The Rest Is History - 461. Dragons

Episode Date: June 16, 2024

"When dragons flew to war… everything burned. I do not wish to rule over a kingdom of ash and bone." Dragons - the most compelling of mythical beasts - are one of the most vivid creations of all human imagination, and their enduring resonance is captivatingly displayed by their role in George R.R. Martin’s House of the Dragon and Game of Thrones. But how did the legend of the dragon, prominent across the world, evolve into the modern incarnation embodied by Rhaenyra Targaryen’s golden Syrax? And what is the difference between dragons, wyverns and wyrms, the traces of which persist in Damon’s reptilian Caraxes?  Canonical dragons are the realisation of four main traditions: the serpents of the Greco-Roman World, the fortune-bringers of the Chinese emperors, the demonic beasts of the Bible, and the greedy gold-hoarders of Norse mythology, as seen in the tale of Beowulf.  The most famous heir of this tradition is J.R.R. Tolkien’s avaricious Smaug, but as in Tolkien’s Middle Earth, the dragons in Martin’s Westeros represent the dangers of uncontrolled power and humans’ capacity to abuse it. Perhaps, then, they have long served as avatars for humanity’s deepest fears about the world, with their manifestation in every age and culture tellingly symbolic…. Join Tom and Dominic as they interweave the many myths and traditions surrounding that most spectacular of beasts: the dragon, and trace its fascinating progression from the wingless creatures of early antiquity, to the mighty, complex creatures who fight for mastery of Westeros alongside their Targaryen riders, in George R.R. Martin's House of the Dragon.  Watch House of the Dragon season 2 on Sky. Go to sky.com to find out more. Twitter: @TheRestHistory @holland_tom @dcsandbrook Producer: Theo Young-Smith Assistant Producer: Tabby Syrett Executive Producers: Jack Davenport + Tony Pastor Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Thank you for listening to The Rest Is History. For weekly bonus episodes, ad-free listening, early access to series, and membership of our much-loved chat community, go to therestishistory.com and join the club. That is therestishistory.com. This episode is brought to you by Sky. 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 actually it's been two years, almost two years, since we last saw Matt Smith, Emma Darcy, Olivia Cooke 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, Lucerys 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 a side 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 Sky, 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 in legend is a potent creation of men's imagination, richer in significance 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, J.R.R. 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 does indeed.

And I think pretty clearly there, he's talking about himself. He's obviously a man who is obsessed by dragons. But since Tolkien wrote that essay, dragons have gone completely mainstream, in part at least thanks to Tolkien 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 when Game of Thrones first came out. I remember watching it, what is it, 10 years ago or something. The dragons in Game of Thrones, when they start off, dragons are extinct or they're thought to have vanished and they're in these eggs. And then they hatch at the end of the first series.

And they're quite sweet, aren't they? To begin with. They are. Kind of little baby dragons. terms was groundbreaking because the cgi used for the dragons was extraordinary i mean it was the first time anyone had done anything like this that 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 weren't we about whether or not the dragons can be likened to weapons of 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 books you haven't got to the end but if you've seen the tv series the dragon's 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 1 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, only 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 her 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 Daenerys, 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 has 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 who supposedly can ride them and i'm guessing that people listening to this there there will either be massive enthusiasm. I mean, Game of Thrones was a huge global phenomenon and House of Dragons had a massive critical success as well. But there will also be kind of bewilderment.

Because there are lots of people, Tom, who would say, listening to this, say, oh, in a history podcast, dragons, really? And actually, that itself is a historical phenomenon, because Tolkien, in 1936, correct and 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, Tolkien, when he wrote that essay in the 30s, was saying, as a society, we have become indifferent to, we've lost sight of the, dare I say, the weirdness, Tom, of monsters, of dragons, and that 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, is that even George R. R. 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 to him and said, George, it's a fantasy. You've got to have dragons. George R.R. Martin was doing the Wars of the Roses, basically, Lannisters and Starks, Lancaster and 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, 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 lidless eyes, that they have a flickering tongue. You know that they're long and snake-like, or lidless eyes, that they have a flickering tongue. You know that they're long and snake-like, or you might say worm-like. So Tolkien in that passage quoted the worm.

