461. Dragons
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This episode is brought to you by Sky. So Dominic, we are talking about dragons today and I know that you are as excited as I am about the return of House of the Dragon because actually it's been two years, almost two years since we last saw Matt Smith, Emma Darcy, Olivia Cooke on House of the Dragon and now they are returning for the biggest TV event of the summer. So more characters and the

Best of all, five new dragons. So, Tom, you'll remember the big hullabaloo about King Aegon II's coronation, and you'll remember what happened to his cousin, Lucerys Targaryen, murdered by a dragon. I do. So, season two will see the much-anticipated sequel

civil war between the greens and the blacks unfold as Tom, the dance of the dragons truly begins. The realm is divided. All of Westeros must choose a side. So please tune in every Monday. And Dominic, there are so many questions. Who will win the war? Will Team Black or Team Green claim the Iron Throne?

which of these factions will triumph in the Dance of the Dragons? House of the Dragon is available now exclusively on Sky, and you can, of course, go to sky.com to find out more. MUSIC

A dragon is no idle fancy. Whatever may be his origins in fact or invention, the dragon in legend is a potent creation of men's imagination, richer in significance than his barrow is in gold. Even today, despite the critics, you may find men not ignorant of tragic legend and history, who have heard of heroes and indeed seen them, who have yet been caught by the fascination of the worm. That

That was, of course, J.R.R. Tolkien in his great, great essay, Beowulf, the Monsters and the Critics, which he published in 1936. And Tom, that was an essay that changed the way people thought about Anglo-Saxon literature, about fantasy literature more generally, I suppose, but also about dragons. Yeah, absolutely. So he talks about people who've been caught by the fascination of the worm. He does indeed.

And I think pretty clearly there he's talking about himself. He's obviously a man who is obsessed by dragons. But since Tolkien wrote that essay, dragons have gone completely mainstream, in part at least thanks to Tolkien himself. But more recently due to the global phenomenon that is Game of Thrones and House of the Dragon. So the novels first by George R.R. Martin.

And then the TV series. So people were very excited when Game of Thrones first came out. I remember watching it, what is it, 10 years ago or something. The dragons in Game of Thrones, when they start off, dragons are extinct or they're thought to have vanished. And they're in these eggs. And then they hatch at the end of the first series. And they're quite sweet, aren't they? To begin with. They are. They're very kind of Gremlins-esque. But actually, Game of Thrones in TV terms was groundbreaking because the CGI used for the dragons was incredible.

I mean, it was the first time anyone had done anything like this that didn't look a little bit fake. And actually, as the series went on, the dragons became more and more important because they sort of played the part of... Well, we were talking about this before we started recording, weren't we? About whether or not the dragons can be likened to weapons of mass destruction. And at the end of Game of Thrones, without giving it away to people who haven't... Well, actually, if you've read the books, you haven't got to the end. But if you've seen the TV series, the dragon's sort of full potential is enormous.

exploited in a terrifying way. Unleashed in a kind of apocalyptic manner. And the reason that we're recording this is that today, going out on Sky, is House of the Dragons. So Series 1 has already gone out and now Series 2 is coming out. And

In that series, which you can see on Sky, House of the Dragon is, well, do you know what? We're being sponsored by Sky. Let's be upfront. I hope that they will allow me to say that it is quite like Henry VI Part I, the Shakespeare play that shows us the opening of the Wars of the Roses. So it's like the Wars of the Roses. It's very, very Shakespearean, kind of romantic.

rival noble families quarreling over the crown. So it's like Shakespeare, only you don't know what's going to happen. And as the name implies, it has a lot of dragons. Right. So the dragons in House of the Dragon, it's not like in Game of Thrones where there's the mother of dragons and she has three dragons and that makes her a remarkable figure in the context of this world, Westeros. But in House of the Dragon...

There's a sort of nuclear proliferation, isn't there, of dragons? And I think that dragons kind of play the role of tactical nucleolus.

nuclear weapons, so battlefield nuclear weapons. And we see the origins of the family of Daenerys, the mother of dragons. So it's the Targaryens. They have come from overseas, they've brought their dragons with them, and this has enabled them to conquer the continent of Westeros. And basically the plot of House of the Dragon is civil war within the Targaryen family.

And it ends up, so the end of series one, one of the rival candidates, who is a Targaryen herself and can ride a dragon, is wondering whether she should fight to defend her right to the throne. Because she knows what it will mean. And there are these very, very kind of chilling lines that you get in the final episode of series one. When dragons flew to war before, so she's talking about what has happened even before this. Yeah.

everything burned. I do not wish to rule over a kingdom of ash and bone. And you see in the final stages of season one, you see how dragons actually can't be controlled even by the people who supposedly can ride them. And I'm guessing that people listening to this, there will either be massive enthusiasm. I mean, Game of Thrones was a huge global phenomenon and House of Dragons had a massive critical success as well. But there will also be kind of bewilderment. Right.

Because there are lots of people, Tom, who would say, listening to this, say, oh, in a history podcast, dragons, really? And actually, that itself is a historical phenomenon because Tolkien, in 1936, correct and sober taste may refuse to admit that there can be an interest for us, the proud we that includes all intelligent living people, in ogres and dragons. And actually, Tolkien, when he wrote that essay in the 30s, was saying, as a society, we have become indifferent to, we've lost sight of the

the, dare I say, the weirdness, Tom, of monsters, of dragons, and that we think of them as childish, but actually they are a really, really interesting and important cultural and historical phenomenon that opens up all kinds of different avenues of inquiry. Well, the amazing thing is, is that even George R.R. Martin, the novelist who created Game of Thrones, is

Even he had to be persuaded to include dragons. So it was his friend, the writer Phyllis Eisenstein, wrote to him and said, George, it's a fantasy. You've got to have dragons. George R. R. Martin was doing the Wars of the Roses, basically, Lannisters and Starks, Lancaster and York. And I

And I suppose he had an anxiety that putting dragons in it would mean that people thought it was childish, that it was silly and frivolous. But as we'll discover, there's nothing frivolous about dragons at all, is there? Well, I think also from the historical point of view, so looking at the dragon as a cultural phenomenon, there is a really obvious, strange factor about it, which obviously dragons are

are fantasy. I mean, there's no disputing that. Although I think secretly Tolkien kind of did believe that they might have existed. He kind of drops hints about that in that essay that you were quoting. But the weird thing is, is that basically everyone kind of knows what they look like, even though they never existed. So you know that they're reptilian, that they kind of have scales, that they have lidless eyes, that they have a flickering tongue.

