Dragons

25:50For whatever happens next, grab Kleenex.

25:56Can we talk about dragons and women with you? Absolutely. So dragons, when I've been talking about them as a kind of imperial symbol, they have largely been, therefore, a symbol of male imperial power. Because in China, it was thought that only men could be emperors. But this was all upended by China's only female emperor, who reigned over her own dynasty, the Joel dynasty, from 690 to 705 AD, which was Emperor Wu Zetian. She first starts out as an empress with her husband, the Emperor Gaozong from the mid-7th century. He dies in 683 and she becomes regent. And it's at this point that she starts to think about taking the throne for herself, which puts her in direct competition with her sons for the throne.

26:35Rumours conveniently begin to spread that maybe she is also the daughter of a dragon. And this was, as I've mentioned earlier, the marker of a future emperor. However, she couldn't really lean into the dragon imagery because it's something that her sons could really use far more effectively than she could because of this kind of gendering, despite the fact that there were male and female dragons. They were still very much associated with the male emperor. So she instead really leans into the phoenix imagery. If the emperor was the dragon, was the sun, was the yang of yin and yang and the masculine energy, as it were, then the phoenix is the empress.

27:10it's the moon, it's the yin of yin and yang, it's the softer, the feminine, in this case second to the dragon. But she leans into the phoenix instead. She has phoenix pavilions built, she has phoenixes placed on top of these amazing architectural wonders that she has built and she also makes sure that the phoenixes are at the top and the dragons are below. She comes to rule her own dynasty, it's very avian, lots of avian imagery throughout, but she's forced to abdicate in 705, dies shortly thereafter and is buried with her late husband, the Emperor Gaozong. It's the only tomb we have in China where two emperors are actually buried together in the same tomb.

27:46And it's also the only case we have of a phoenix being placed above a dragon outside the tomb. And this shows not only that she inverts expectations to be a woman on the throne, but also that she symbolically inverted and challenges the supremacy of the dragon in her own reign by putting the phoenix on top. Thank you. We come back to you, Daniel, and then Julia. Can you give us one or two praises of the dragon tales from Anglo-Saxon and Germanic literature? Well, to start with Old Norse then, the most famous story by far is that of Sigurd, or Siegfried as he's known in German, and Fafner, again Wagner fans will know this story well.

28:23So Fafner was a humanoid entity of some sort in origin, and he retreated into a cave with his gold, he was very miserly, couldn't bear the thought of anybody else touching this gold, and he sat upon it and he mutated into a dragon. It's possible that he died there and then a dragon was born out of his body. That seems to be quite a common Norse idea. But anyway, we end up with this great dragon sitting on the gold in the cave. And along comes Sigurd with the idea of getting his hands on it. He waits for Fafna to crawl down. Whether Fafna is a crawling dragon, a worm dragon or a winged dragon is debatable.

29:04But anyway, he's crawling down to the river for his drink. Sigurd sits in a little ditch and as the great serpentine body passes over the top up he goes with a sword into Fafna and that's how he kills Fafna and what happens after that? Well, there are various versions according to one version he's cooking the dragon's heart he tests it with his finger burns his finger, sucks it and in ingesting the dragon's blood in that way suddenly acquires the ability to understand the language of birds not hatches in particular and he hears the birds telling him that his companion is about to kill him and so he whips off his head first.

29:44In another version, he coats himself in the dragon's blood and that gives him a horny skin, makes him invulnerable. Of course, he misses one spot, either a linden leaf falls on his back or he can't reach his agnistis, the bit in the middle of his back and that's the spot through which the wicked Hagen will eventually kill him. Can we go now, Julia, to the best known of the tales of Beowulf? Well, Beowulf is the end of the Beowulf story. You've stated for our listeners. With Beowulf, the story is about 800, and Beowulf has a very successful time ruling his kingdom. Then what happens is suddenly someone steals from a dragon horde.

30:24This, as I say, reflects the Norse notion that very often dragons are associated with hordes and with burial mounds, so you get gold and death. Someone steals a piece of the dragon's horde, the dragon comes out and starts burning and ravaging the country. So Beowulf goes and takes the dragon on. Now, this is an old Beowulf. He only has one companion who is willing to stay with him. And the dragon spits his fire and Beowulf is wounded. Beowulf kills the dragon but is poisoned by it, is wounded by it. And so the poison gets into Beowulf and Beowulf dies. The dragon's body is thrown into the water.

