A Little Review of A Little History of Dragons, by Joyce Hargreaves

A Little History of Dragons by Joyce Hargreaves

My rating: 4 of 5 stars


I bought this little book on a trip to England last summer and stuffed in my suitcase and it has languished in my "to be read" stack ever since. I fished it out the other day and have had a delightful time reading it.

For a tiny little book, with only 58 pages of text, Joyce Hargreaves covers a lot of territory, beginning with the basic question of just what is a dragon to dragons in the West, in Norse mythology, in China and Japan, in India, and the Americas and other places. Dragon varieties examined include the Hydra, the Worm and the Wyvern, and the Basilisk. A helpful "Gazetteer on Interesting Dragon Sites" in Great Britain is provided, along the appropriate tales for each site.

Hargreaves begins with the question of just what are dragons, these beasts that are "the most nebulous, complex and ambivalent of all the animals that inhabit the jungle of the imagination. This fabulous creature has been the subject of myth and traveller's tales for the last 4000 years." Hargreaves argues that "[a] can be primarily considered a symbol of the many different aspects of the powers of the earth, both good and bad" (1). There is a wealth information here on this fabulous beast.

Students of dragons, aka dragonologists, here is a resource book for you. And ponder this: "...we can be almost certain that the dragon, in the general form we visualise it, does not physically exist anywhere on Earth" (2). Almost, eh? After all, "Our genetic ancestors were once hunted by dinosaurs. Could dragons resonate as a deep compound symbol for one of our oldest foes?" (50)?

They do make for great stories.




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