, wields a huge war hammer (as all Marvel Comic fans know). Though he has long been at war with the world serpent Jörmungandr, he hasn’t killed it yet. At some time in the future, during Ragnarök (the end of the world as we know it), Thor will slay the dragon with his hammer, but before he takes nine steps, he will die himself, a victim of the serpent’s venom.

A condemned prisoner volunteered to kill the Mordiford dragon in order to earn a pardon. He went to the river in Herefordshire where the dragon was known to drink, and hid in a cider barrel. When the dragon appeared the prisoner poked a gun through the barrel’s bung hole and shot the beast.

Sometimes a  weapon alone isn’t enough and a slayer can fight a dragon for days without success. What he has to do is find the dragon’s vulnerable spot.

Norse hero Sigurd’s adversary was Fafnir, a dwarf who had turned into a dragon as a result of greed. Sigurd dug a trench in a path used daily by the dragon and lay in it. When Fafnir slithered above him, Sigurd plunged his sword into the the dragon’s soft belly.

St George knew that under a dragon’s wing was very tender and unprotected by scales. He killed his Egyptian dragon this way.

More of More Hall inflicting the death blow to the Wantley Dragon

More of More Hall fought the Wantley dragon for two days and a night, but his sword failed to penetrate the dragons iron-like scales. In frustration, More kicked the dragon up the behind. The point of his metal boot (called a sabaton) entered the creature’s anus and punctured the end of its gut, killing it. (Though one version of the story suggests the beast died of embarrassment.)

13. Specific vulnerable spot

Careful research might lead to the discovery of a dragon’s unique vulnerable spot. English land owner Hugh Barde guessed that the wart on the leg of the one-eyed Wormegay dragon was its vulnerable spot.

Another successful technique is to trick the dragon with a lure.

Many British dragons have a liking for milk. Sir Macdonie de Berkley set out milk cans brimming with fresh milk to lure the Bisterne dragon, and then hid in a glass case he had constructed. While the dragon was diverted by the milk, Sir Macdonie leapt out of the case and killed the dragon .

To save the life of Princess Kushi-nada, Japanese storm god Susanowo lured the dragon of Koshi with eight barrels of sake (one for each of the dragon’s heads). The beast got so drunk that Susanowo was easily able to lop off each one of the dragon’s heads.

In Scotland, Charles the Skipper made a deadly pontoon bridge out of spiked barrels, leading to his boat where he was cooking meat. A salivating dragon tried to clamber over the barrels to get to the meat even though the spikes were ripping its flesh. Canny Charles’s barrel bridge didn’t quite reach his boat. Weak from blood loss, it couldn’t leap across the gap and slowly bled to death.

Austrian stamp depicting the Klagenfurt dragon.

The Austrian Klagenfurt dragon was lured by means of a calf tethered with a spiked chain. This was the brain wave of Herzog Karast. The dragon ate the calf and the chain and would have died from its internal wounds, but the impatient hero finished the job off with a spiked club.

Everyone knows that dragons have a taste for the tender flesh of a princess. The slayer could tie a princess to a rock (they tend to run away when faced with danger) and wait for the dragon to arrive. As the beast ponders how to undo the knots, the hero can leap out from his hiding place and kill the dragon. Careful timing is needed with this technique to avoid royal bloodshed.

Spikes feature in a surprising number of successful dragon-slayings.

In another version of the demise of the Mordiford dragon, the criminal hid in a barrel studded with spikes and blades. He taunted the dragon until it coiled around the barrel in order to squeeze him to death. The vicious spikes and blades dug into the dragon and it bled to death.

The Turan dragon about to devour Isfandiyar’s (only slightly) spiky carriage

An Iranian variation of the spiked barrel (or perhaps the ancient inspiration for it) was a carriage which Prince Isfandiyar had fitted with sword blades. Isfandiyar drove the carriage into the mouth of the massive Turan dragon. The dragon chomped on it and was severely wounded. Isfandiyar extracted himself from the carriage and finished the monster off with a sword in the brain.

Spiked suits of armour were a popular protective device that served to keep the dragon at bay. John Lambton also annoyed the dragon until it wrapped itself around him, mortally wounding itself on the spear heads that John had fitted to his armour.

A Welsh dragon harassed the citizens of Llandeilo Graban by day and roosted in their church spire by night. A simple ploughboy made a dummy dragon out of oak studded with spikes and hooks. While the dragon slept, he hoisted it onto the church spire. When the dragon awoke, it wrapped itself around the intruder and mortally wounded itself on the hooks and spikes.

Story references

There are too many dragon stories here for me to list references for all of them, but if you’d like to know where I sourced any of these stories please email me.