31:02It has so many of the motifs that we know from earlier and are going to continue later. One of them is this notion that the hero kills the dragon, but something about the dragon's poison catches him. So that you have this notion of this great culture hero who saves his people but sacrifices himself, but always with the idea that something better can come along. You have the fiery dragon, of which there are famous ones, but they don't actually dominate. A lot of the local dragons are just nasty, but they aren't necessarily fire-spitting. This one definitely is. And, of course, Tolkien takes up this wonderful one, and we have it in fantasy.

31:41Can you tell us about the role of the dragon in Welsh culture? In Welsh culture, the one that is best known is the story of the red and the white dragon, in which either Ambrosius or Malinus, depending on what the source is, is going to be sacrificed because Vortigern is building this tower which keeps falling down and is told that the blood of a fatherless child will save it. And Merlin says, no, get me these two little things which you'll find under Dinis Emerus. And they bring two little pots in which are tiny little creatures that jump out and get bigger and bigger and bigger. One is white, one is red, and they fight.

32:14And the red seems to be losing and suddenly pulls itself together and sees off the white one. And Merlinus Ambrosius says, this is what's going to happen. You're going to lose to the Saxons, but eventually the Britons will be secure. Now, that's the famous one. But what people sometimes don't recognise is that Geoffrey of Monmouth had three dragons and they were really important. The second one is a comet, a gold dragon, that Uther sees in the sky. And Merlin says, this is you, you are Pendragon, chief dragon. However, the little comets are your son and your descendants who will be better. And so he takes this gold dragon and puts it on his helmet.

32:54The third time is just before Arthur sort of tries to win and he has dreams of a dragon. So you have the white dragon, the gold dragon and the dream dragon all sort of framing the Arthurian legend. I was just going to come in on the colour there because colour is such an important part of dragons in a Chinese context of whether it's a positive sighting of a dragon or a negative sighting for the emperor's fate really is dictated by the colour. there's this idea that there are five colours, they work in a system along with the five elements, and each dynasty frames themselves on one of these colours.

33:29So, for instance, it starts with the first emperor, Qin Shi Huang, in 221 BC. So, for instance, in 579 AD, a black dragon was said to drop dead out of the sky, and this is already very bad. It already indicates something bad is going to happen to the emperor, that he might fall because the emperor and the dragon are so closely and symbolically intertwined. But because it's a black dragon specifically, it's deemed doubly as bad because the dynasty at the time has taken black as their colour. That's the northern Joel dynasty. So it's not just that the emperor will fall, but the entire dynasty will fall.

34:02And it does two years later. So the colour of the dragon is very important in China as well. Perhaps on a lighter touch here, what's the relationship between dragons and the weather in China? They have an incredibly strong relationship with rain. So dragons are actually aquatic creatures in China. They live in lakes, rivers, seas strongly associated with water and have this ability to summon rain, which is something that's actually shared by Japanese dragons as well and also the Indian Nagas that I mentioned earlier. So local dragons can be worshipped at shrines or even at the rivers and lakes in which they're said to reside.

34:33And this reveals a tension between people and the weather. Agriculture really needs consistent, predictable rainfall, but weather does not follow human timetables. So in China, they position dragons as this intermediary to whom they can ask for rain, particularly in times of drought. And these ceremonies, which start in very early China, can be incredibly simple or they can be the most convoluted affairs possible that last multiple days. And they pray usually to a clay figurine of a dragon or sometimes they use live substitutes like a small lizard or a small snake. That's not to say necessarily that dragons are reptilian in a Chinese context.

35:11There's something between a reptile and a fish. So fish can become dragons and also so can lizards and snakes. And if the rain still doesn't come, people get increasingly desperate to have the dragons bring forth the rain. So you can start by, for instance, demoting the dragon or you can threaten to close their shrine. So the founder of the Ming dynasty, no less, Emperor Taizou, in the 14th century, he prays for rain at a dragon shrine. No rain comes and he's furious. and he declares in three days' time, if it doesn't rain, I'm going to come back and I'm going to personally destroy this shrine.

35:42And luckily it does rain within the three days, which spares the dragon's dignity. But it also shows that this emperor has the power to move the supernatural and to move the weather. Now, a big shift now here, Daniel. Can we talk about how dragons figure in the lives of the Christian saints? Right. Well, if you say saint and dragon, the first big idea that everyone's going to get in their mind is St George on a horse, slaying the dragon below him and saving the damsel in distress, who in some early accounts is called Princess Sabra. It must be said that St George is almost unique. There's another saint, a military saint like George, that kills the dragon by martial means, and that's Theodore Tyrion.

