Help plan a class

[radiantfracture]

(I mean, if you want to and you have nothing better to do.)

What are your favorite instances of dragons in literature?

{rf}

Comments

[highlyeccentric]

I enjoy the dragon that eats St Margaret!

[radiantfracture]

...tell me more...

[sovay]

What are your favorite instances of dragons in literature?

I would read anything with dragons in it as a child. My really formative ones were written by Anne McCaffrey (Pern), Laurence Yep (Dragon of the Lost Sea and sequels), Jane Yolen (Dragon's Blood, though not sequels), and Susan Fletcher (Dragon's Milk and Flight of the Dragon Kyn, Sign of the Dove although I wasn't crazy about it). I did not like Smaug because I did not like the greedy, devilish tradition of dragons, however magnificently realized. I did like Le Guin's dragons and liked them even more when she revisited them in the later Earthsea books. I have good memories of something called A Book Dragon by Donn Kushner, but have no idea how it would hold up. I don't know how E. Nesbit's The Book of Dragons would hold up, either, but I have been really amused to see that one of its stories has sort of entered the realm of generally accepted cat legend. Less formatively, Patricia A. McKillip's "The Harrowing of the Dragon of Hoarsbreath" has—as one would hope from the title—an excellent dragon; I don't like The Cygnet and the Firebird so much as a novel, but the dragons in it are very good. I'm sure others will come to mind. For example, Maur in Robin McKinley's The Hero and the Crown, which got around my resistance to malevolent dragons by being an astonishing incarnation of trauma. I stalled out halfway through Naomi Novik's Temeraire series, but that wasn't her dragons' fault. Graeme Base's The Discovery of Dragons is delightful. [edit] The dragon in Tanith Lee's "Draco, Draco" also made a great impression on me, because it was bestial and uncanny, and the story's twist on dragonslaying new to me.

[radiantfracture]

Thank you! I believe I have a winter of delightful reading ahead of me.

I'd like to contrast depictions of dragons, so the variety is perfect. The short stories are very useful in that way.

I was thinking also of -- is it "St. Dragon and the George"? I don't know how that holds up.

Of the novels, I think I'll try to excerpt some scenes that will more or less easily come out more or less whole. Eustace in the cave, etc.

[agoodwinsmith]

R.A. Macavoy, Tea With The Black Dragon, 1983

I don't remember much right now, and the book is still packed, but I do remember wishing I could meet the Black Dragon.

[radiantfracture]

A Twitter friend suggested this, too! I think I'll have to at least track down a copy.

What makes the dragon appealing?

[juushika]

I really don't care about dragons—not my aesthetic, never imprinted on them when growing up, they're just not my thing—so I'm pretty fond of the few dragons in literature that have managed to overcome my disinterest:

Temeriare series by Naomi Novik. (The first book is fantastic and probably works as a stand-alone for the purposes of a class, despite that it's part of a much longer series.) Dragons here are a complete and unique sentient race operating alongside humans, and I love them as individuals, especially how their size, diet, and social structures operate inside and outside of human interaction and "civilization," and in interactions with humans, specifically what it means for two sentient races to interact when they are so profoundly different and one views the other as inhuman. I think it also does a good job of capturing that feeling of dragons as massive flighted beasts, that grandeur and awe and scale; not something I'm personally invested in, but I can see why others enjoy it.

Tooth and Claw by Jo Walton. This takes Victorian romance axioms/tropes and recasts them with huge sentient lizards; the interaction between dragon biology, instinct, culture, and social norms is super engaging. It almost makes more sense than similar social customs as they operate(d) in human culture, while also drawing attention the fact that these customs are social constructions. It's a playful book, but it was the physicality of the dragons that sold me, especially the danger that egg laying poses to female dragons.

ETA: in no way is an "unusual" dragon book: The Flight of Dragons by Peter Dickinson, illustrated by Wayne Anderson. This I did imprint on as a kid, and still love it; I'm a sucker for speculative evolution and similar books (like Dougal Dixon's Man after Man and After Man). The combo of soft science, playful illustrations, fantasy premise, and worldwide view (covering a diverse number of dragon origins and builds) really captured my imagination. I still have a lot of adult headcanons about dragon flight as a result of this book, even for instances of dragons that otherwise don't interest me at all.

[redbird]

Jo Walton says that one was prompted by a slightly confused conversation with her husband along the lines of "the problem with Trollope…[misunderstanding]is that he doesn't understand dragons" and the thought that no, Trollope understood dragons well enough, what he didn't understand was humans.

[radiantfracture]

Yes! I thought Temeraire was pretty delightful, and Tooth and Claw as well. Tooth and Claw would be a fun companion piece to the novels it takes off from. Maybe something on the marriage plot.

The dragon seems to feature often in crypto-natural-histories. Somehow we want to map the possibilities of dragons.

Do you have a favorite bit in "The Flight of Dragons"?

[radiantfracture]

Further, if you aren't a dragon sort, I'm also looking for unicorns and sea serpents.

[shewhomust]

Seconding those mentions of Ursula LeGuin and Peter Dickinson.