Picture references

2. Aller dragon: Mosaic panel on Aller Village Hall, Somerset, UK created by Bryan Newman and Chiggy Little http://en.wikipedia.orgwiki/File:AllerDragonMosaic.jpg

4. Yofune-nushi: Ancient Tales and Folk-lore of Japan, by Richard Gordon Smith, 1918, at The Internet Sacred Texts Archive

8.  Thor and Hymir go fishing for the Midgard Serpent. From the 18th century Icelandic manuscript SÁM 66 in the care of the Árni Magnússon Institute in Iceland. Wikipedia

12. Wantley Dragon:  http://keramos.users.netlink.co.uk/dragons/wantley.html

17. Klagenfurt dragon http://www.stampcommunity.org/topic.asp?TOPIC_ID=21044&whichpage=9

20. Isfandiyar  http://www.metmuseum.org/toah/works-of-art/1970.301.51

Here is a drawing of a water dragon and a hypno dragon that I have received from Tayla.

Shadow Sister, the fifth book in the Dragonkeeper series will be available from

1st May.

I have just received an advance copy, so I can finally show off the cover. It’s another gorgeous piece of art from Sonia Kretschmar. I love it!

There is some new free stuff on my Downloads page. 

I’ve written a Prologue to the fourth Dragonkeeper book, Blood Brothers, called Leaving Home.

I was interested to read the reaction to J K Rowling’s recent comments about how Hermione should have ended up with Harry and not Ron. Firstly. No. Wrong. But also, I read some of the comments from fans. There were a number who didn’t like the fact that she had written the epilogue to Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows describing the characters 19 years later, married and with children. These fans wanted to be able to imagine their own continuation of Harry’s story. Jane Austen is another famous author who wrote an epilogue at the end of her most-loved book Pride and Prejudice, describing what happened in the ensuing years, but she left plenty of room for readers to imagine the details of Lizzie and Darcy’s life together.

Personally, I like to be given the space to imagine “what happens next?” I loved doing that when I was younger (and not so young). I think it was good practice for writing my own stories when I eventually decided to become an author. So when I came to the end of the first three Dragonkeeper books, I didn’t want to tie up everything. I wanted readers to have the space to imagine their own ongoing stories.

Some readers didn’t like that. Quite a few of them. They wanted to know exactly what happened to Ping and the dragons. For ages I kept saying, “You decide.” Then last year, I wrote the Lost Letter from Ping (which is also on the Downloads page). It explains what happened to Ping. I have to admit, I did enjoy writing it. But it isn’t part of the book. Readers have the choice of whether to read it or come up with their own personal story of Ping’s life post-dragons.

Leaving Home is about Tao, the boy who is the main character from Blood Brothers (and the upcoming Shadow Sister). It’s about his life before he met Kai. It’s there if you want to read it.

Also new to the Downloads page is a sample chapter from Stagefright, my non-dragon teen novel, in case you like to test drive a book before you buy it.

Melbourne is a dragon city. And Chinese New Year is when the shy Chinese dragons in Melbourne come out to play. Sadly I missed seeing our Millennium dragon in the Chinese New Year Dragon Parade last Sunday. It was just too hot for me to venture out of the house. But all was not lost. There is a new dragon in town! At Docklands there is a fabulous Chinese dragon which has been created to celebrate Chinese New Year. It doesn’t require 60 people to carry it through the sweltering streets, it is a stationary beast ten metres high at its head and 100 metres long. It is made of steel and silk. The best thing about it is that at night, it is illuminated from within.

We went along one evening earlier this week after a hot day. We took the dog and had an ice-cream.

The dragon was made by a company called Sichuan Tianyu Cultural Transmission Company. It will be in place until 16th February and I gather it will be an annual event. The dragon’s tail is at the corner of the Bourke St extension and Harbour Esplanade and its body extends up the Esplanade. There is more information and how to get there at the Destination Docklands website.

This fine dragon is the first artwork I’ve received from a reader for ages. Matilda says she loves anything to do with dragons. That’s something we have in common. One thing we don’t have in common is that she can draw, and I can’t!

Dragon by Matilda

I was eagerly waiting to see how the dragon was depicted in Peter Jackson’s The Hobbit: Desolation of Smaug. Needless to say, armed with my 3D glasses, I went to see the movie the day it was released.

Smaug is one of the most well-known dragons in fiction, imagined anew by every reader for the last 77 years. Depicting him on the screen was an onerous task, something like casting an actor to play a famous person in a movie, and is subject to much discussion.

J R R Tolkien’s dragon was inspired by dragons in Scandinavian mythology. Like the dragons from the Norse sagas, Smaug has a lust for gold, he is winged and fire-breathing. He also has a particular trait of Scandinavian dragons – he can speak and argue the point. But what do Scandinavian dragons look like?