That they breathe fire, that they have wings, that they can fly, that they have legs. Okay, just on legs. Two or four, Tom, because that is, among dragonologists, that is a crucial area of contention, isn't it? Whether a dragon has two or four legs. Actually, specifically among British heralds, which we'll come to. So for British heraldry, a two-legged dragon is a wyvern 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 midway between that. So we'll be discussing that.

Not quite three-legged, but... Yeah. So everyone kind of, you know, if you said, what's a dragon to someone in the West, they'd immediately know it. But the even weirder thing is, is that dragons are not confined to kind of medieval Europe. When people think of dragons, they think of China, don't they? But there are dragons also in... There are effectively dragons in 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 the obvious 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 specialist subject, but an obvious theory would be that there's some kind of weirdly buried cultural memory of dinosaurs. Which is, I mean, it so ticks my boxes. And I would so love that to be true. And it was actually, it was proposed by Carl Sagan. Oh, yeah.

He's the former great popularizer of science. And he wrote a book with the brilliant title The Dragons of Eden, where he proposes that the kind of seeming universality of the dragon as a myth is a kind of legacy of our primordial ancestry in Mesozoic ecosystems when we were tiny little shrews kind of dodging tyrannosaurs. How would that have been passed down though in pre-linguistic 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, are we, Dominic? Never. I don't feel we're qualified to say about that. But there is also another thesis that the discovery of dragon fossils might have inspired it.

And there's a brilliant series of books by a 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 kind of examples in the might be something that might have worked. And we also do have kind of examples in the Mediterranean world. You'll make plenty, plenty of the elder. We can't have an episode on mad kind of wonders without mentioning Pliny. 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 Pliny records that 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.

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

Yeah, I love an Austrian dragon. The town of Klagenfurt. 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. Yeah.

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 Dragon's 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 Klagenfurt. And in 1590, the town fathers commission a statue 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 the 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 to be found in this region. And sea monsters don't actually exist.

Yeah, and the, yes, that as well. But no, but it might have been a kind of, you know, a tyrannosaur head or something like that. And the dragon in the cave? Is a woolly rhinoceros. Also, of course, the issue with the fossils theory is that, so for example, dragons play a huge part, as we will go on to see in Norse sagas and things, don't they? Worms and whatnot. But there aren't big fossils of dinosaurs in Scandinavia. So have they just, where's it come from? Right. So I think that theory, I mean,

the kind of elements of truth to 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 who 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 locations. And 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 and the climate

crisis and all that stuff. People are more receptive to that idea. Yeah, that's a really interesting point. But I think the argument from 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. Yeah, because everybody hates a snake. Well, as we go on to see, not everybody hates a snake.

Tom, I hate snakes. I have no time for snakes. I hold them in very low regard, like Indiana Jones. And actually, there's... I don't mind a snake. You don't mind a snake? No, I don't mind a snake. Would you have a snake hung around your shoulders?

Would you welcome that? I think if I wanted to intimidate people. But if you were strolling through the souks of Marrakesh and a barker hung a snake around your shoulders... I'd be fine with that. You know, I'd quite welcome to my home and I would... the lord of snakes or something. The lord of snakes. shoulders. I'd be fine with that. You know, I quite... I'd hate that. Welcome to my home, and I would... The Lord of Snakes or something. The Lord of Snakes.

Yeah, I quite go for that. That's how you'll be known from now on. So we've mentioned how Tolkien refers to dragons as worms. The old English for dragon was a worm. That was lovely. I really enjoyed that. And in Old Norse, it's an urm. Yeah.

You're pretty good at rolling your eyes. Yeah. And actually, in House of the Dragon, the dragon ridden by the character played by matt smith yeah erstwhile doctor who and duke of edinburgh yeah um is called the blood worm so does he say it like that yeah he does so the way in which dragons are serpentine in in most of the myths so they live in holes so you get this in House of the Dragon, they live in dragon pits or caves. They're lidless and snakes have no eyelids. They can't close their eyes. And so when you look at a snake, 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 dragon that you get 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 don't you and greek snakes they can be wise and benevolent? Well, they can be. So there's a sacred snake on the Acropolis in Athens,

and girls feed it with honey cakes. And when the Persians invade in 480 BC and burn Athens, the coming incineration of the Acropolis is foretold by the sacred snake vanishing. And, of course, you have Asclepius, the god of healing. One of his symbols is snakes coiled around a staff. You've got a wound or a sore. He'll get a snake to come and lick it for you.

