From Dragonslaying to Dragonriders — Who Rang In The Change?
Dragonslaying featured here last week, starting on Wednesday when Rebecca featured the ’80s film Dragonslayer in her Big Worlds On Small Screens column — and apparently, the film wasn’t that bad. 😉
Her look at the film inspired me to look at some of the great dragonslayers of legend and fantasy fiction — and then on Friday I added another worthy contender, the hero Yorindesarinen, from my own The Wall of Night series.
At which point Rebecca kicked the can along a bit further by wondering when the shift occurred, from fantasy concerning itself with dragon slaying to the far more likely scenario now, when the hero is a dragonrider and the dragons can be friends and mentors rather than ravening terrors.
I was inclined to think Anne McCaffrey was the turning point, with her Hugo Award-winning novella Weyr Search, the forerunner of Dragonflight (1968), published in 1967 — a lot earlier than my initial pick of the early to mid-1970s for Dragonflight.
However the change may have been in the air in the late 1960s because when Ursula Le Guin’s The Farthest Shore came out in 1973, the dragon Kalessin was more a mysterious mentor than the dragons of Pendor that the mage Ged had defeated in A Wizard of Earthsea (1968.)
By the 1980s there were several contenders in adult literature, from RA MacAvoy’s scholarly and zen philosophizing black dragon (Tea With the Black Dragon, 1983) and Melanie Rawn’s Dragon Prince series (1985-1994) — and very many more.
Not least Robin Hobb’s dragon influenced Liveship series and George RR Martin’s A Game of Thrones, both of which had their beginnings in the mid-90s. Not to mention the more recent Eragon — and Balisan the Red in my own Thornspell.
However, I can point to a much earlier story that heralds the contemporary theme: Kenneth Grahame’s 1898 children’s story, The Reluctant Dragon, which was made into the 1941 Disney film of the same name. The story concerns an erudite, poetry-loving dragon that would really rather not fight. Fortunately St George is of the same mind so they fake a joust instead. Anyway, I’m sure you know the story, but my point is that it was published around 70 years before Anne McCaffrey’s novella.
So the new, you see, is not as new as we may have thought, after all. 🙂
Interesting, Helen. I wonder if the shift to seeing dragons more as friends or mentors is somehow connected to the growing environmental movement; that we are connected to nature rather than apart from it. And now we know that we’re the ones breathing out toxic emissions, not the dragons!
Ha! I like that about the toxic emissions. I hadn’t thought about the connection to nature angle, but you’re right, it’s an interesting possibility.
Patricia Wrede’s dragons have always been favorites, along with the princess who saves herself. 🙂 If you’ve not read “Dealing with Dragons” (and the rest of the Enchanted Forest Chronicles), I recommend it highly as a delightful romp that nonetheless makes you think.
I haven’t. Patricia Wrede is definitely on my radar but I don’t think I have read one of her books yet. Which is a shame–I really must!