Eleven things you didn't know about dragons

 

Ten Eleven Things You Didn’t Know about Dragons

 (a revised version of a popular post from the past)

1. Dragons guard hoards of treasure not out of greed, but because of the healing and rejuvenating properties of gold. Dragons lying on hoards have been overheard purring. How else do you think they manage to live for hundreds of years?

2. That’s right, some dragons purr, like cats. This should not, however, be taken as a sign that the dragon is well-disposed toward you. As with domestic felines, deep contented purring often precedes a particularly vicious attack.

3. The average dragon’s pulse beats once per minute. A dragon’s heartbeat may be audible from a mile away, or felt as a tremor in the ground from an even greater distance. That is why many professional dragonslayers go barefoot, to get as much advance warning of the presence and location of their enemy as possible.

4. Dragon bone is the hardest substance known to be produced by animal bodies. On the Mohs scale of hardness (in which diamond rates at 10), human tooth enamel is rated at 5, and dragon bone comes in at 9, the same hardness as sapphires and rubies, and far harder than quartz, iron and steel.

5. The longest-lived dragon is reputed to be Tau Lung, who was born before the formation of the Earth and inhabits the Sun (he may be responsible for sunspots and solar flares).

The shortest-lived dragons are the “offspring” of Motherworms, immense sack-like black dragons capable of vomiting hundreds of small fiery “drakelets” at their enemies. The drakelets can briefly fly on their own power but in a matter of moments they fall apart into gobbets of flame or burn to ash. Since the drakelets do not last long enough to reach maturity, it is not known how Motherworms actually reproduce.

6. There are seventeen officially recognized classes of dragon, including the well-known Firedrakes, as well as ice dragons, riverdrakes, celestial dragons, bookworms, etc. The classification of certain dragon-like creatures is currently in dispute, most notably in the case of the scaly flatwyrm, a parasitic organism that infests the digestive system of dragons and can grow to be over one hundred feet long. The scaly flatwyrm most often infests fire-breathers, and its irritating presence in the dragon’s bowels is said to be the real reason these dragons so often go on destructive rampages.

7. Dragonflesh contains no fat. It is the healthiest and most vitamin-rich meat available, if you can get it. One has to be careful cooking dragon, however, since it can spontaneously combust, sending gobbets of fiery nastiness in every direction.

8. The most intelligent dragon ever known, Auuggg the Venerable, held a Chair in astronomy and synchronicity studies at Hypatian University in New Alexandria. She taught there for seventy-nine years before taking a well-earned retirement, though she still continued to give lectures as a Professor Emeritus for a long time, lectures that well-attended even though it was said they did tend to "drag on." Auuggg's office was a cavern deep underground said to be lined with the bones of hapless graduate students who never finished their dissertations.

9. The vulnerable spot on a dragon’s hide is not always on its underbelly. Dragons have been known to have what professional dragonslayers call “sweet spots” on other parts of their bodies, including the head, limbs, and tail. There have been legendary dragons whose hides were said to be completely impenetrable, but these creatures apparently all died of boredom after several centuries and thousands of failed attempts on their lives.

10. According to most enigmatists, a dragon is an event, not a thing. A fire-breather like the legendary Smaug, for example, is what happens when heat, oxygen, and combustible material combine with story.

11. There are some who attribute the global warming trend to the increased activity of fire-drakes. This is, of course, simply more evasion of human responsibility. Fire-breathers and all other kinds of dragons are in decline as a result of pollution, human population growth, and the rise of extreme weather events. It seems that not even our oldest and most powerful myths are invulnerable to the kinds of sudden, unprecedented change our species is bringing to this world.

Popular posts from the past: Ogre

Traveling in the Perilous Realm you’re likely, sooner or later, to meet ogres. They have become more and more familiar denizens of Story these days, no doubt largely as a result of computer and roleplaying games like World of Warcraft, in which they appear quite often. In these games, and the guidebooks and manuals that have spun off from them, ogres have been catalogued by way of various species, tribes, races, etc. You can, for example, encounter an “ogre mage,” which is surprising, given that ogres are traditionally thought of as brutish hateful creatures without much in the way of brains. Rarely (if ever) in stories does a hero go to consult a wise old ogre.