Tolkien’s 1937 illustration of Smaug

We know what dragons from other parts of the world look like because people have been creating images of them for centuries, even millennia. The earliest depiction of a Chinese dragon is an arrangement of shells from 6000 years ago. The oldest representation of a European dragon is a large snake-like creature painted in about 500BC. There is a wealth of beautiful images of Iranian dragons from at least a 1000 years ago.

The Scandinavian dragon is more elusive. Despite the fact that there are many dragon stories among the Norse sagas, the ancient Scandinavians left very few images of the creatures. There is a carving from a church door of hero Sigurd killing the dragon Fafnir from around 1200AD. There are some very serpentine dragons on rune stones and jewellery etc from 8th Century AD, but there appears to have been no tradition of illustrating the sagas, which were oral tales.

Sigurd killing Fafnir. Hylestad Stave Church, Norway c.1200AD

The sagas themselves are light on physical detail. The two most famous dragons are Fafnir and the dragon in the 3000-line poem Beowulf. Neither of these sagas describes the dragon.

So when Tolkien came to draw Smaug, he didn’t have much to go on. Tolkien drew Smaug as a big dragon sitting on top of his hoard. He has four legs, no horns and a three-pronged tail terminal. He is red-gold in colour.

We finally get to see Smaug in the second Hobbit movie. With only a glimpse of him in The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey, I was keen to see how Peter Jackson and his conceptual designers, Alan Lee and John Howe had reimagined Smaug. He is huge – a massive creature, many times bigger than Tolkien’s vision, sleeping amongst his mountainous hoard of gold.

He is not golden at all and, most interestingly, he is a wyvern – a two-legged dragon – using the “elbows” of his bat-like wings to assist movement on the ground. Smaug retains his ability to talk and Benedict Cumberbatch provides the voice. The dragon’s facial expressions and movements also come from Cumberbatch via motion capture.

Scandinavian dragons are lindworms, shortened to worms, or wyrms, sometimes wingless, but always two-legged. The Hylestad portal dragon has two legs. So I think those designing the movie dragon were well within their rights to depict a wyvern.**

Images of this latest version of Smaug are still hard to come by on the internet, and we will have to wait until the end of this year when the final Hobbit film is released to see how Peter Jackson deals with Smaug’s demise. Perhaps the clearest picture is the one promoting the movie on this Air New Zealand plane.

Smaug on Air New Zealand plane 2013

*You can see how illustrator Dean Jones and I imagined Scandinavian dragons in  my book Dragon Companion. They are more slimy and slobby.

**There is already controversy about the number of legs. According to this blog Peter Jackson changed his mind. In the prologue to the first Hobbit movie, Smaug has four legs, while in the second movie he has two. I’m not entirely convinced.

Picture sources

Tolkien’s Smaug: The Annotated Hobbit

The Sigurd Portal: http://www.pitt.edu/~dash/sigurddoor....

Benedict Cumberbatch: http://www.avclub.com/article/here-ar...

Air New Zealand Plane: http://www.smh.com.au/travel/travel-n...

Sources

The Hobbit, JRR Tolkien, 1970, Unwin Books

The Annotated Hobbit, 2002, annotated by Douglas A Anderson, Houghton Mifflin

Dragon Companion: An Encyclopedia, 2007, Carole Wilkinson, illus. Dean Jones, black dog books

Dragons vs Wyverns: The Question of Smaug  http://atolkienistperspective.wordpre...

For the original story of Fafnir read The Story of the Volsungs, Chapter XVIII http://www.sacred-texts.com/neu/vlsng...

For Beowulf and the Dragon read Beowulf chapters XXXIIItranslated by Francis B Gummere, 1910, http://www.sacred-texts.com/neu/beo/b...

“So have you finished for the year, Carole?”

People are always asking me that.

“No, I have a book that’s going to the printers on the 19th,” I reply.

“Which book?” they say.

Shadow Sister, the 5th Dragonkeeper book.

I thought you finished that months ago.

I finished the first draft in July, second draft in September, third draft early this month.

Up to that point the book is just a Word document. After that it gets formatted so that it finally looks like the book as it will be published, with page numbers, nice font and fancy chapter headings. Something happens when you first see it like that. Suddenly mistakes and things that need changing leap off the page.

And lots of other people are reading it. Publisher, editor, proofreader. They want to make changes too.

And I have to add the end matter (acknowledgements, glossary, pronunciation guide) and update the maps.

And there are only three days to go!

“But why don’t you leave it till after Christmas?”

“I can’t!”

Some people imagine that authors write when they feel like it and take as long as they need to write a book. J K Rowling and Terry Pratchett might get away with that, but I can’t! The publisher has a schedule. They have lots of authors writing books. They have to have them spaced out throughout the year.