Yeah, you go and lie down at the temple of Asclepius and the holy snakes will come out and lick your wounds. 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'd go for the snake. Would you? Yeah, they'd be sweet little snakes.

Yeah, I don't like snakes. I don't massively like Catherine of Siena. But you're a big fan of Constantinople as well, aren't you? Love Constantinople. So in Byzantium, the city that Constantinople will be built on, no one was allowed to attack a snake, to kill a snake. So St. Patrick would have been unwelcome. Very unwelcome. Because snakes are seen by the Byzantines as benefactors of the city.

Yeah. 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 Great pals. Very, very beneficent. And that of course is the Chinese tradition. So the Chinese, the dragon brings rain. If you're a good emperor, the dragon is a great chum of yours. And the dragon generally symbolizes sort of balance and wellbeing 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 Neolithic. So, you know, thousands and thousands of years ago. And all the way through the histories of China, I mean, right the way up to the present day, emperors are being visited by dragons.

There's a sense in which dragons, I think, you know, people in China really do seem to have believed that dragons existed. They're not seen as merely fantastical. And there's an incredibly recent example of that. So Yuan Shikai, who is one of the kind of the leading figures in the revolutionary movement that ends up toppling the empire in the 1910s. In 1915, he decides it's all been a 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 casting his rule as something that because it's been blessed by a dragon, therefore, yeah, brilliant. Maybe emperor. Does he find the dragon bones? No, he doesn't. He doesn't. I don't think he has time to look for it. Right. 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 Tolkien. 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 aren't they really after The Hobbit. Yeah so The Hobbit is famously Tolkien starts writing it in the early 1920s when he's marking school certificate papers

after he's come home from the First World War. He's at Oxford and he sits down, he writes in the Hall of the Grounds that there lived a hobbit. And for people who 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 Smaug. And the whole trajectory of the narrative is leading up to the great confrontation between Bilbo, our hero, and the Dragon Smaug, who is actually a tremendous character. Yeah. He's like he's voiced by George Sanders or Terry Thomas, isn't he?

Sort of, hello. Or Benedict Cumberbatch in the film. Yeah, he's very, but actually in the film, he's threatening and his voice is very deep and stuff. But in the book. Hello. Yes, he's very but actually in the film he's he's threatening and and his voice is very deep and stuff but in the book hello yes he's right he's rather suave and urbane and witty yeah and so so that obviously is drawing on kind of traditions that's 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 are two in particular, aren't there?

There are two dragons that basically influence Smaug. So tell us about those two dragons. Well, 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 Tolkien is completely fascinated by. And basically in this is part of a kind of vast corpus of Norse legends that 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. I mean, a dragon. Maggie Smith joining us here. Yeah. And his brother, who's very cross about this. Oh yeah, Regan. Yeah, Regan. So he forges a great sword and Wagner fans, this is kind of one of the great moments 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 this trench. And Fafnir is described as kind of crawling down towards the water. And as he crawls along, Sigurd stabs him in his kind of 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 wriggles. 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 is even more terrifying. And 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. Absolutely furious, livid about it. Goes kind of growing up, burning everyone. And so Be beowulf eager to defend his people despite

being very old goes up and he fights the dragon and he kills the dragon but he himself dies of the wounds so there tom in those two dragons you have you have tolkien's dragon so the riddling so when smough we first meet him he does this riddle game with bilbo and he's clever and he's sort of well-spoken and stuff. The dragon guards stolen treasure. I mean, that's the 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 Bard the Bowman, and he's killed by Sigurd or Siegfried, if you're a Wagnerian.

So Tolkien obviously is, as Tolkien would, because he was the 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 indeed in Game of Thrones, is the idea of the treasure, that a dragon is inextricably linked to a kind of stolen treasure hoard. There's greed. Yeah, well, I think even more than that because fafnir is originally human and 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 yeah will turn into a worm-like monster squatting on great piles of gold and in the hobbit tolkien refers to this as dragon sickness and of course tol Tolkien was great friends with C.S. Lewis and the Narnia stories. There is a very similar episode where Eustace in the Dawn Shredder. He went to a progressive school. Yes, and kind of drank prune juice and doesn't believe any of it. Left-wing parents. Look what happens to you.