You know that they're long and snake-like, or you might say worm-like. So Tolkien in that passage quoted the worm. That they breathe fire, that they have wings, that they can fly, that they have legs. Okay, just on legs. Two or four, Tom, because that is, among dragonologists, that is a crucial aerodynamic

area of contention, isn't it? Whether a dragon has two or four legs. Actually, specifically among British heralds, which we'll come to. So for British heraldry, a two-legged dragon is a wyvern and a four-legged dragon is a dragon. We'll be coming to that. And Martin's dragons, so the dragons that you see in the House of the Dragon, are kind of midway between that. So we'll be discussing that. Not quite three-legged. So everyone kind of, you know, if you said, what's a dragon to someone in the West, they'd immediately know it.

But the even weirder thing is that dragons are not confined to kind of medieval Europe. When people think of dragons, they think of China, don't they? But there are dragons also in...

There are effectively dragons in Greek myths and Babylonian legends and so on. Absolutely, yeah, and Egyptian. So you could say it's kind of pretty much a global phenomenon. So that raises the obvious question. Where is this idea coming from? It can't just be kind of cross-cultural contamination because the Chinese are coming up with it at the same time as the Babylonians are, and they don't know each other. So an obvious theory, Tom. I don't want to send you into a seven-hour lecture about this because I know this is your specialist subject.

But an obvious theory would be that there's some kind of weirdly buried cultural memory of dinosaurs. Which is, I mean, it so ticks my boxes. And I would so love that to be true. And it was actually, it was proposed by Carl Sagan. Oh, yeah. He's the great popularizer of science. And he wrote a book with the brilliant title, The Dragons of Eden, where he proposes that the kind of seeming universality of the dragon as a myth is a kind of legacy of our history.

primordial ancestry in Mesozoic ecosystems when we were tiny little shrews dodging tyrannosaurs. How would that have been passed down though in pre-linguistic age? I think it's fair to say that that hasn't met with universal enthusiasm among scientists. We're not the rest of science, are we, Dominic? Never.

I don't feel we're qualified to say about that but there is also another thesis that the discovery of dragon fossils might have inspired it and there's a

a brilliant series of books by a scholar called Adrian Mayer who pursues this theme. And I think that actually there is a kind of definite case for this in the case of China and Mongolia, because there are quite a lot of dinosaur fossils that you find there kind of weathering out of the rocks. And you can kind of see how that might be something that might have worked. And we also do have kind of examples in the Mediterranean world. You'll make plenty, plenty of the elder. We can't have an episode without that.

on mad kind of wonders without mentioning Pliny. Yeah, so he writes about a Roman general who was in the train of Pompey the Great, who was campaigning in the East in the 50s BC. And in 58 BC, he comes back from the East. He's coming back from what's now Lebanon and Israel. And he exhibits in Rome the

the bones of a giant beast found at Joppa, which is now Jaffa. And Pliny records that this was 40 feet long, that it had ribs longer than those of an African elephant. And the assumption is that this is a sea monster that had been turned to stone

by Perseus, who was the legendary hero. With the head of Medusa. With the head of Medusa. I love that theory. Yeah, and had rescued the princess Andromeda. Yeah. So this was the theory. And then there is another much more recent example of this happening, which happened in late medieval Austria. Yeah, I love an Austrian dragon. The town of Klagenfurt.

So where in the 13th century, which is very late, there's reports that a dragon was kind of wrecking havoc as dragons tend to do. And the local duke offers a reward for anyone who could capture it and kill it. And so a brave young man gets a bull, chains it up, and he kind of has a hook on the chain and he catches the dragon like a fish. Fishing with a bull as bait. Yeah. And he kills it. And then what turbo charges this?

A huge excitement, 1355, people are digging around in a cave and it's called the Dragon's Cave and they find what seems to be the skull of the dragon. And they bring it out, it's made of stone and they store it in the, it's kind of exhibited in the town hall. It's one of the great wonders of Klagenfurt.

And in 1590, the town fathers commission a statue of this dragon. And the sculptor goes to look at this skull. And he models the head of the dragon on the contours of the skull. So it is reputed to be the first reconstruction of a prehistoric creature actually looking at the bones. But the question is, was that skull the skull of a dinosaur? Am I not right in thinking that actually neither of these collections of bones were bones?

dinosaurs. So the Plinny's thing, or whatever it is, that's a whale, isn't it? Yeah, basically there are no dinosaurs to be found in this region. And sea monsters don't actually exist. Yes, that as well. But it might have been a kind of, you know, a tyrannosaur. And the dragon in the cave? Is a woolly rhinoceros. Also, of course, the issue with the fossils theory is that, so for example,

Dragons play a huge part, as we will go on to see, in Norse sagas and things, don't they? And worms and whatnot. But there aren't big fossils of dinosaurs in Scandinavia. So have they just... Where's it come from? Right. So I think that theory... I mean, there are kind of elements of truth to it, but I think that it's inadequate to explain the whole phenomenon. And so what a lot of anthropologists and also Jungian psychologists who love an archetype, they...

have proposed that dragons are an expression of the dread of the violence and danger of nature. And I think it's interesting that you get these legends emerging in Egypt,

in Babylon, in China, all of which are kind of river-based civilizations and therefore might be subject to violent flooding. So perhaps that explains why these stories are kind of appearing specifically in these locations. Could you argue as well that's why we're interested in dragons right now? The idea of the world being reduced to ash, the idea of fire and the climate crisis and all that stuff. People are more receptive to that idea. That's a really interesting point.