The word ogre itself is interesting. Looking into its etymology, one finds that the word first appears in French literature, in a 12th century poem about the Aruthurian knight Percival, where these lines appear:

et s'est escrit que il ert ancore

que toz li reaumes de Logres,

qui ja dis fu la terre as ogres,

ert destruite par cele lance …

Which translates roughly to something like: “and there will come a time / when the kingdom of Logres [England], / which was once the land of ogres / shall be destroyed by that spear …”

It almost seems likely the poet invented the word ogre in order to find something to rhyme with an odd word like Logres. From there, however, the word ogre shows up more and more frequently in poems and stories through the ages, usually to describe some sort of large, savage, nasty being, somewhere in size between a goblin and a giant. 

I used to wonder why there were no ogres in Tolkien’s books, only trolls, until I discovered that his word for goblin, orc, may have been derived from the Italian word for ogre, orco, which may itself come from a far older word for some sort of evil creature. So he didn't want both orcs and ogres in his stories if they're really the same thing, at least etymologically. As usual with Professor Tolkien, it was an interesting old word that sparked his imagination and led to the creation of a new creature. 

Sometimes that's how the realm of Story grows: the word comes first, then something has to be imagined to fit it.

The Knowmes

 

Quite possibly the most irritating beings in all the Perilous Realm are the Knowmes. This crabbed, humourless race dwells by the Sad Grey Lake in the Great Scarred Land, where they busy themselves every day at their many profitable industries, which make them rich but also make the lake more grey and the land more scarred.

 They inform anyone who asks that they are unrelated in any way to the more familiar garden-variety gnomes of the ferny woods, with their jolly white beards and red caps. And that is why they insist on the unusual spelling of their name. For they will tell anyone who makes the mistake of calling them gnomes that they are not gnomes, they are Knowmes, the keepers of Knowledge (or as they call it, Knowmledge). They value facts only, hard data, the kind of information that they can make use of for their own profit.

If someone mentions one of their hated rivals, for example Gnome Chomsky, they roll their eyes and speak condescendingly of his discredited theories.

A conversation with one of these beings will consist mostly of the Knowme telling you “I already knowm that.” Indeed, they will inform anyone they meet that whatever they knowm about is what’s worth knowming, and whatever they don’t knowm about isn’t. Although they’re not often willing to admit there’s anything unknowmn to them. Their arrogance really knowms no bounds. When confronted by information that’s new and unfamiliar to him, a Knowme will put on a knowming expression and nod knowmingly, as if it’s already aware of these facts. 

If you’re ever in the presence of a Knowme on those rare occasions when it's forced to admit there’s something it doesn’t knowm, you had better turn and run, because Knowmes deal with these situations by turning bright purple and exploding. As a diversionary gambit this is of course quite drastic, but it does have the side benefit of keeping the Knowme population in check.

 Of course there's probably much I don't know about these beings, so don't take my word for it. I'm not an expert in Knowmology.

Popular Posts from the Past: Ice Dragons

Long ago, when much of the Perilous Realm was locked in a neverending winter, the ice dragons ruled. They were mighty creatures, powerful and unpredictable. Few humans ever saw them, for they dwelt only in the most frozen, inaccessible regions.  Nor were they interested in gold or treasure or in capturing princesses, like their more avaricious and meddlesome cousins, the dragons of fire.

Those few storyfolk who dared travel in the lands of ice brought back tales of huge winged shapes that left blizzards of frost in their wake, of avalanches that had the power to change direction and even charge uphill, of lakes that would suddenly freeze over, or just as suddenly crack apart and plunge travelers into the icy water.

There are those who say that the glaciers we see today are the sleeping bodies of these mighty beings, and that although their kingdom has shrunk much from what it once was, they may still be roused from their slumber. Even as it withers away and dies, ice is a magnificent and dangerous phenomenon to behold.

In The Shadow of Malabron, Rowen of Blue Hill has a very close encounter with an ice dragon on the Whitewing Glacier. An encounter that will have important consequences for the fate of Fable and all of the Perilous Realm.

Illustration by Mary Wharton

Golem

My son was playing Minecraft and I was watching (I can’t play computer games: a few minutes of that jerky screen motion and I start to feel like I’m going to throw up). Some sort of creature I’d never seen before appeared on the screen. I asked my son what it was and he told me it was an iron golem. It was protecting the village.