36:26He's slightly obscure now. That's particularly St George. There's plenty to say about him. Well, again, I think actually the interesting thing about St George which is how abnormal he is. I mean, there are just so many saintly dragon-slaying stories. I mean, on just a casual trawl, I found 200. I'm aware that I've only just scratched the surface. What date are we talking about? Well, basically it starts 200 AD, even before that really with the apocryphal lives of the apostles. And I suppose hagiography kind of peters out around 1500 AD. so I've turned up 200 narratives and I'm aware that I've only scratched the surface I wouldn't be surprised if there were over a thousand in the Western Christian tradition now as I say, St George and Theodore are military saints and they kill their dragon by martial means but they are really quite distinctive so the great bulk of the saints, all the other saints they kill them in a different way and actually it's rather less dramatic they typically just have a marauding dragon The saint comes along, he presents himself outside the dragon's cave.

37:33He prays. The dragon comes out, you know, in an aggressive mode. And again, the saint just prays to God. And either the dragon just drops dead or scarpers off into the wilderness or is sent down into the sea or into the abyss or something like that. So these saints are just sort of putting themselves in the footsteps of St Michael. We didn't quite get to the New Testament before, but the big dragon of the New Testament is the Revelation dragon, which the archangel Michael confines to the abyss and these saints are sort of re-enacting that really so it's an easy quick way of expressing their ability to triumph over the ultimate evil and now as Juliet was saying some of these saints are female Victoria dealing with the dragon of Tribula is a good interesting early example the most famous would be Margaret of Antioch Margaret of Pisidian Antioch who again faces a dragon in her martyr cell and so because it's normally a non-contact sport, saintly dragon slaying or banishing, it's equal opportunity.

38:38So women saints can do it just as men saints can. And the interesting thing about St Margaret is, in fact, she's actually swallowed. She does come into contact with her dragon. She's actually swallowed by her dragon, but Jesus precedes her down into the dragon's stomach. This is about a 9th century tradition, by the way. Jesus precedes her down into the dragon's stomach and bursts it open for her and so she pops out of the dragon's stomach and because of that, amazingly this virgin Christian saint becomes the patron saint of childbirth Can I just, I think we skipped over St George You did And I'd rather not skip over St George So can you tell us a bit more about him and why he figured so heavily in the canon Well, St George initially really is a healing saint really before he becomes attached to the dragon.

39:25He's associated sometimes with storms, with healing and healing disease. So having him switch to overcoming evil is not all that big a jump. But the first story we get, which we would recognize, St. George the Dragon and the Girl, is from the Legenda Aurea, which is a collection of saints' lives. About the 1400, just at the point where hagiography was going to start to change. And there we get this notion of the warrior saint saving a woman. He in that one doesn't actually kill the saint. She, kill the dragon rather, she wraps her belt around it and they lead it into the town to be killed. But then George kind of becomes really, really popular.

40:04The Crusaders probably had something to do with him moving from the East to Europe. Eventually, of course, he becomes the symbol of Britain. He becomes very much a British saint. How is that managed? Well, it's a question really of sort of incremental interest. Suddenly he becomes popular with the English aristocracy, with the British aristocracy. Warriors, basically. He's a great big manly warrior saint riding a horse. And he becomes associated with this, particularly strongly after the Reformation, when, of course, the Christian, the sort of Catholic business becomes less popular. But there is one wonderful printed tale called The Heroes of Christendom, and George leads them.

40:47It's a real boy's own adventure. and George and St. Patrick and all of the sort of national saints go off to save this girl and only George manages to do it. So you can imagine that it's obviously written from an English point of view and it is an English story. So he becomes both a symbol of the nation and a kind of symbol of warrior culture but also on a softer level this notion of healing, this notion of someone who will protect us. and it's very interesting in New York on the side of one of the buildings of the UN is a Saint George and the Dragon made up of bits of weapons that are supposed to symbol peace so you have bits of ballistic missiles in this very, very modernistic George and the Dragon and it's supposed to sort of see George as a protector rather than a murderer.