But I think the argument from anthropologists would be that it could also be a reminder of an age when humans were the prey rather than the predator. And perhaps this is what explains the kind of reptilian and particularly serpentine quality of dragons. Yeah, because everybody hates a snake. Well, as we go on to see, not everybody hates a snake. Tom, I hate snakes. I have no time for snakes. I hold them in very low regard, like Indiana Jones.

I don't mind a snake. You don't mind a snake? No, I don't mind a snake. Would you have a snake hung around your shoulders? Would you welcome that? I think if I wanted to intimidate people. But if you were strolling through the souks of Marrakesh and a barker hung a snake around your shoulders? I'd be fine with that. You know, I'd quite welcome to my home and I would, the lord of snakes or something. The lord of snakes. Yeah, I'd quite go for that. That's how you'll be known from now on. So we've mentioned how Tolkien refers to dragons as worms. The old English for dragon was a worm. Yeah.

That was lovely. I really enjoyed that. And in Old Norse, it's an urm. Yeah. You're pretty good at rolling your eyes. Yeah. And actually, in House of the Dragon, the dragon ridden by the character played by Matt Smith, erstwhile Doctor Who and Duke of Edinburgh, is called the Blood Wurm. Right.

Does he say it like that? Yeah, he does. So the way in which dragons are serpentine in most of the myths, so they live in holes. So you get this in House of the Dragon. They live in dragon pits or caves.

They, you know, they're lidless and snakes have no eyelids. They can't close their eyes. And so when you look at a snake, you know, it's unblinking. It's quite intimidating. And of course, a lot of snakes are poisonous. And I think it's pretty clear that that's where the idea of fire comes from. The idea of poison coming out of the mouths. So I think that's all very convincing, but it still doesn't entirely get to the root of the issue of where...

The kind of the dragon that you get in the House of the Dragon, the Western dragon is coming from because not all dragons are fundamentally like snakes. You know, they have other attributes. They have wings. They have legs. And also dragons are terrifying, right? And snakes...

snakes are obviously not always terrifying because sometimes I know you love a Greek snake, don't you? And Greek snakes, they can be wise and benevolent? Well, they can be. So there's a sacred snake on the Acropolis in Athens and girls feed it with honey cakes. And when the Persians invade in 480 BC and burn Athens, the coming incineration of the Acropolis is foretold by the sacred snake vanishing.

And of course you have Asclepius, the god of healing. One of his symbols is snakes coiled around a staff. You've got a wound or a sore. He'll get a snake to come and lick it for you. Yeah, you go and lie down at the temple of Asclepius and the holy snakes will come out and lick your wounds. If you had to choose between having a snake, if you had an open wound and you could have a snake come and lick it or Catherine of Siena suck at it,

Which would you go for? I think I'd go for the snake. Would you? Yeah, they'd be sweet little snakes. Yeah, I don't like snakes. I don't massively like Catherine of Siena. But you're a big fan of Constantinople as well, aren't you? Love Constantinople. So in Byzantium, the city that Constantinople will kind of be built on...

No one was allowed to attack a snake, to kill a snake. So St. Patrick would have been unwelcome. Very unwelcome. Because snakes are seen by the Byzantines as benefactors of the city. Yeah. So that's one tradition, obviously, where snakes are seen as quite positive. But what about dragons? Of course, there is a very, very...

well-known dragon tradition in which dragons are very, very beneficent. And that, of course, is the Chinese tradition. So the Chinese, the dragon brings rain. If you're a good emperor, the dragon is a great chum of yours. And the dragon generally symbolizes sort of balance and well-being and

sort of national prosperity and stuff like that, right? They are absolutely not wicked. I mean, quite the opposite. As you say, they are symbols of that kind of sense of harmony that in a sense lies at the heart of Chinese civilization. And they are also incredibly old. So there are portrayals of what seem to be dragons that go right the way back to the Neolithic. So, you know, thousands and thousands of years ago. And

All the way through the histories of China, I mean, right the way up to the present day, emperors are being visited by dragons. There's a sense in which dragons, I think, you know, people in China really do seem to have believed that dragons existed. They're not seen as merely fantastical. And there's an incredibly...

recent example of that. So, Yuan Shikai, who is one of the leading figures in the revolutionary movement that ends up toppling the empire in the 1910s. In 1915, he decides it's all been a terrible mistake. They should bring back the emperor and he nominates himself to be the emperor. And

He actually makes an attempt to kind of unearth the bones of a dragon to demonstrate that in some way he has been chosen as emperor.

And he's casting his rule as something that because it's been blessed by a dragon, therefore, yeah, brilliant. Does he find them? Does he have any? Does he find the dragon bones? No, he doesn't. He doesn't. I don't think he has time to look for it. So that Chinese tradition is obviously very, very different to the Westerosi tradition that you get. And so, you know, we come back to this question, where is that, you know, the fire-breathing, winged, hostile dragon coming from? And...

I think that you can actually trace it back to a very obvious point of origin. And it's Tolkien. Oh, yeah. I mean, when I think about when would I first encounter dragons, you know, as a boy?