An iron golem?

I did some looking around. Golems are cropping up in stories, games and elsewhere more and more often nowadays. And they’re not just made of clay anymore. There are golems of iron, stone, diamond, fire, blood, and snow in games like Minecraft and Diablo. Sometimes they're protectors, sometimes destroyers.  

There are days as a writer when I feel like a golem myself, performing endless toil from which there is no escape unless someone releases me with a magic word. Like “Lunch!”

Much like Ord, the man of clay in The Perilous Realm trilogy, the origins of the golem legend are wrapped in mystery. There are ancient Jewish tales of beings created from earth and given life, and in the Talmud even Adam himself was said to have been a golem until God granted him mind and will. One of my favourite modern interpretations of the Golem legend is the moving retelling by David Wisniewski, with dramatic illustrations made of cut and torn paper.

Come to think of it, why not a golem made of paper? I may just have to write that story myself.

Ord

 

The man made of clay plunges his thick, powerful arms into the muck of the bog.

Without any sign of strain or even a grunt of effort, he uproots an immense stone and lifts it over his head.

The man of clay carries the stone to a tower standing by itself in the middle of this bleak, uninhabited bog. The tower is unfinished. It is roofless and has a gaping hole for a doorway.

The man of clay climbs the winding stair inside the tower. At the top he sets the stone he is carrying in place on top of the unfinished wall.

He pauses for a moment as if to survey his work, although his face remains  expressionless. In the middle of his forehead is a small mark. A shape that could be a letter in some unknown alphabet.

The man of clay descends the tower and strides off into the bog to search for another stone.

No one knows who brought this creature to life and commanded it to toil like this day after day. Those who wished the tower built may be long dead.

Slowly, steadily, without rest, the clay man builds the tower, day after day. And day after day the tower sinks a little further into the bog. The man of clay will never finish the tower. He will keep adding stones but the tower sinks faster than he can build it up.

Story-suckers

Blood-hobs (also known as story-suckers) are some of the truly shudder-worthy creatures in the Realm.  Blood-hobs are difficult to see, since they only come out at night, but even more than that, they’re not fully solid, material beings. Enigmatists say that only the circulatory and lymph systems of a blood-hob exist in the realm of matter, while most of the rest of them lives in the spirit world, and so their contact with creatures of flesh and bone like us is tenuous. You may think you see a blood-hob in front of you, but if you try to grasp it, you’re usually left with a sensation that your hand has passed through some damp miasma that’s left your skin unpleasantly cold and wet.

Blood-hobs are drawn to storystuff. What loremasters call innumith, or the fathomless fire. It’s the spark that starts deep in the mind and grows into a story. That’s why sometimes, late at night, if you’re listening to someone tell a story, or telling one yourself, you may have the sense that someone or something else is listening, too, over your shoulder. What these creatures want from our stories is not clear.

Sometimes the fathomless fire burns out of control and becomes werefire, the flame of hallucination and obsession. Blood-hobs feast on this stuff. And sometimes they attach themselves to people who spend too much time around the werefire. They invade such a person’s mind, and feed off their fevered dreams and fantasies.

The vampire plague

They’re everywhere. There are so many of them infesting Story these days that sometimes it seems there are more undead in books and on glowing screens big and small than there are regular people. And rather than being creatures of pure evil, these bloodsuckers have hopes and dreams and relationship problems just like the rest of us. In fact some are so unlike whatever was supposed to scare us about them in the first place that it seems “vampire” has simply become a trendy way of saying that a character in a story is “cool” or “different,” or even “rich.”

It seems to happen every few years, this virulent cycle: we find ourselves craving genus Nosferatus in our stories. We just can’t get enough of them, we binge on them, and then get heartily sick of them, as every tired toothy cliché gets overworked and exhausted, and all the same old “twists” get passed off as new. The blood of Story grows clotted and unnourishing. The night people no longer have the same scare factor or hipness quotient and we go looking for something else. Vampires quietly fade into the night. Then a new generation comes along looking for thrilling stories, and the Undead crawl forth once more, reviving on the scent of fresh victims.

