This post is for a young reader who shares my deep and abiding affection for the malicious and maladroit creature known as the dragon. There will be a forthcoming installment of Field Notes with a dragon. Since, however, that’s a few drawings down the line, I thought I’d offer up florilegium draconum, or…er… bouquet of dragons, from medieval manuscripts to hold over all those who want more dragons.

The medieval bestiary seems the most sensible place to begin, and one of my favorites is the Aberdeen Bestiary which is as good as Thanksgiving for the eyes. In the nature of bestiaries, the Aberdeen provides practical (in a manner of speaking) insight into the species.

Aberdeen University Library, MS 24 f. 65v, c. 1200

Thus, we learn not only that dragons are the largest of both serpents and animals upon earth, but also that their emergence from the caves makes the ether tremble. If you ever wondered where dragons come from, they apparently originated in Ethiopia and India. Regrettably, the  bestiary does not say whether there is a distinction–as with elephants–between the Indian and the African species. Instead, the text provides instructive details like which end to be more afraid of, and perhaps that is more important than which branch of the family has the bigger ears. Fun fact for your next dragoning venture (like birding only far, far more perilous): a dragon’s strength lies in its tail not its teeth. (That seems rather contradicted by those fangs in the illumination but never mind.) Apparently, the strangling strength of those tails makes them fearsome threats to even great creatures like elephants. As with any good bestiary, the point is not natural history but spiritual illumination and so the text continues with an explication of how the devil is like the dragon. To be edified, go to the Aberdeen MS.

That connection between dragons and evil plays out in hagiography (writings on the lives of the saints) as well as in bestiaries. For example, dragon (demon) plays an important role in demonstrating St. Margaret’s authority and sanctity. In short, when our gal Margaret refuses to dally, marry, or have anything in any way tawdry to do with the pagan Olibrius, she is tortured not only by oily Olibrius, but also the devil.

BL MS 48985, f.124v

In what can only be utter frustration at Margaret’s seeming immunity to temptation and torment alike, a demon appears in the form of a dragon and swallows her whole, thinking that’ll settle her hash. Unfortunately for the dragon, Margaret turns out to be as indigestible as she is invulnerable.  Lunch gets the better of the dragon-coming and going as we see here. (Of course, anyone could have told him that dress is way, way too much roughage.)

Returning to the earlier theme of natural history, we find this fellow in the Liber acerbe etatis from the second half of the 14th century. Personally, I do not believe that heresy was what got Francesco Stabili, the composer of the Liber’s “encyclopedic [vernacular] poem dealing with the natural sciences, physics and religious philosophy” burnt at the stake (Imaginary Creatures, p 32). My money is on the dragon portrayed here hunting him down and crisping him for writing a poem that inspired such a spectacularly unflattering and spotty portrait.

Just to show how cosmically important dragons are, the next example comes from a manuscript that deals with astronomy. If you’re wondering what about those things that look like shuriken are all over the hindquarters of this dandy with a chin-beard are, wonder no more. They are not ninja weapons but stars. This particular section of the manuscript treats the constellation Cetus. While we today know this constellation as “the Whale,” it was better known to as a sea monster to the Greeks. Ergo, a starry-bummed dragon.

If ever a dragon was cute as a button…. BL, Add MS 49622,  Gorleston Psalter 133v

While bestiaries, natural histories, and astronomical miscellanies are all excellent places for finding representations dragons, some of the most delightful dragons–in my opinion–are the wholly decorative dragons one trips over in margins and lettering.

Admittedly, in real life, the only ones who think that dragons are decorative are dragons themselves, vain creatures that they are. Moreover the thought of tripping over an unexpected dragon should make anyone with any instinct for self-preservation watch their footing. In manuscripts, however, anything goes. So, a few dragons from medieval marginalia.

Another Gorleston Psalter beauty, which is worth going to the British Library site for in full, takes up the ubiquitous knight-dragon motif below. As with saints, knights generally get the better of dragons (as opposed to snails who tend to beat knights hollow. Go figure.)

BL, Add MS 49622 MS Gorleston 134v.

BL, Cotton MS Claudius B VII, f.224r

Here, in an image which must deeply wound dragonly pride, the artist has reduced dragons to mere architectural filler. The upside for the beasts is that they can nod off, make lunch dates, or whatever while Merlin (on the left) drones on about the world’s longest prophecy to Vortigern.

No one will ever know.

Speaking of lunches, in this lovely marginalia from the late thirteenth-century Alphonso Psalter below, it’s hard to tell whether these two are sharing a salt lick or facing off. Whatever they are doing, I have to say this is one of the hodgepodgier dragons I’ve seen with his bird-like wings, ivy-leaf claws, stripes, and spots. It’s really no wonder it doesn’t know whether to kiss the stag or attack it. It’s probably having an identity crisis.

BL, MS 24686, f.12r.

Some other post, I’ll devote attention to dragons in other manuscript traditions.