I guess they're in children's literature generally, but they're only in children's literature, aren't they, really, after The Hobbit? Yeah. So The Hobbit is famously, Tolkien starts writing it in the early 1920s when he's marking school certificate papers after he's come home from the First World War. He's at Oxford and he sits down, he writes in the hall on the ground that there lived a hobbit. And for people who don't know, which I can't believe is anybody, this guy, Bilbo Baggins, he's a burglar.

He goes off with some dwarves and a wizard, and they're going to find this lost treasure in the Lonely Mountain, which is guarded by the dragon Smaug. And the whole trajectory of the narrative is leading up to the great confrontation between Bilbo, our hero, and the dragon Smaug, who is actually a tremendous character. Yeah. He's like he's voiced by George Sanders or Terry Thomas, isn't he? Yeah.

Or Benedict Cumberbatch in the film. Yeah, he's very... But actually in the film, he's threatening and his voice is very deep and stuff. But in the book... Hello. Yes, he's rather suave and urbane and witty. Yeah. And so that obviously is drawing on kind of traditions that are current in the 1930s. But Tolkien is the great scholar of Norse and Old English literature and mythology. And he...

is very, very consciously drawing on these traditions for his portrayal of dragons. Well, there are two in particular, aren't there? There are two dragons that basically influence Smaug. So tell us about those two dragons. Well, he says in Northern literature, there are only two dragons that are significant. And the first of these is a dragon called Fafnir. And this is part of a kind of vast corpus of Norse legends that Tolkien is completely fascinated by. And basically in this, there is a dwarf who has killed his father, who steals his treasure,

who hides it in a cave, who squats down on this treasure. And over the course of time, he becomes a wyrm. A wyrm. Becomes, I mean, a dragon. Maggie Smith joining us here. Yeah. And his brother, who's very cross about this. Oh yeah, Regan. Yeah, Regan. So he forges a great sword and Wagner fans, you know, this is kind of one of the great moments in the Ring Cycle. And he persuades the hero Sigurd or Siegfried, if you're watching Wagner, to...

to take the sword and to dig a trench which kind of runs by the water where Fafnir comes down to drink. And Sigurd lies in this trench and Fafnir is described as kind of crawling down towards the water. And as he crawls along, Sigurd stabs him in his kind of unprotected underbelly. And Fafnir slowly dies.

But as he dies, he talks to Sigurd to try and work out who it is who's killed him, trying to get his name kind of penetrating his wriggles. He's very, very clever. He's very, very cunning. And when he dies, Sigurd roasts his heart and eats it. And from that point on can understand the language of animals and birds. So there's a lot there that is in the Hobbits, right? There is. So the riddles in particular. But there is also another tradition. So the second dragon that is significant in Northern literature is...

in the old English poem Beowulf. And Beowulf is a great hero. He confronts three monsters. He confronts a monster called Grendel. He confronts Grendel's mum, who in

In lots of ways, it's even more terrifying. And at the end of his life, he confronts this dragon. And again, in this, the dragon lies on a great pile of treasure. A slave comes and steals a single golden cup. And the dragon immediately notices this. Goes ballistic. Absolutely furious. Livid about it. Goes kind of going out, burning everyone. And so Beowulf, eager to defend his people, despite being very old, goes...

goes up and he fights the dragon and he kills the dragon, but he himself dies of the wounds. So there, Tom, in those two dragons, you have Tolkien's dragon.

So the riddling. So when Smaug, we first meet him, he does this riddle game with Bilbo and he's clever and he's sort of well-spoken and stuff. The dragon guards stolen treasure. I mean, that's the theme in both of those stories. The dragon is killed by having a vulnerable spot on his underbelly. So in The Hobbit, he's killed by Bard the Bowman and he's killed by Sigurd or Siegfried if you're a Wagnerian. So Tolkien obviously is...

As Tolkien would, because he was the professor of English literature at Oxford. He's drawing on these traditions. The one thing that obviously is here, but there's not in the Chinese dragons or indeed in Game of Thrones, is the idea of the treasure. That a dragon is inextricably linked to a kind of stolen treasure hoard. There's greed. Yeah, well, I think even more than that, because Fafnir is originally human and becomes a dragon. And...

I think that there is absolutely a sense in Norse and Old English literature that dragons are basically humans who have been corrupted by avarice. So you see this again and again in various epics that people who succumb to avarice will turn into a worm-like monster squatting on great piles of gold. And in

In The Hobbit, Tolkien refers to this as dragon sickness. And of course, Tolkien was great friends with C.S. Lewis and the Narnia stories. There is a very similar episode where Eustace in the Dawn Shredder. He went to a progressive school. Yes, and kind of drank prune juice and doesn't believe any of it. Left-wing parents. Look what happens to you. Well, he turns into a dragon. Yeah. Terrible scenes. That's his punishment. Yeah.

Don't go to progressive schools, you'll turn into a dragon. It's basically the lesson of that. So, I mean, that is obviously a tradition that doesn't pass into House of the Dragon and West West and all that. But one of them that does is the fact that these are monsters that fly,

and that breathe fire. So the fire breathing is there from an early point as well, isn't it? So when the Vikings attack Lindisfarne, this is the famous, famous, most famous moment in kind of Viking history. The moment they're perceived as having erupted onto the European scene. People talk of flashes of lightning and storms and fiery dragons were seen flying in the air. Yeah. And that idea of

fire and slaughter and the storm clouds gathering in the east, Tom, as they always do. Those are all tied together in that kind of Norse Anglo-Saxon understanding of a dragon, right? Yeah, absolutely. And this raises a kind of a puzzle because, you know, we've been saying that the idea of dragons as worms is a really fundamental part in both Old English and Norse literature. So where is the idea of wings coming from? Because there is actually another famous kind of dragon-esque

monster in Norse mythology, which is the Midgard serpent, which is absolutely huge creature, which is so enormous that its coils enfold the earth. And at Ragnarok, the end of days, Thor, the great, you know, the god with the hammer and the Midgard servant will kind of kill each other.