41:38Can we go back to China and more contemporary mood? Do dragons have any significance in modern day China? Absolutely. They have huge significance, particularly in, I would say, three different areas. The first is language. So thousands of place names and river names still contain the word dragon and stories and references to dragons are still very much used in day to day language. so there's a very popular idiom which is li yu qiao longmen which is the carp leaps over the dragon gate and this tells the story of a carp that leaps over an incredibly high waterfall on the yellow river and by this feat it becomes a dragon and this is often said to students who are about to face their own imposing waterfall which is the intense gaokao examinations to encourage them to persevere so that they will become dragons on the other side another area where we see dragons a lot is the Dragon Boat Festival, which is celebrated on the fifth day of the fifth lunar month.

42:30So it's normally around May or June. It was the 31st of May this year. It's celebrated across East Asia, Southeast Asia, and also London. And this probably started out as an agricultural festival in South China to bring the rains forth. So when we think of this kind of chaos of dragon boat racing and the noise of it, it should call to mind this idea in late Imperial China and Japan, that if the dragons just weren't bringing the rain, they should be made to wake up and bring the rain out. So people would throw rubbish and they would even throw iron. Dragons hate iron in China. They hate the metal.

43:03It dazzles them. So you would throw rubbish, you'd throw iron into the water to try and vex them and make them wake up and cleanse the waters. And finally, we've also just said goodbye to the year of the dragon in China, which ended at the end of January this year. And actually, this is hugely significant in contemporary Asia as a whole. There's actually been a noticeable uptick since 1976, which was a year of the dragon. There's been a noticeable uptick in birth rates in countries that follow the zodiac calendar for dragon years. So one expert even predicted an extra million babies would be born in this last dragon year in China because people that believe in this calendrical system, in this astrology system, believe that dragon children will be lucky, auspicious and fortunate.

43:46They invest very heavily in their education. So dragon children actually have higher graduation rates, higher test scores and fewer chores than their other zodiac cohorts. So they're still very much relevant in contemporary Asia. Daniel, why have dragons become such important symbols? I'm very hesitant about the idea that dragons symbolise any one thing, really. I mean, I think like the middle of the Greek verb, the dragon is a form, not a meaning. and you can load whatever you want onto that form. But in some cultures they're terrifying. In other cultures and other stages of people's lives they're very lovable.

44:27Where do you stand? Oh, I love them, of course. Even looking on them as villainous, I mean, we love the great villains, don't we? And also there are, again, focusing on the Western dragon, in some ways it's just a bizarre thing cobbled together from these arbitrary body parts from other animals And yet it's become a design classic, hasn't it? Refined over the centuries to something that we regard as absolutely beautiful. That's why there's so much sort of fantasy art on the Internet. Do you want to take this up, Judith? Yes, this idea of dragons as being sort of multivarious. Leonardo da Vinci draws cats, and one of those cats is actually a little dragon.

45:04Now, that's really unusual. And I think it kind of anticipates what's really interesting about a lot of contemporary dragon lore, is that it's become part of fantasy. Now, the Tolkien fantasies, the dragon is still very much the dragon that you find in Beowulf and the Norse. But what's interesting is how much dragon you now get in children's fantasy and how very different it is. Apart from anything else, they talk. They provide children with an opportunity to mature, basically. They become companions, guardians more than anything else. And I think it starts actually with Kenneth Graham, the tale of Custard the dragon.

45:41The dragon there is an aesthete. He doesn't really want to fight George at all. And this little boy, this innocent little boy, who really anticipates the figure that you get in a lot of children's fantasy literature, kind of mediates between them. So I think this has really, really changed the nature of how we look at the dragon in the West. And I have to say, you're now also getting fantasy literature written from the point of view of Japanese dragons and Chinese dragons. So we're beginning to open this up, the dragons within internet games. So they've become something quite different, but still retained the fascination and fierceness that they had when they first appeared.

46:19Would you agree with that? I think in the West, we tend to be quite guided by our close contact with the Qing dynasty of what a dragon is in a Chinese context. The Qing dynasty, which ruled from 1644 to 1911 in China, really intensified the connection between the emperor and the dragon. So we were dealing with an emperor who was very visually connected to dragons. He was wearing dragon robes on a dragon throne in a dragon room with dragon in his name and even was ruling an empire with dragon on the flag. So the flag of China until 1911 was a yellow background with a blue dragon on it. So we very strongly associate the dragon in China with the emperor.