Well, he turns into a dragon. Yeah, terrible scenes. That's his punishment. Don't go to progressive schools. You'll turn into a dragon. It's basically the lesson of that. So, I mean, that is obviously a tradition that doesn't pass into House of the Dragon and West West and all that. 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 attacked Lindisfarne. This is the famous, famous, most 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, Tom, as they always do. Yeah. Those are all tied together in that kind of Norse Anglo-Saxon understanding of a dragon, and slaughter and the storm clouds gathering in the east, Tom, as they always do. 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 dragon-esque monster in Norse mythology, which is the Midgard Serpent, which is an absolutely huge creature, which is so enormous that its coils enfold the earth. And at Ragnarok, the end of days, Thor, 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 a snake. Certainly not flying. I mean, he 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. So there are two different, that's interesting, there are two different threads then. I think so. That lead to this. So one is your wyrm. Wyrm. And then another is the dragon with wings, which is a different tradition.

And in Beowulf, there are two words for dragon. So there is wyrm, but there is also draca and this opens up the question of where is the word draca 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 draca and in the second half we'll see where the drakkar comes from. What drama. Return after the break to find out the true roots of the modern dragon. This episode is brought to you by Sky. Now, Tom, I was chatting to you a couple of 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 sure 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, Vhagar. 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 it. But Tom, of course, the counter-argument would be that Vhagar is a lot bigger than the

blacks' largest dragon. So are you siding, as so often in your career, with the minnows, 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 Velaryon the Sea Snake. And he's an absolutely tremendous chap and very much the kind of person that you would want on side. And Dominic, you know, having done episodes on the Battle of Trafalgar with me, that I'm

a great enthusiast for naval power. Well, Tom, 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 help her. Jason followed her, terrified. But the monster was already bewitched by her song and had begun to unfold its long, spiraling spine and straighten its countless circles, just as a black wave, silent and without noise, rolls over a calm sea. Even so, it raised its terrible head aloft and was eager to enfold a pair of them in its ruinous jaws.

But Medea sprinkled its eyes with a fresh-cut spring of juniper, dipping it into her potion to the accompaniment of her incantations. 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, Tom, was Apollonius. Not Ian McKellen.

Well, it was Apollonius, actually. It was Ian McKellen. We're very grateful to Sir Ian for joining us on the show and reading it in the voice of Gandalf. I thought it was Tolkien again. Yeah, well, that's the thing. It's done it in identical voices. Well, they are identical voices. Ian McKellen's Gandalf and Tolkien. I thought it was Tolkien again. Yeah, well, that's the thing. It's done it in identical voices. Well, they are identical voices.

In MacKellan's Gandalf and Tolkien, I think sound very similar. And that's how Apollonius sounded. Well, who knew? So that's from the third century BC, Tom, as you will know. And Apollonius is describing that crucial moment in the story of Jason and the Argonauts when Medea, the sort of witch queen, has bewitched 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 Sea to Colchis. They've got the golden fleece.

Great scenes. Some darkness to come. Some darkness to come, yes. We don't need to get into that now. Little boys being chopped up and thrown into the sea. But I mean, it's an example of a snake that isn't kind of lying around licking saws and being nice. No, it's a malevolent snake.

It's a malevolent, terrifying monster. And there are a lot of these kind of serpentine monsters in Greek myth. So there's the python, which Apollo shoots. It had been occupying the site of Delphi, so this is where Apollo's great oracle will be. And also there's the hydra, which is the multi-headed monster that Heracles kills for his second labor. And the Greek word for these serpentine monsters is dracone.

And a dracone 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 dracone. And he basically says that a dracone is a snake and something more. So a hydra would be a dracone and not a snake because it's got loads of heads, that kind of thing. And also, so the dracone is often portrayed on vases where he's shown with a beard, which is nice.

So it seems to come from Egypt. You do kind of get bearded creatures. No, you don't get bearded snakes though. Like a bearded, like a schnauzer, like a dog? No. No, because these are kind of like the beards that, you know, pharaohs have, kind of long, long thin ones. And Ogden in his book, he kind of lists all the various elements

that characterize these stories of draconis coming out um it lives in a cave yeah it will often kind of monopolize a water source so the hydra for instance lives in a you know in a swamp yeah 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 um a northern a product of the northern world and the and the worm but a dracon is more sort of pestilential water-based yeah eating oxen yeah that kind of thing.