But there's no hint that the Midgard serpent has legs. Fafnir, when he's going down to the waterhole, is crawling. He doesn't seem to be kind of walking. So he's a snake. Certainly not flying. I mean, he seems to be kind of worm-like. Right. And even in Beowulf, although the dragon is described as having wings, he never seems to use them. So I think what you get there is a really strong sense of...

that the tradition of winged dragons is being drafted onto the idea of purely serpentine dragons. Oh, so there are two different, that's interesting, there are two different threads then. I think so. That lead to this. So one is your wyrm. Wyrm. And then another is the dragon with wings, which is a different tradition. Right. And in Beowulf, there are two words for dragon. So there is wyrm. Right. But there is also dracca. And this opens up the question of where is the word dracca

coming from and i think yeah i mean we will explore this in the second half of this episode that the dragon of westeros is a kind of fusion of the northern dragon the worm and the dracar and in the second half we'll see where the dracar comes from what drama return after the break to find out the true roots of the modern dragon this episode is brought to you by sky now

Now, Tom, I was chatting to you a couple of days ago, wasn't I? And you said to me just how unbelievably excited you were at the new season of House of the Dragon as the struggle for the Iron Throne descends into death and destruction. Because, Dominic, I actually had the privilege of attending the House of the Dragon season two premiere in the heart of London's glittering West End in Leicester Square.

And there was a great iron throne, which I sat on and posed, I thought, very fetchingly. You were on the red carpet. Incredible scenes. I was treading the red carpet.

And I don't want to give any spoilers away, but I can confirm that the desire to make sure of dragon power is basically what both sides are all about. So the blacks, they have more dragons. But the problem is the greens have the most formidable dragon of all, the world's largest dragon, Vhagar. So it's all about air power. So, Tom, with the realm divided, all the Westeros must choose a side. Right.

Would you pledge your allegiance, Tom, to the Greens or to the Blacks? Dominic, obviously the Greens are usurpers, so I wouldn't pledge my allegiance to them. I pledge my sword to the Blacks of House Targaryen. And the fact that they have more dragons is nothing to do with it. But Tom, of course, the counter-argument would be that Vhagar is a lot bigger than the Blacks' largest dragon. So are you siding, as so often in your career, with the minnows, with the underdogs? No, I'm siding with the side that has right on its side.

but also has lots of dragons and also has the backing of Westeros's greatest fleet led by Corlys Velaryon.

the sea snake and he's an absolutely tremendous chap and very much the kind of person that you would want on side and Dominic you know having done episodes on the Battle of Trafalgar with me that I'm a great enthusiast for naval power well Tom that absolutely settles it doesn't it so House of the Dragon is available now exclusively on Sky with new episodes every Monday please go to sky.com to find out more music

As the serpent coiled, so Medea approached it. In a sweet voice, she invoked sleep, highest of the gods, to help her. Jason followed her, terrified.

but the monster was already bewitched by her song and had begun to unfold its long, spiralling spine and straighten its countless circles, just as a black wave, silent and without noise, rolls over a calm sea. Even so, it raised its terrible head aloft and was eager to enfold a pair of them in its ruinous jaws. But Medea sprinkled its eyes with a fresh-cut spring of juniper—

dipping it into her potion to the accompaniment of her incantations. The snake dropped its jaw and rested it just where it was. Its endless coils were unfurled far behind it through the wood of many trees. Then, as the girl instructed him, Jason reached for the golden fleece from the oak and took it.

So that, Tom, was Apollonius. Not Ian McKellen. Well, it was Apollonius, actually. It was Ian McKellen. We're very grateful to Sir Ian for joining us on the show and reading it in the voice of Gandalf. I thought it was Tolkien again. Yeah, well, that's the thing. It's done it in identical voices. Well, they are identical voices. Ian McKellen's Gandalf and Tolkien, I think, sound very similar.

And that's how Apollonius sounded. Well, who knew? So that's from the third century BC, Tom, as you will know. And Apollonius is describing that crucial moment in the story of Jason and the Argonauts when Medea, the sort of witch queen, has bewitched this serpent. Jason goes and gets the golden fleece. So Jason and the Argonauts, one of the great Greek myths, Jason and all his pals, Heracles, all the lads, they've gone off across the Black Sea to Colchis. They've got the golden fleece. Great scenes. Yeah.

Some darkness to come, but we don't need to get into that now. Boys being chopped up and thrown into the sea. But I mean, it's an example of a snake that isn't kind of lying around licking saws and being nice. This is a terrifying snake. It's a malevolent, terrifying monster. And there are a lot of these kind of serpentine monsters in Greek myth. So there's the

python which apollo shoots it's been occupying the site of delphi so this is where apollo's great oracle will be um and also there's the hydra which is the kind of the multi-headed uh monster that heracles kills his his second labor and the greek word for these kind of serpentine monsters is dracone

And a dracone is different from an office, which is just a snake. And there's a wonderful book by a scholar called Daniel Ogden called The Dragon in the West that zooms in on what is a dracone.

And he basically says that a dracon is a snake and something more. So a hydra would be a dracon and not a snake because it's got loads of heads, that kind of thing. And also, so the dracon is often portrayed on vases where he's shown with a beard, which is nice. So it seems to come from Egypt. You do kind of get bearded creatures. No, you don't get bearded snakes though. Like a bearded schnauzer, like a dog? No. No, because these are kind of like the beards that, you know, pharaohs have.

Kind of long, thin ones. And Ogden in his book, he kind of lists all the various elements that characterize these stories of draconis coming out. It lives in a cave. It will often kind of monopolize a water source. So the hydra, for instance, lives in a swamp. The python inhabits a spring.