St. Gallen, Zürich, Braginsky Collection, B252, f. 362

For now, I’ll just  pop in this crick-necked cutie. The late fifteenth-century manuscript from Northern Italy contains a collection of Minhagim (“religious customs”).  The illustrator has included this little fellow to spice up a passage treating with the seventh day of the Sukkot festival, Hoshanah Rabba.

We’ll wrap up in good, oxymoronic style with a selection of initials, specifically with a variety of zoomorphic capitals rather than inhabited capitals like the “D” with St. Margaret above.

This slideshow requires JavaScript.

This slideshow requires JavaScript.

Sources and Resources: Continue reading →

I’ve always taken umbrage at John Dryden for slandering puns as the ‘lowest and most groveling form of wit’. I was raised in a punning family. My father was an inveterate and unrepentant punster until life beat the humor out of him. He was the Speedy Gonzalez of puns, and I loved that about him. He wielded puns like a musketeer wields a rapier. Agile, quick, and deadly. My sisters and I would be left holding our wounds, groaning in pain around the picnic-cum-kitchen table while he’d chuckle gently. Every punster knows joy that comes from the infliction of deep, deep agony in one’s verbal victim. My father is still alive, but it’s been decades since I’ve heard a good/bad pun out of him. It was this transformation from impish punster to resigned parrot that, to me, served as the most painful indicator of his diminution. So, to our friend Dryden, I say, “Low? Low?!” I don’t even comprehend the connection of that word to wordplay. Pun. Pun loudly. Pun proudly, and let the gibes fall where they may.

Perhaps that is not entirely true. About puns being lowly, I mean. I did just have to apologize this evening to my flatmate this evening for referring to some game show disaster as a “vowel movement.” Around my friend’s agonized objections–“So bad! So bad!”–I heard the telltale thumping of my mother flipping in her grave. Over the years, my mum’s gotten a lot of exercise in there. A lot.

Another boring hunt scene (BL Gorleston 210b – because I am totally obsessed with this manuscript)

It’s hardly surprising as I had her flipping in her grave before she died. I’d do something sub-standard that usually involved burping, and then she and I would do our little dance. By way of explanation, a super-nervous stomach meant I was basically a human eructor set as a child, and gas, so far as my mother was concerned, belonged ever and only in cars. Any hooo…. I’d belch, count to two, and like clockwork…

“Liesl Ruth! I despair of ever turning you into a young lady.”

To which ever-popular refrain, I would protest, “Oh Mom! I’m not that bad!”

Thereafter followed a sigh to wallop all sighs ever sighed. Desdemona breathing her last had nothing on my mother. Elinor exasperated by Marianne’s declaration of poetic love could not rival her. Little Amy Dorrit, lamenting for her foolish relatives, could only pale by comparison. My mother’s sigh was a masterpiece of controlled exhalation, discrete rather than maudlin, but replete with emotion. It suggested depths of emotion that even she would not admit to. The air echoed with a dozen different, unspoken failures. You could have built bridges with her sighs. Sometimes I did things just to get her to sigh that sigh. It was magnificent.

Maybe she was right. Maybe I was that bad.

Unlike my father, my mother did not pun, but neither did she roll her eyes or sneer at my father or diminish him for his sense of humor. For that, I am unspeakably grateful. I like having that memory of grace between them. I say grace, because there are a lot of people out there of the Dryden ilk who treat punsters like hardened sinners.  Après pun, their faces become as immobilized as an eighteenth-century death masks, and you know—you just know–they’re consigning you to some wholly inappropriate ring of purgatory for molesting their ears.  Why inappropriate, you ask? Because Dante did not create a ring for what other people consider bad wordplay. Not in the Purgatorio, not in the Inferno. Okay, he doesn’t celebrate us in Paradiso either, but that’s fair. So, take that, Dryden. Low, my sweet Aunt Fanny. No pun merits shaming. No, not even if you refer in awe to the giant baked potato on your plate as a potentator. No! Wipe that look off your face, reader. Not even then.

So, the rules of engagement for those who do not revel in “low” wordplay: Sneering? Not acceptable. Do not stretch and elongate your nostrils like some bactrian afraid of infection. Wit is not contagious. The more’s the pity.  Eye-rolling? Acceptable, so long as there’s a twinkle in that eye. Groaning? Perfectly acceptable. In fact, please groan. Loudly. We know that deep down beneath that groan is deep and abiding admiration and no small amount of jealousy that you didn’t get there first.

Like most of us, I remember exactly where I was and I what I was doing on this day seventeen years ago. I was lecturing on Beowulf. Whether I was just introducing the poem or whether we had actually begun Grendel’s attack upon Heorot, I do not remember. What I do remember (to my shame) is giving the unknown student who interrupted my class a you’re-a-very-daring-person look before he informed me the university was closing because of attacks on New York City and that, as our building was located right behind the Massachusetts State House, we were to evacuate immediately.