But we’re not really the victims. We do this to ourselves. We’re the creatures of unholy appetites. We the readers and viewers and browsers hungry for our next quick fix. We the editors and publishers and storymongers seeing the trend beginning again and flooding the screens and shelves with more vampires. Entire aisles at the bookstore of dark covers featuring haunted-looking young women beneath titles that drip blood (though this time around there will probably be a lurching zombie  somewhere in the background). And the poor ghosts and witches and werewolves who always seem to play second fiddle, hanging around the edges of the feeding frenzy wondering if this time it’s really their turn. If this time they’re the big new thing.

Or maybe this time it’ll be minotaurs.

We force the Undead to rise too soon and too often from their well-earned sleep. We yank them up out of their coffins and charnel pits and make them dance for us. We dress them up to make them fresh and relevant but we still insist they act out the same threadbare plots over and over again.

Poor vampires.

Useful monsters

The wolf prowls the worlds of Story, in many forms and guises. One of the most terrifying is the garm wolf. This creature takes its name from a hellhound, Garmr, mentioned in the Poetic Edda: he is a monstrous dog whose howling will announce the coming of Ragnarok, the fall of the gods and the ending of the world.

In the Perilous Realm, the garm wolf is a wild wolf which has been captured and transformed, by sorcery or ill-treatment or usually both, into a vicious hunter and killer. Unlike the werewolf, which is a man (or woman) changed into a monster that kills other men, the garm wolf is a wolf changed into a monster by man, to kill other men.  The journey may be different but the end result is much the same: a creature that is neither one thing or another but something else, a thing that crosses a guarded boundary and leaps out at us from our darkest nightmares.

Wolves have been demonized in stories probably since stories were first told, or at least since humans began to domesticate sheep and cows and other livestock. When this happened, however many thousands of years ago, when we began to keep animals as stock, like items in a store, instead of just following them around with spears and bows, what a change that must have made in our way of seeing the world. Because now there were two different kinds of animals: ours, and all the others out there, including the ones that wanted to kill and eat ours. Come to think of it, this may have been the reality-altering moment that the idea of wild first entered human consciousness: when we put a fence around some animals to keep other animals out. Before the sheepfold and the barn, we were hunters along with the wolves and the other predators. The forest was our home too. But once we learned to keep animals and breed them, we stopped thinking of ourselves as having anything in common with the other predators. Of course we were still predators, only we’d learned how to keep our prey close by for when we needed them. We no longer had to venture out into the dark dangerous forest to find them.

So, as we looked over this new thing we’d invented called the fence, which divided the world into two separate places, home and out there, our stories must have changed, too. On the other side of the fence was the wolf, a dusk thing, prowling the border of night and day, of two worlds. He was a lot like our new friend the dog, and so seemed close to us in a disturbing way, and yet he was not like the dog because he could not be tamed. And so the wolf made a handy villain. We could tell scary stories about his cruelty, his lack of mercy, his diabolical craftiness (conveniently forgetting these are traits we excel at ourselves). We could give evil a face. And if we could name it, and kill it, we’d be safe for a while. Good defeats evil once again.

And so we invented the Big Bad Wolf, and he began to prowl through our stories and nightmares. And that is what the tale of the garm wolf is really about, perhaps. It is a story about the story of the Big Bad Wolf. About how we made the wolf into a useful monster.

A Very Brief Tale

The time-eater smacked his lips.

"Those minutes and hours were delicious," he said, and lifted his empty plate.

"May I have seconds?"

 

Illustration of Walter Stenström's The boy and the trolls or The Adventure in childrens' anthology Among pixies and trolls, a collection of childrens' stories, 1915.

Troll under a bridge in Seattle

shrowde

A shrowde is a living creature that looks, to the unsuspecting eye, like a ragged white sheet or cloak. Beings of the Shadow realm that cannot bear direct sunlight will sometimes go about concealed within a shrowde. According to some chroniclers, the "wearer" and the shrowde form a relationship of mutual dependence. The being that wears the shrowde as a cloak comes to depend on its protection and concealment, and the shrowde feeds off the thoughts and emotions of the one that wears it. Whether a shrowde has thoughts and feelings of its own is unclear, but it will act as an independent being if separated from its wearer.