It's always marauding around, so it's kind of nicking cattle and burning crops and all that kind of thing. It's fiery and poisonous and kind of clouds of pestilence hang over it. But no treasure in this, right? So that's a big difference. So the treasure seems to be a kind of a northern, a product of the northern world. And the worm, the dracon, is more...

Sort of pestilential, water-based, eating oxen, that kind of thing. Also doesn't have wings and doesn't have legs. So how are these kind of Greek draconis, if these are also part of the ancestry, what is going on? And the first thing to say is that these myths are massively, massively influential. So everyone in the Greek world knows them. And of course, then under the Romans, everyone basically knows them. And the

And the Romans love these kind of stories of dracontes, you know, dragons, let's call them dragons because draco in Latin is the word from which dragon comes. And they even tell stories themselves. So there's a very, very Roman dragon story where Regulus, people who listened to our episode on the first Punic war, Regulus is a consul who leads an invasion of Africa fighting against the Carthaginians.

And they come up against a draco. So a terrible fire flashed forth from its twin eyes. The height of its raised crest exceeded that of the grove and the high treetops of the wood. Its tongue flickered and flashed through the air. And I think it's very Roman.

that rather than sending out a champion to fight it, which is obviously what would happen in a Greek myth or a kind of medieval romance, they break off their catapults and batter it to death with stones. That is very Roman. Very, very Roman. But the Romans, I think they kind of really like the Draco. So in their stories, the Draco invariably has kind of character. He's an individual, often has a certain sense of dignity. So that's something that the Romans add to the mix.

And because they are so keen on the figure of the Draco, they're always putting them into vases, into mosaics, paintings, putting them into their poetry. And over the course of time, you get kind of various other elements that join the mix. So we've talked about sea monsters, you know, the sea monster that Skaurus brought from Joppa that's supposed to have been turned to stone by Perseus. And sea monsters...

can be like snakes, but they can also kind of be like whales and whales have flippers. And so over the course of the history of the Roman Empire, you start to get dragons with kind of flippers, which then start to kind of become legs. So it's almost, so basically you're saying that Roman interior decorators...

create the idea of the legged dragon. I mean, what they're doing... So you think about the war paintings you get in Pompeii, for instance. They like monsters. And you have the Draco and you have the sea monster. And if the sea monster can be a whale, then you can give it flippers or give it legs. Yeah, I wouldn't give a whale legs. And if you want to, you could give it wings, perhaps, or whatever. But I don't think that...

interior decoration of Roman living rooms is where the wings come from. Okay. Because Dominic, it will thrill you to know that I think that the wings are derived from Christianity. I knew this would, I feared, I genuinely dreaded that this would be the case. So obviously there are kind of dragon-ish creatures in Greek mythology, but there are also a lot in

So I was wondering why you didn't mention the, well you hadn't mentioned the serpent in the garden of Eden. I'm guessing because you're going to now. So that's not a worm. I mean, that could be very worm-like, isn't it? Well, it does sort of make elliptical obscure references. It's kind of seductive, like these kind of like smaugers. Yeah. And in rabbinical traditions, which you don't actually get in Genesis, there are accounts that the serpent in the garden of Eden had legs.

And part of its punishment when it has to kind of crawl on the ground and dust, the legs go. So there's something there. But I think an even kind of more menacing dragon-ish figure in the Bible is the figure of Leviathan, which is a kind of giant monster that clearly in the traditions from which the biblical traditions are deriving, the figure of God is fighting against.

the leviathan yeah and and those traditions they have a ghostly presence in the in the biblical texts and in revelation in the book of revelation is there not a dragon there is a dragon and i think that that portrait of the dragon is definitely drawing on the figure of leviathan so there's a kind of brilliant account of leviathan in the book of job where god appears and basically kind of

tells Job off for moaning. And this is God describing Leviathan. Out of his mouth go burning lamps and sparks of fire leap out. Out of his nostrils goeth smoke as out of a seething pot or cauldron. His breath kindleth coals and a flame goeth out of his mouth. God would have had the voice of Ian McKellen there. Well, all right. Maybe you should have read that. But as you say, this is then an influence on a book in the New Testament, which is clearly drawing on all these traditions. And

In the book of Revelation, there is a vision of the future that is to come.

And there are quite a lot of kind of dragon-like monsters in it. And the most sinister, the most sinister dracone is a red dracone. It has seven heads, ten horns. Each is crowned with a diadem. And this is the very embodiment of evil. So famous passage. And there was war in heaven. Michael, who is the captain of heaven, the great archangel, and his angels fought against the dragon. And the dragon fought and his angels fought.

And I think that this is the crucial development for fans of Dragon Wings because this is directly identifying the figure of the Draco, the dragon, with the demonic. And this is the crucial development

And demons, according to Christian tradition right from the beginning, have wings. So that's in the book of Revelation. In the centuries that follow, so we're in the time of the Roman Empire, and people believe that demons exist, don't they? I mean, there's references to church fathers and so on. And that they have wings. And that they have wings. And that they think demons have the form of serpents or dragons. And that must be also clearly reflecting the fact that they are dealing with a tradition in which...

The fount of all evil is the serpent in the Garden of Eden. So it must be reptilian. So the church fathers are obviously drawing on the biblical traditions. They're drawing on the tradition that demons have wings. But they are also, of course, living in the Roman Empire. So they have all these traditions about draconis as well. So Augustine, who's writing in Latin at the beginning of the 5th century AD, he's writing about draconis. And he says that they live in the region of water, which is...