Also doesn't have wings and doesn't have legs. So how are these kind of Greek draconis, 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, then under the in the Greek world knows them. And of course, then under the Romans, everyone basically knows them. And the Romans love these kind of stories of dracontes, you know, dragons, let's call them dragons, because draco in Latin is the word from which dragon comes. And they even tell stories themselves. So there's a very, very Roman dragon story where Regulus, people who listened to our episode on the first

Punic War, Regulus is a consul 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 crest exceeded that of the grove and the high treetops of the wood. Its 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 would happen 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, is 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. So we've talked about sea monsters, you know, the sea monster that Scourus brought from Joppa that's supposed to have been turned to 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 basically you're saying that Roman interior decorators create the idea of 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 wouldn't give a whale legs. And if you want to, you could give it wings, perhaps, or whatever. But I don't think that the interior decoration of robert living rooms is where the wings come from okay because dominic it will thrill you to know oh no 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 dragon-ish creatures in Greek mythology, but there are also a lot in the Bible. So I was wondering why you didn't mention the,

why you hadn't mentioned the serpent in the Garden of Eden. I'm guessing because 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 sort of make elliptical obscure references. It's kind of seductive, like these kind of like smaugers. Yeah. And in rabbinical traditions, which you don't actually get in Genesis, there are accounts that the serpent in the Garden of Eden had legs and part of its punishment when it has to kind of crawl on the ground and dust, the legs go. So there's something

there. But I think an even kind of more menacing dragon-ish 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 portrait of the dragon is definitely drawing on the figure of leviathan so there's a kind of brilliant account of leviathan in the book of job where god appears and basically kind of tells job off for moaning yeah and this is god describing leviathan 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 cauldron. His breath kindleth coals and a flame goeth out of his mouth. God would have had a voice of Ian McKellen there. Well, all right. Maybe you should have 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, the most sinister dracon is a red dracon. It has seven heads, 10 horns, each is crowned with a diadem. And this is the very embodiment of evil. So famous 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 deceiveth 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 draco, the dragon, with the demonic. And demons, according to Christian tradition, right from the beginning, have wings. So that's in the Book of Revelation. In the centuries that follow, so we're in the time of the Roman Empire, and people believe that demons exist, don't they? I mean, there's references to church fathers and so on.

And that they have wings. And that they have wings. And that 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 fount of all evil is the serpent in the Garden of Eden. 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 draconis as well. So Augustine, who's writing in Latin at the beginning of the fifth century AD, he's writing about draconis and he says that they live in the region of water, which is obviously- Oh, from the Greek myths. 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 this for sure, but I think we can be reasonably sure that Augustine never actually saw a dragon. I think we can be relatively sure of that, yeah.

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 Augustine 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 Augustine is writing, there's a Greek text that describes St. Bartholomew, who's one of Christ's disciples, one of the apostles. He's with Jesus and he can ask Jesus anything he wants. And so he does what I think I would do, which is to say, you know, I'd love to see the dragon that will fight with St. Michael at the end of days. That would be a one-way. I'd quite like to see a to say, you know, I'd love to see the dragon that will fight with St. Michael at the end of days. That would be a one-way.

I'd quite like to see a dragon. Okay. And Jesus says, I don't think you should see it. I think it's too frightening. And St. Bartholomew says, go on. So Jesus says, fine. And so St. 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 bolt-shaped nostrils. Yeah, exactly. It is enormous. And it has one wing, which is a very weird detail. I find that the most sinister and unsettling of all those details.

So it's like kind of a helicopter. I mean, I don't quite know how it works. Yeah. A one-winged dragon. I actually find such a troubling thought. Yeah. So Augustine is writing at a time when the West and the eastern halves of the empire are 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 warlords and whatnot. And new kingdoms emerge on the rubble of what had been the Roman Empire. And so the traditions of the dragon become very specifically Latin, very specifically Western, although there are kind of influences coming from the Greek world. So by AD 800, which is the year that Charlemagne is being crowned emperor in Rome. But also right about the time that the fiery dragons are appearing above Lindisfarne. Yes, absolutely so. And Alcuin, who is Charlemagne's great advisor, is a Northumbrian and is 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 Draco. And it's serpentine, so it hasn't got any legs, but it does have wings. So this is the first portrayal of a dragon that you can say, yeah, it has wings. It's an 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 that are breathing fire. You know, 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.

