{"id":31984,"date":"2016-04-14T06:30:39","date_gmt":"2016-04-13T18:30:39","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/helenlowe.info\/blog\/?p=31984"},"modified":"2016-04-13T22:39:45","modified_gmt":"2016-04-13T10:39:45","slug":"a-league-of-fantastic-dragonslayers","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/helenlowe.info\/blog\/2016\/04\/14\/a-league-of-fantastic-dragonslayers\/","title":{"rendered":"A League of Fantastic Dragonslayers"},"content":{"rendered":"

Yesterday, Rebecca reviewed the 1980s film Dragonslayer<\/a> (which it seems wasn’t that<\/em> bad \ud83d\ude09 ) — and that got me thinking about the great dragonslayers of epic and fantasy that I’d enrol in a personal “League of Extraordinary Dragonslayers.”<\/p>\n

\"Beowulf_Seamus<\/a>\"Beowulf<\/a>First off the blocks would have to Beowulf<\/strong>, the hero of Saxon epic who took on a dragon in his twilight years, and died doing so even though he did for the dragon as well. My earliest encounter with Beowulf was through Rosemary Sutcliff’s retelling, titled Beowulf: Dragonslayer<\/em><\/strong>, but I have since read Seamus Heaney’s interpretation of the Anglo Saxon poem, which is quite wonderful. Both, though, capture the sombre ‘twilight of the hero’ that is Beowulf’s battle with the dragon.<\/p>\n

\"the<\/a>Second in my league is Bard the Bowman from JRR Tolkien’s The Hobbit<\/em><\/strong>, who slays the dragon Smaug with a well-placed arrow to the one small, vulnerable spot in the dragon’s armored hide. A thrush whispers the secret to him, but Bard has the eye and skill to loose the vital arrow successfully — and the courage to wait for the right moment, despite the dragon’s onslaught.<\/p>\n

\"Hero<\/a>No League of Extraordinary Dragonslayers would be complete without Aerin from Robin McKinley’s The Hero and the Crown<\/em><\/strong>. Disregarded by the rest of her extended family because she has no magical gifts (kelar), Aerin befriends an “injured-out” warhorse and sets out to establish a place for herself by slaying dragons. Although still fearsome, these are mostly small — until that is, she comes up against Maur… Maur almost does for Aerin and the kingdom in more than one way, but you’ll have to read the book for yourself to find out more.<\/p>\n

\"Dragonbane\"<\/a>One of my favourite dragonslayers has always been John Aversin, from Barbara Hambly’s Dragonsbane<\/strong><\/em>. A reluctant hero, John Aversin only fights his dragon—a pastime that tends to get you messily killed—out of a sense of duty, since he is the only knight available to protect the people of the north. He lives in a brutal world, where survival is a brutal business, so he doesn’t take on his dragon by charging nobly to meet it, waving a sword, but by catching it asleep, shooting it with poisoned harpoons, and chopping off its wings with an axe before it can take to the air. And then comes the day when he has to take on Morkeleb the Black… Undoubtedly, my league would be incomplete without him.<\/p>\n

\"Wizard<\/a>\"Tombs<\/a>Sometimes, though, the solution may not be to slay the dragon but to get it to talk to you instead of fighting. That’s why the League needs Ged, the mage from Ursula Le Guin’s Earthsea trilogy. Ged becomes one of the mages known as a Dragonlord, not — as he tell Tenar in The Tombs of Atuan<\/em><\/strong> — because he controls dragons, but because he can generally count on a dragon to talk with him rather than eating him. Of course, in A Wizard of Earthsea<\/em><\/strong>, Ged also kills a brood of dragons and banishes the greatest of them, the dragon of Pendor — but in the latter instance, too, the ability to speak with the dragon is an important part of the whole deal.<\/p>\n

So there you are, there’s my League of Fantastic — and Extraordinary — Dragonslayers. Who else would you add to the team?<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Yesterday, Rebecca reviewed the 1980s film Dragonslayer (which it seems wasn’t that bad \ud83d\ude09 ) — and that got me thinking about the great dragonslayers of epic and fantasy that I’d enrol in a personal “League of Extraordinary Dragonslayers.” First off the blocks would have to Beowulf, the hero of Saxon epic who took on […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[30,19],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-31984","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-epicfantasy","category-funstuff"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/helenlowe.info\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/31984","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/helenlowe.info\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/helenlowe.info\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/helenlowe.info\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/helenlowe.info\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=31984"}],"version-history":[{"count":24,"href":"https:\/\/helenlowe.info\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/31984\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":32013,"href":"https:\/\/helenlowe.info\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/31984\/revisions\/32013"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/helenlowe.info\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=31984"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/helenlowe.info\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=31984"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/helenlowe.info\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=31984"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}