This book has to go to press on the 19th. No arguments.

Dragonology #4

The Bible might not be the first place you’d think to look for dragons, but they are there. In fact, the Bible begins and ends with dragons. The Hebrew word for dragon is tannin (plural tanninim). These are terrifying sea dragons conquerable only by God. The Old Testament was written in Hebrew between 13th and 2nd centuries BCE. There was no English version until 1611 by special command of King James. This translation came via the Greek and Latin translations of the Hebrew. The translators didn’t always get it right.

The first dragons in the Bible are on the very first page where God’s creation of heaven and earth is described. The tanninim were created on the fifth day along with all the other living creatures of earth (Genesis 1:21). But tanninim was translated as whale. Perhaps the translators didn’t like the idea of God creating such evil creatures as dragons. In the Revised Standard Version of the Bible (1952), tanninim is translated as “sea monsters”. It should be dragons.

So God created the great sea monsters and every living creature that moves, with which the waters swarm, according to their kinds, and every winged bird according to its kind. And God saw that it was good.

Holy Bible, Revised Standard Version, Genesis 1:21.

The most vivid and detailed description of the biblical sea dragon is contained in Job 41. This is a particular tannin called Leviathan. A vast, fire-breathing creature with limbs and possibly more than one head, his body is protected by scales that are impenetrable to weapons. He has terrible teeth. Light shines from his eyes. His breath is so hot it can kindle coals and make the sea boil.

Leviathan by Arthur Rackham, 1908

Out of his mouth go burning lamps, and sparks of fire leap out.

Out of his nostrils goeth smoke, as out of a seething pot or caldron.

His breath kindleth coals, and a flame goeth out of his mouth.

King James Bible, Job 41: 19–21

As the Bible begins with the creation of the dragon, it ends with its defeat. By the time the New Testament was written (1st Century CE), dragon symbolism had become straightforward. In the final book of the Bible, Revelation, the dragon is explicitly described as a manifestation of Satan. It describes a series of cryptic visions that Saint John had. In one vision, he saw a red dragon with seven heads and ten horns.

The dragon was waiting for a woman to give birth so that he could eat the baby, but she escaped. Then archangel Michael and his angels waged war on the dragon and cast it out of Heaven. It was bound in chains, and cast into the bottomless pit for a thousand years.

St Michael fighting the seven-headed dragon, from the Douche Apocalypse, c. 1265-70

And there was a war in heaven: Michael and his angels fought against the dragon; and the dragon fought and his angels,

And prevailed not; neither was their place found any more in heaven.

And the great dragon was cast out, that old serpent, called the Devil, and Satan…

King James Bible, Revelation 12:7–9

There is another dragon story in the Bible, or at least there was. It is a story called Bel and the Dragon. This tells how the prophet  Daniel (of the lions’ den fame) convinced Cyrus, the King of Persia, that the dragon he worshipped was just an earthly creature not a god. Daniel said he would kill the dragon “without sword or staff”. He made cakes from a mixture of pitch, fat and hair which sound disgusting, but when he offered them to the tame dragon, it ate them. The cakes were ignited inside the dragon (presumably by the fire that dragons breathe) and the dragon exploded. Cyrus was convinced, and converted to Daniel’s Jewish faith.

14th C window of Daniel feeding cakes to the dragon, Temple St Etienne, Mulhouse, France

This story is one of the Apocrypha which were removed from the King James Bible in the 1600s. It can still be found in Catholic and Orthodox Bibles.

Then Daniel took pitch, and fat, and haire, and did seethe them together, and made lumpes thereof:

this hee put in the Dragon’s mouth, and so the Dragon burst in sunder :

and Daniel said, Lo, these are the gods ye worship.

Apocrypha, King James Bible 1611

There are other dragons mentioned in the King James Bible. In complete contrast to Leviathan, these are land creatures living in desolate, desert wildernesses. This is the result of another mistranslation. The Hebrew word for these creatures is written as tannim, which the translators misread as a plural of tannin. In fact tannim is the plural of the word for jackal. So these creatures aren’t dragons at all, but wild dogs. This misunderstanding has been corrected in the Revised Standard Version of the Bible and the desert dragons have been replaced with jackals.

Picture references

Leviathan: http://www.artsycraftsy.com/rackham/r...

Revelation dragon: http://bodley30.bodley.ox.ac.uk:8180/... MS. Douce 180, p. 044 196T 5

Daniel: http://www.soniahalliday.com/category...

References

Paul Mankowski, S.J., Pontifical Biblical Institute,Rome. Personal communication 2001

http://www.kingjamesbibleonline.org/B...