Greco-Roman, the kind of 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 his treasure, sort of incarnation of greed, all of that kind of thing. So you're listening to me and wondering, well, how does this Greco-Roman Christian figure of the dragon, the Draco, merge with the worm that we get in, say, Beowulf. 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 wellspring of prestige and authority, which is why over the course of the Viking age, the Viking kings and then the Vikings themselves start to convert to Christianity. And I think that the Latin dragon, it's 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, there are a lot of scholars who would argue that Beowulf itself is a fusion of Norse and Christian traditions.

And so the dragon may be in Beowulf, is a fusion of Norse and Christian traditions. And so the dragon may be in Beowulf, may be slightly imported. Yeah. 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 Draco, 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 Latin 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 Theophanu, 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 plain. And he says, you know, that there was this dragon, it was flying overhead. Its 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, I saw an interesting cow or, you know, there was a 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 are crossing the plain 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 that. They are blinded, Tom, by their own religious enthusiasm. Well, you might say that, or you might say... They've genuinely seen a dragon. 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... No. So these are what heralds in Britain and Ireland would call a wyvern. Right. So the distinction is made by basically British heralds. And why the idea of that comes from a viper, right? So it's more serpentine. It's more serpentine. It only has two legs.

But in the rest of Europe, there's no distinction. They're all dragons. And so people may be wondering, well, the last kind of piece of the jigsaw is how these two-legged creatures, the wyverns, 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 Ghent in the 12th century that I think is the first show of four-legged dragon.

But the image of dragons having four legs is really late 14th century and particularly 15th century. You know, this is the dragon-like smile that you get. Yeah. 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 book, the first printed books have dragons in them because people love dragons. They're the canonical monster of the time. And they have the four legs, the wings, the lidless reptilian face, breathing fire, I guess, Tom.

But is it not also that people in England in particular are very excited about dragons because, of course, 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, you know, all of that stuff. So dragons start appearing on flags and start appearing on, you know, the royal coats of arms.

So that also kind of beds it down. So you take someone like 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, that's a really important part to play. And so I think that this is why the combination of printing, the fact that you're starting to get books now, say 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 on 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 the great dynastic struggle of the 15th century. So in the first series of the House of the Dragon, you have tournaments in very 15th century armor. You have kind of a Mallory-esque quest for a white heart. You have a Richard III figure who's kind of, you know, 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, Tom, because probably some of that is unconscious, right? That it's actually just a buried association. Yeah, maybe. I'm sure not all of it is unconscious, but when we think of dragons and knights, we think of them in their sort of slightly decadent 15th century, very fancy armor. We don't think of Beowulf. 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 foundational principles of dragonology, if that's what.

I would like to think that there is. And I think also, 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 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 kind of 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, there are giant winged creatures, pterosaurs, vast, vast pterosaurs, Quetzalcoatlus, 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 Morte d'Arthur.

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 a kind of fear of the apocalyptic? You know, we talked at the beginning about them as tactical nuclear weapons. Obviously, we live in an age of tremendous anxiety about weapons of mass destruction, about the climate, about all of those kinds of things. How much do you think that dragons have become avatars for our deeper, more profound fears about humanity

in the world and whatnot i mean tolkien was writing the hobbit in the 30s so before the development of of the atom bomb i think that the portrayal of dragons in george rr martin must be influenced by that in particular by kind kind of dread of nuclear war, because that's the role that they play. In Tolkien, it's about anxiety, it's about avarice and about accumulation of wealth. And in George R.R. Martin, the dragons are emblems of power. Yeah. Or actually that's something that Tolkien and George R.R. Martin have in common, right? The fear of power and the human capacity to abuse power. All right, Tom, that was absolutely fascinating. Brilliant interweaving of all these different traditions

and forensic work on your part. Thank you very much. Thank you for that. I was going to say, is it draconian? Because that's a different route, isn't it? I was going to say a draconian tour de force. Well, I mean, if you burn down a town with a dragon, that's quite draconian behavior.

That's very Game of Thrones. Right, so on that bombshell, as as it were yeah tom what are you doing this evening reading up on st george for our next podcast presumably are you uh no i will be watching uh season uh 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 new dragons. It's going to be tremendous scenes. So I'm very much looking forward to that. And I should be tuning in on Sky tonight. With the realm divided and on the brink of civil war, Tom, all must choose their side. Brilliant. Bye-bye. Goodbye.