Happy Year of the Dragon!
The start of the Year of the Dragon has made me think about dragons. Though I don't really need to be encouraged to think about dragons – the book I'm deep in the middle of editing has seven speaking dragon parts, and any number of minor spear-carrying dragons. But this seems like a good time to celebrate other people's dragons too!
My favourite dragon books include:
The wonderful heartrending dragon in CS Lewis's The Voyage of the Dawn Treader, which is my earliest dragon memory.
The amazing How to Train Your Dragon series by Cressida Cowell, the funniest, cleverest, most exciting series of dragon books ever. Though I'm not sure I'd want Toothless under my helmet.
Philip Reeves' No Such Thing As Dragons, which is dark, spiky, tantalisingly short, and a fabulous novel for slightly older readers.
And the very similarly titled, but for much smaller people: There's No Such Thing As A Dragon by Jack Kent.
I also love the splendidly distant dragons in Vivien French's Flight of Dragons.
I have mixed feelings about Eragon and its sequels, partly because they are almost too big to hold, but also because I thought I'd been really original, creating a friendly female dragon, making her blue and calling her Sapphire. Then shortly after First Aid for Fairies was published, I read Eragon, and met his friendly blue female dragon, called Saphira. I'm very relieved about that final vowel.
I have a couple of favourite dragon reference books too (I'm not sure if you can call them non-fiction!)
My first dragon collection was A Book of Dragons, edited by Roger Lancelyn Green (though I see it has my wee brother's name on the first page, in pencil. Perhaps I could rub that out, because he's not getting it back now!)
And more recently, I've loved the wonderful tactile Dragonology books by Dr Ernest Drake (which aren't mine either – they belong to my kids.)
And finally, my favourite dragon myths.
I've enjoyed telling dragon myths for years, partly because they come with inbuilt excitement (a dragon! fire! teeth!), partly because they come from all over the world, and partly because it feels right to share dragon stories when I'm doing author sessions about the novels with Sapphire in them.
My favourite dragon stories to share include:
A seven-headed Chinese dragon
A Greek dragon who kept a shepherd boy company on the hills
A Viking dragon defeated by a sheepskin
A Polish dragon, also defeated by a sheepskin (some dragons are easily fooled)
A Persian dragon who teased a horse
A Georgian dragon who was sung to sleep
And an Irish dragon who lost his tongue
(If you want to find out more about these dragons, you'll have to ask me to come and tell you the stories!)
Dragons are universal, appearing as the monster of choice in many cultures and countries, so I'm fascinated by theories about where our dragon stories come from. Do we need monsters for our heroes to prove themselves against? Did our ancestors need explanations for those big fossilised bones and teeth? Or maybe, just maybe, these stories are about real dragons, and they're still out there, somewhere…
What are your favourite dragon books and stories? Please let me know!
(And here is the dragon who sits beside my computer – hand made for me by a Sapphire fan!)