Obviously. The Greek myths. Yeah. I mean, that's coming from Greek tradition. They come forth from caves. Again, that's very much in the Greek tradition. And they launch themselves into the air. This is the Christian contribution to the figure of the Draco. The air is made turbulent by them. Draconis are massive creatures. There are none greater on the earth. Okay. A question here. So Augustine, he's in North Africa. I

I think it's fair to say, I mean, obviously we can't say it's for sure, but I think we can be reasonably sure that Augusta never actually saw a dragon. I think we can be relatively sure of that, yeah. But does he believe that they physically, literally exist? Yes, I think he does. And where does he think they are? I think that that is a kind of possibly overly 21st century question. I think he thinks that they live in the dimension of the infernal, so they're in hell. Right. But when they appear in Dreams and Visions...

They are not fantasies. He doesn't think there's like a cave in modern day Tunisia where there's plausibly a dragon. Well, I don't know about Augustine himself, but there are definitely lots of traditions in which saints confront dragons. And I think that people absolutely believe in these. And also that saints can have visions of dragons that are completely authentic. So around the time that Augustine is writing, there's a Greek text that

that describes St. Bartholomew, who's one of Christ's disciples, one of the apostles. He's with Jesus and he can ask Jesus anything he wants. And so he does what I think I would do, which is to say, you know, I'd love to see the dragon that will fight with St. Michael at the end of days. That would be a one-way. I'd quite like to see a dragon. Okay. And Jesus says, I don't think you should see it. I think it's too frightening. And St. Bartholomew says, oh, go on.

So Jesus says, fine. And so St. Bartholomew sees the greatest of all dragons, that is Satan, the old serpent. And the dragon is bound in chains of fire. It has a face like a lightning bolt. Very sinister. Foul smelling smoke is drifting from its nostrils. Lightning bolt shaped nostrils. Lightning, yeah, exactly. It is enormous. Yeah. And...

It has one wing, which is a very weird detail. I find that the most sinister and unsettling of all those details. So it's like kind of a helicopter. I mean, I don't quite know how it works. Yeah. A one winged dragon. I actually find such a troubling thought. Yeah. So Augustine is writing at a time when the West and the eastern halves of the empire are still part of a single geopolitical entity. But obviously over the centuries that follow, the West very much goes on.

on a kind of separate route from the Eastern half because it's been conquered by incoming barbarian warlords and whatnot, and new kingdoms emerge on the rubble of what had been the Roman empire. And so the traditions of the dragon

become very specifically Latin, very specifically Western. Although there are kind of influences coming from the Greek world. So by AD 800, which is the year that Charlemagne is being crowned emperor in Rome. But also round about the time that the fiery dragons are appearing above Lindisfarne. Yes, absolutely so. And Alcuin, who is Charlemagne's great advisor, is a Northumbrian and is terribly upset that Lindisfarne has been sacked. So he's aware of these dragons.

Around this time, you are getting a manuscript of Revelation, which includes eight pictures of a draco. And it's serpentine, so it hasn't got any legs, but it does have wings. So this is the first portrayal of a dragon that you can say, yeah, it has wings. It's an obvious, it's a modern dragon. And by the end of the 9th century, you are starting to get illustrations of kind of serpentine reptilian creatures with wings.

with legs that are breathing fire. These are clearly dragons of the kind that you get in the House of the Dragon. So at this point, you have got the union of dragons

maybe three different traditions, Greco-Roman, the kind of classical, then you've got your biblical demonic dragon, as it were, and then you've got the Norse, the idea of the dragon with his treasure, sort of incarnation of greed, all of that kind of thing. So listeners may be wondering, well, how does this Greco-Roman Christian

figure of the dragon, the Draco, merged with the worm that we get in, say, Beowulf. And I think it's because for the Vikings, the Christian world, although it's something to prey on, is also something that is a kind of wellspring of prestige and authority, which is why over the course of the Viking age, the Viking kings and then the Vikings themselves start to convert to Christianity. And I think that the Latin dragon

It's a marker of prestige. It's the kind, you know, if you have a dragon, you want it to have wings because that's the kind of the cutting edge. We could get really bogged down in this so we can save this for another podcast. But Beowulf itself, there are a lot of scholars who would argue that Beowulf itself is a fusion of Norse and Christian traditions. And so the dragon may be in Beowulf, may be slightly imported. Yeah. So the date of Beowulf is much contested. But I think it's entirely possible that, you know, the tradition of the worm, the tradition of the Draco,

the way in which even though the dragon in Beowulf has wings but can't fly, what you're seeing is a kind of writer in Old English wanting to give it a bit of kind of sophisticated Latin garnishing. And so the thing is that the dragon, say,

around the time of the millennium in Latin Europe is not seen as something primordial. I mean, it's only been around for maybe a century. It's seen as very, very cutting edge. And there are a lot of dragons that are recorded in chronicles of this age. The previous episode that went out, we were talking about Theophanu, the mother of the emperor Otto III, who rules at the time of the millennium.

And he dies, but his death is presaged by the sight of a massive dragon flying overhead. And often these descriptions are incredibly matter of fact. So there's a wonderful one recorded by a monk who is crossing the Hungarian plain. And he says, you know, that there was this dragon, it was flying overhead. Its plumed head was the height of a mountain. Its body was covered with scales like shields of iron. And he's recording it as, you know, as you might, I saw an interesting video.

cow or you know there was a kind of interesting storm or something and i

I think that it's the fusion of the matter of fact and the apocalyptic because this is the millennial age. Loads of pilgrims are crossing the plain of Hungary to go to Jerusalem in this period and thoughts of dragons, of Satan, of the kind of confrontation at the end of the world is absolutely part of... They are blinded, Tom, by their own religious enthusiasm. Well, you might say that or you might say... They've genuinely seen a dragon. You might say that. I mean, that's certainly what I think Tolkien would say. They don't have four legs, these dragons, that they

No, so these are what heralds in Britain and Ireland would call a wyvern. So the distinction is made

by basically British heralds. And a wyvern, the idea of that comes from a viper, right? So it's more serpentine. It's more serpentine. It only has two legs. But in the rest of Europe, there's no distinction. They're all dragons. And so people may be wondering, well, the last kind of piece of the jigsaw is how these two-legged creatures, the wyverns, become four-legged. And I suppose it's probably because people are kind of thinking if they've got two legs...

maybe they're more like lizards than snakes. And so giving them four legs is kind of obvious.