And since larryhammer was reminding me about U.A. Fanthorpe, her Not My Best Side.

[radiantfracture]

Thanks for the poem! That would yield some fun discussions.

[cmcmck]

Chrysophylax in Tolkein's 'Farmer Giles of Ham'.

[jazzfish]

Ooh, yes.

[anne]

The Memoirs of Lady Trent series, by Marie Brennan, starting with A Natural History of Dragons. Secondary world, lady from "Victorian England" studies dragons and has adventures, writes her memoirs with the full benefit of hindsight. And the illustrations are genius.

[radiantfracture]

I've just started reading these! Great fun.

[larryhammer]

The dragons of Earthsea, and Oolong from MacAvoy's Tea with the Black Dragon and sequel.

Not counting the origami dragons I have known (and, some of them, folded).

[radiantfracture]

Well, now I want very much to hear about the origami dragons.

[jazzfish]

Yevaud, from UKL's A Wizard of Earthsea.

All the dragons but especially Kazul and the old dragon whose name escapes me, from Wrede's Enchanted Forest Chronicles (Dealing With Dragons et seq).

Seconding Chrysophylax Dives, the cowardly (but very rich) worm from Tolkien's linguistic shaggy-dog story "Farmer Giles of Ham".

Speaking of Tolkien, Smaug as voiced by Richard Boone in the Rankin-Bass animated "The Hobbit."

(There are no dragons in John M. Ford's ahistorical epic The Dragon Waiting but heck with it, imma use the icon anyhow.)

[sovay]

All the dragons but especially Kazul and the old dragon whose name escapes me, from Wrede's Enchanted Forest Chronicles (Dealing With Dragons et seq).

YES.

(I knew I was forgetting something. I learned to make cherries jubilee because of those books.)

[asakiyume]

I loved the fire lizards in the Harper Hall trilogy by Anne McCaffrey--I loved the idea of a mob of tiny creatures like that for friends. I imagined them exactly like they appeared on these paperback covers, with diaphanous webbing between the struts of their wings and long, sinuous, glitteringly scaled bodies.

[sovay]

I imagined them exactly like they appeared on these paperback covers, with diaphanous webbing between the struts of their wings and long, sinuous, glitteringly scaled bodies.

Yes. I should take a picture of the fire lizard I made in ninth grade.

All of the Above

[eldriwolf]

All time favorite: - - "The Book of Dragons" - - Stephen J Walker
( I quote it often, and love to read it aloud)
I also like to read-aloud the poem "the tale of Custard the Dragon"

I am fond of Barbara Hambly's 'Dragonsbane'

Classics not mentioned: "the reluctant dragon" Kennith Grahame

The similarly themed "the Prince with a Hundred Dragons" Malcolm Foster
(Illustrated by Barbara Foster - who did the cover for the Ballintine paperback of "The Hobbit" I had )

"the True Account of the Death by Violence of George's dragon"
Fritz Eichenberg; Stan Washburn
(etchings, not-quite a children's book)

-I grew up calling all those paintings of 'George and the Dragon'
"Ethel the Martyr, and the man in the tin suit"
Which I got from an Aunt of mine-- I think she might have gotten it from a Charles Addams cartoon, Or made it up

Re: All of the Above

[radiantfracture]

Thanks! "The Reluctant Dragon" in particular is a great lead.

[conuly]

Maybe not for your class, but I like the Good Night, Good Knight series of books. It's so adorable!

[shewhomust]

Oh, how could I have forgotten: Moshui, the Books of Stone and Water. A fantasy trilogy of which the first volume is Dragon in Chains. Chinese type dragon...

[marycatelli]

Let's see

The Hobbit by J.R.R. Tolkien
Farmer Giles of Ham by J.R.R. Tolkien
A Book Dragon by Donn Kushner
A Wizard of Earthsea by Ursula K. Le Guin
Draw One in the Dark by Sarah A. Hoyt
The Unexpected Enlightenment of Rachel Griffin by L. Jagi Lamplighter

[monanotlisa]

I'd say Fuchur the Luck Dragon from Michael Ende's book The Neverending Story (I'm not sure I've seen the US movie at all, but I've read the book a couple of times).

[radiantfracture]

That might be a good book to consider, too -- thanks!

[wordweaverlynn]

Nobody has mentioned Eustace turning into a dragon in The Voyage of the Dawn Treader by C.S. Lewis.

[radiantfracture]

I am definitely going to excerpt this bit.

[watervole]

Earthsea.

[radiantfracture]

I'm sensing a consensus building around Earthsea. I do happen to be re-reading them just now.

Dragons!

[bibliofile]

A short story: James Thurber, The unicorn in the garden. A personal favorite.

Robin Hobb's Liveship Traders stories (three novels plus shorter pieces).

George R R Martin's A Song of Ice and Fire series (AKA Game of Thrones).

Don't the Eragon books have dragons in them?

Tanya Huff, The Enchantment Emporium

Genevieve Cogma, The Invisible Library.

Re: Dragons!

[radiantfracture]

Thank you!