A shrowde can move about on its own, much in the way that a sheet will be tossed and blown about by the wind. Shrowdes can thus glide through the air, or flow over the ground, and in these ways the shrowde will sometimes act as a scout or spy for its wearer. (Some scholars of the Perilous Realm believe that sightings of shrowdes are the source of our world's depiction of ghosts as figures draped in white).


At the will of its wearer, a shrowde can also envelop others. Those few who have been "swallowed" by a shrowde and lived to tell the tale report that they experienced a sense of being lost within a vast, murky expanse, as if the shrowde is somehow larger on the inside than it looks to be from the outside.

Nightbane

***
Nightbane is the collective word for beings from the shadow side of Story. They have also been called "Banefolk," although some scholars object to the term "folk" as being too nice and neighbourly for creatures known to perpetrate acts of horrific violence.




Nightbane include such familiar entities as goblins, ghouls, vampires, werewolves, some giants (not all) and witches (not all).


Lesser known to people in our world are such creatures as:


mordog: large man-shaped creatures with doglike faces and bloodthirsty appetites. Many mordog look more ursine than canine. The name does not derive from "dog" in fact but from an Eld word meaning "plague," as these creatures were thought of as a plague upon peace-loving folk.


creech: smaller creatures of naked bone and sinew, with sharp beaks and claws


hogmen: as the name suggests, these beings are porcine in appearance, and are notorious for a taste for human flesh. Fortunately, they are not particulary intelligent (although they like to believe they are) and can often be outwitted by stratagems that wouldn't ordinarily fool a five-year-old child.


While any of these creatures should be considered extremely dangerous, they themselves go in fear of some of the darker, truly terrifying beings of the shadow side of Story. Such beings as reavers, dark angels, and deathdancers.


Having long been on the side of wickedness in the realms of Story, Nightbane have been recruited in great numbers by Malabron the Night King. Many of them worship him as a god, who has promised to make them lords of the Realm over all of the "good" folk. In recent years, however, a number of Nightbane (either singly or in bands) have rejected Malabron's authority and joined the alliance of free folk against him, thus disproving the age-old notion that they are purely evil by nature and cannot change.

Image by T Wharton
***

On giants 2

***

One of my all-time favourite giant stories is the one about the Irish giant Finn MacCool (Fionn Mac Cumhail) and his wife Oonagh outwitting a rival giant who has come to find Finn and challenge him to a fight.

In some versions this rival is a Scottish giant named Ben An Donner, in other versions he is Cuchullain, the mythical Irish hero transformed for the purposes of the story into a giant.

The gist of the story is that when Finn finds out this giant is coming to find him, he panics and pleads with his wife to get him out of trouble. Oonagh dresses Finn up as a baby and puts him in a cradle. When the rival giant arrives at Finn's house, Oonagh tells him Finn is out, and invites him in for tea. The giant is startled at this enormous baby, and wonders fearfully how huge Finn must be if this is his child. He reaches into the crib to tickle the baby and Finn squeezes his finger and nearly crushes it (or bites it off, in some versions). The giant gets up and runs off, not daring to wait around for the father if the baby is so strong.

I haven't done justice to the wit and comedy of the story here at all, of course. There are several published versions which tell the tale with wonderful words and pictures, such as Mrs. McCool And The Giant Cuhullin: An Irish Tale, by Jessica Souhami.

on giants

***

Since the Perilous Realm is the realm of Story, there are giants here. All different sorts of giants. Nasty, people-eating, harp-stealing giants; frost giants and storm giants; giants with multiple heads; Nephilim; jotuns and ettins; colossi; Brobdingnagians; giants that live up in the sky, in the earth, under the sea; giants that can change size and change shape; giants that don't look like giants, but don't tell them that; unemployed giants in Greenland; friendly giants...

There are many places in the Realm where you can see the work of giants. Rings of huge stones, great mounds of earth, clefts in the sides of mountains, ravines and river valleys. Near a range of hills called the Winden Tors lives a good-natured, sleepy giant who does little but lie around all day and is often mistaken for a hill. Whether he will turn into a hill eventually is uncertain, but some say this is how many geographical features are formed. Like Nose Hill and Elbow Creek in Calgary, commemorating the body of Naapi, Old Man, the primeval ancestor of the Blackfoot people.

***