Beyond a rather stunned injunction for everyone to be safe and leave campus immediately as directed, I do not remember a word I said to the class. The silence with which they vanished in a matter of seconds was memorable even if my words were not. Rather than fight the crowds on the abysmal Green Line, I wound my way down the oddly empty side streets of Beacon Hill to the Church of the Advent to give the madness of the subways an hour or two before going home. Where other people may have a memory of crowds and chaos, I have a memory of being alone and feeling oddly solitary on the city streets. There may have been people. There must have been people, but I remember feeling as if the city had been deserted.

Angel over the choir, Church of the Advent, Boston

For the next hour or so, I sat quietly mulling in the quiet of Church of the Advent. After asking the heavens what the world was coming to (and receiving no definitive answer), I alternated between reading Psalms from the bible in the pew in front of me and Beowulf I had with me in my satchel. Aside from the fact that there’s nothing like translation for clearing one’s head, life seemed a strange echo of art at that moment.

Item 1: A hall ruled by Hrothgar, king of the Danes; a hall in which the great men of their world boast and make plans; a hall in which these great men decide amongst themselves how their world shall go because they have the power to bend it to their wills and make it so.

Þa wæs Hroðgare      heresped gyfen,
wiges weorðmynd,      þæt him his winemagas
georne hyrdon,      oðð þæt seo geogoð geweox,
magodriht micel.      Him on mod bearn
þæt healreced      hatan wolde,
medoærn micel,      men gewyrcean
þonne yldo bearn      æfre gefrunon,
ond þær on innan      eall gedælan
geongum ond ealdum,      swylc him god sealde,
buton folcscare      ond feorum gumena.
Ða ic wide gefrægn      weorc gebannan
manigre mægþe      geond þisne middangeard,
folcstede frætwan…
healærna mæst;      scop him Heort naman
se þe his wordes geweald      wide hæfde.
He beot ne aleh,      beagas dælde,
sinc æt symle.      Sele hlifade,
heah ond horngeap. (ll. 64-82a)

Thereafter was fortune in war vouchsafed to Hrothgar, and glory in battle, that the vassals of his kindred hearkened willingly unto him and the numbers of his young warriors grew to a mighty company of men. Then it came into his heart that he would command men to fashion a hall and a mansion, a mightier house for their mead-drinking than the children of men had ever known, and there-within would he apportion all things to young and old such as God had granted him, save the people’s land and the lives of men.

Then have I heard that far and wide to many a kindred on this middle-earth was that work proclaimed, the adorning of that dwelling of men… the greatest of houses and halls. For it he devised the name Heorot, even he whose word far and wide was law. His vow he belied not, the rings he dealt and treasure at the feast. The hall towered high with horned gables wide…. (from J.R.R. Tolkien’s translation, Beowulf: A Translation and Commentary. Mariner Books; Reprint edition. 2015, p. 14)

Item 2: An outsider, a monster, uncivilized by the standards of these men, a son of Cain and thus cursed with all his kin; a creature to whom the sounds of rejoicing in the hall were torment.

Ða se ellengæst       earfoðlice
þrage geþolode,       se þe in þystrum bad,
þæt he dogora gehwam       dream gehyrde
hludne in healle;       þær wæs hearpan sweg,
swutol sang scopes.       Sægde se þe cuþe
frumsceaft fira       feorran reccan,
cwæð þæt se ælmihtiga       eorðan worhte,
wlitebeorhtne wang,       swa wæter bebugeð,
gesette sigehreþig       sunnan ond monan
leoman to leohte       landbuendum
ond gefrætwade       foldan sceatas
leomum ond leafum,       lif eac gesceop
cynna gehwylcum       þara ðe cwice hwyrfaþ. (ll. 86-98)

Then the fierce spirit that abode in darkness grievously endured a time of torment, in that day after day he heard the din of revelry echoing in the hall. There was the sound of harp and clear singing of the minstrel; there spake he that had knowledge to unfold from far-off days the beginning of men, telling how the Almighty wrought the earth, a vale of bright loveliness that the waters encircle; how triumphant He set the radiance of the sun and moon as light for the dwellers in the lands, and adorned the regions of the world with boughs and with leaves, life too he devised for every kind that moves and lives. (ibid, pp 15-16.)

There is, of course, much debate over Grendel’s malice and motivations.  Any number of readings turn the poem inside and out and on its head, and yet, while I resist as anachronistic and inauthentic readings that romanticize or excuse Grendel, the poem’s representation of the attack on Heorot requires that the dynamics of power and “civilization” be included in the analysis of this deep enmity.  Did Grendel chose the path of mearcstapa (l. 103. haunter of the marches/waste borderlands), or did rejection by men condemn him to occupy this precarious edge along society’s boundaries? How much (if any) responsibility do the men of Heorot bear for the ire of the creature that comes against them with a malice so determined that it seems to have been refined in fire?

I will not belabor the analogies, such as they are, to the modern context of the U.S. as a superpower. I will add only the confession that when we returned to class the next week, these were connections that I did not, for better or for worse, have the stomach or courage to make directly. The immediate aftermath of such a tragedy did not seem the place to do so. Now, the remembrance of those next classes is for me filled with a lingering sense of my own moral cowardice, as if I failed both the poem and my class.