But again, it takes a long time for this to happen. So there is one, there's a manuscript in Ghent in the 12th century that I think is the first show of four-legged dragon. But the image of dragons as having four legs is really late 14th century and particularly 15th century. You know, this is the dragon-like smog that you get. And I think that the reason why this image gets imprinted for centuries and centuries to come

is because, of course, this is the age of printing. So printed books. The first printed books have dragons in because people love dragons. They're the canonical monster of the time. And they have the four legs, the wings, the lidless reptilian face, breathing fire, I guess, Tom. But is it not also that people in England in particular are very excited about dragons because, of course, the dragon is the symbol of

of the Tudors. Henry Tudor wins Battle of Bosworth. The idea of the red dragon and the white and the union of all of that stuff. So dragons start appearing on flags and start appearing on the royal coats of arms. So that also kind of beds it down. So you take someone like Henry VIII. Henry VIII is obsessed with heraldry. He loves tournaments.

He loves the romance of Arthur, all of that kind of thing. And in his iconography, I guess, the dragon, that's a really important part to play. And so I think that this is why the combination of Prince's

printing, the fact that you're starting to get books now, say Mallory, Thomas Mallory writing about King Arthur. You're getting Tudor heraldry. I think that that's why the backdrop to dragon stories tends to be 15th century and early 16th century. And I think this is the genius of House of the Dragon and in fact Galaxian.

Game of Thrones as well, is that when we did our episode on Game of Thrones ages ago, one of the points we made was that King's Landing, the center of action, is 15th century. And in the House of the Dragon and in Game of Thrones, there is definitely a kind of War of the Roses element, which is the great dynastic struggle of the 15th century. So in the first series of the House of the Dragon, you have tournaments in very 15th century armor. You have kind of a Mallory-esque quest for a white heart and

You have a Richard III figure who's kind of, you know, wears black and is lame and is scheming and plotting in the background. And you have a feud between an elder sister and a kind of younger sibling, very reminiscent of the reign of Henry VIII. And I think that it's that that makes the dragons so appropriate to the setting. And isn't that interesting, Tom, because probably some of that is unconscious, right? That it's actually just a buried association. Yeah, maybe. That's...

I'm sure not all of it is unconscious, but when we think of dragons and knights, we think of them in their sort of slightly decadent 15th century, very fancy armor. We don't think of Beowulf. We don't think of 10th, 11th century or something. It means that in a weird way,

Even though it's a 21st century creation, it is true to the foundational principles of dragonology, if that's what. I would like to think that there is. And I think also, you know, we talked about how printing kind of cements a certain image of the dragon and how many legs it has. It's possible, I think, that the popularity of Game of Thrones and House of the Dragon

may recalibrate that because in house of the dragon the dragons have two legs but they also have kind of wings that can be used as legs so the kind of the joints of their wing membranes are kind of like the front legs so they kind of have two legs they kind of have four legs and i guess the reason for that is partly because they look more realistic like that they look more credible but

But possibly also, and this is going back to dinosaurs, or the age of the dinosaurs rather, there are giant winged creatures, pterosaurs, vast, vast pterosaurs,

Quetzalcoatlus, it's called, 12 foot tall, kind of 40 foot wingspan. And these are often shown on kind of CGI generated portrayals of prehistoric life going around like the dragons in Game of Thrones and House of the Dragon. And I wonder whether perhaps that is an influence on it. And so I wonder whether when you watch House of the Dragon and you see the kind of dragons that you have there, maybe...

History is being made in exactly the way that it was being made in the 15th century when you know Mallory was writing about dragons in the Morte d'Arthur just on them dragons more generally as we as we reach the end how much do you think the popularity of these dragon stories so particularly the most recent iterations of

How much does that reflect a kind of fear of the apocalyptic? You know, we talked at the beginning about them as tactical nuclear weapons. Obviously, we live in an age of tremendous anxiety about weapons of mass destruction, about the climate, about all of those kinds of things. How much do you think that dragons have become avatars for our deeper, more profound fears about humanity and the world and whatnot? I mean, Tolkien was writing The Hobbit in the 30s, so before the development of the atom bomb.

I think that the portrayal of dragons in George R.R. Martin must be influenced by that in particular, by kind of dread of nuclear war, because that's the role that they play. In Tolkien, it's about anxiety, it's about avarice and about accumulation of wealth. And in George R.R. Martin, the dragons are emblems of power. Yeah. Or actually, that's something that Tolkien and George R.R. Martin have in common, right? The fear of power and human capacity to abuse power.

All right, Tom, that was absolutely fascinating. Brilliant interweaving of all these different traditions and forensic work on your part. Thank you very much. Thank you for that. I was going to say, is it draconian? Because that's a different route, isn't it? I was going to say a draconian tour de force. Well, I mean, if you burn down a town with a dragon, that's quite draconian behavior. That's very Game of Thrones. Right, so on that bombshell, as it were,

Tom, what are you doing this evening? Reading up on St. George for our next podcast, presumably, are you? No, I will be watching season two of House of the Dragon. Well, so will I. I'm very excited about it because I understand that the great houses of Westeros are heading for a final showdown, for a confrontation for the throne. The Greens against the Blacks. Five new dragons, Tom. Love new dragons. It's going to be tremendous scenes. So I'm very much looking forward to that and I should be tuning in on Sky tonight.

With the realm divided, and on the brink of civil war, Tom, all must choose their side. Brilliant. Bye-bye. Goodbye.