46:56And I suppose we associate it and conflate it with our own ideas of dragons being very fierce and aggressive. And that's obviously not quite the case with the Chinese dragon. Not only is it not always just a symbol of the emperor, it has many other roles in local religious practices, in rainmaking, in religious art, architecture. It doesn't always have that connection to the emperor, but it also was never restricted just for the emperor's use. The emperor only restricted the usage of the five claw dragon. That was the imperial dragon, but the others were fair game. So I think sometimes we're misled down that route of seeing the dragon as a national symbol of China, but not always perhaps appreciating the other aspects of Chinese dragons.

47:36Well, thank you all very much. Thank you, Juliet. Juliet Wood, Daniel Ogden and Kelsey Grange. And next week, we'll be discussing ideas on civility since the Renaissance, how to talk to those you disagree with and why that matters. Thank you for listening. And the In Our Time podcast gets some extra time now with a few minutes of bonus material from Melvin and his guests. What did you not get a chance to say, starting with you, Don? Just one more point on the relationship between snake and dragon in a Western context, is that some of the most important things we associate with dragons actually derive from snakes.

48:10Why are dragons fiery? Why do they breathe fire? Because viper venom has a burning effect when it's injected. Why are they so often guardians of things, whether they're their own gold or other people's gold? Because snakes can't close their eyes. They're always on. They're believed to be always awake, as it were. They're unsleeping. They're the best guard dogs. Another folk attribute, not a genuine attribute, but a folk attribute of snakes is that they hypnotise their prey. Again, that's connected with the always staring eyes. And freeze it before they, you know, they freeze the rabbit before they leap upon it.

48:44And if we go back to Greek mythology, Medusa, she didn't have snake hair, she had dracone hair. They were dracones. And I'm sure that that is the origin of the notion that Medusa could turn people to stone. That was basically a snaky capability that she had. I'd like to sort of mention the dragons that are non-Western at all. You have sort of serpent creators, particularly prominent in South America. Now, I'm not sure whether I pronounce this correctly, but Sereka starts off as a woman who becomes a serpent. and she becomes a powerful creator by swallowing and regurgitating things. Again, this kind of Python-esque thing, her husband, her brother, various things.

49:29So you get this notion of kind of female cosmology. And again, not a dragon in the sense of a Western dragon, but very much part of this cosmic element. The other thing too are the Orishas, the Dambalas, the snakes that you find in, again, in West African culture, which are very positive and very creative. So I think one has to sort of say that very often the non-Western dragons actually have quite a different significance. And as I say, they tend to stay more serpentine with the exception perhaps of the feathered serpent who is very much part of Aztec mythology. So I think when one talks about dragons, you've got Western dragons, Chinese dragons, Japanese dragons and others.

50:12I was just going to say, actually, it's very interesting because early Chinese philosophical texts tend to position the dragon as the point of creation, actually. All things evolve out of a dragon as a start point. One text particularly focuses on that. So we do have that same kind of concept of a dragon as a creative force. So that's really interesting parallels. I also wanted to touch on the idea of has anyone ever seen a dragon? Because they managed to find a very clever way of getting around it, actually, in early China, because they felt that Chinese dragons could shapeshift. And so they could be not only as large as you like, but they could be as small as a silkworm.

50:44So that could get around it. and they could also take on different guises. So you could be talking potentially to a dragon or you could kill a fish, but it's actually a dragon in disguise. So maybe they really did see dragons everywhere. Well, you certainly covered the territory. Thank you all very much indeed. Thank you. That was terrific. That was smashing. Kelsey, can I offer you tea or coffee? Oh, I'm OK, thank you. Tea will be great, thank you. Two teas and one coffee. I love tea, please. Three teas and one coffee. That was excellent. In Our Time with Melvin Bragg was produced by Eliane Glazer and it is a BBC Studios audio production for Radio 4.

51:16Hello, it's Lucy Worsley here, and we're back with a brand new series of Lady Swindlers. Here we are in cell number one. I'm just shutting us in, Ross. Wow. Following in the footsteps of some all new criminals. Can you take me down to the other end of Baker Street, please? Certainly. Jump in. Thank you. Join me and my all-female team of detectives as we revisit the audacious crimes of women trying to make it in a world made for men. This is a story of working-class women trying to get by. This is survival. Lady Swindlers Season 2 with Lucy Worsley from BBC Radio 4. Listen now on BBC Sounds.