{"id":32029,"date":"2016-04-18T06:30:37","date_gmt":"2016-04-17T18:30:37","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/helenlowe.info\/blog\/?p=32029"},"modified":"2016-04-17T23:43:00","modified_gmt":"2016-04-17T11:43:00","slug":"from-dragonslaying-to-dragonriders-who-rang-in-the-change","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/helenlowe.info\/blog\/2016\/04\/18\/from-dragonslaying-to-dragonriders-who-rang-in-the-change\/","title":{"rendered":"From Dragonslaying to Dragonriders — Who Rang In The Change?"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"Dragonslayer1\"<\/a>Dragonslaying featured here last week, starting on Wednesday when Rebecca featured the ’80s film Dragonslayer<\/em><\/strong> in her Big Worlds On Small Screen<\/a>s column — and apparently, the film wasn’t that<\/em> bad. \ud83d\ude09<\/p>\n

Her look at the film inspired me to look at some of the great dragonslayers of legend and fantasy<\/a> fiction — and then on Friday I added another worthy contender<\/a>, the hero Yorindesarinen, from my own The Wall of Night<\/a> series.<\/p>\n

\"dragonflight295\"<\/a>At which point Rebecca kicked the can along a bit further by wondering when the shift occurred<\/a>, 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.<\/p>\n

I was inclined to think Anne McCaffrey was the turning point, with her Hugo Award-winning novella Weyr Search<\/em><\/strong>, the forerunner of Dragonflight <\/em><\/strong>(1968), published in 1967 — a lot earlier than my initial pick of the early to mid-1970s for Dragonflight<\/em>.<\/p>\n

\"Farthest<\/a>However the change may have been in the air in the late 1960s because when Ursula Le Guin’s The Farthest Shore<\/em><\/strong> 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<\/em><\/strong> (1968.)<\/p>\n

\"tea<\/a>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<\/em><\/strong>, 1983) and Melanie Rawn’s Dragon Prince<\/strong> series (1985-1994) — and very many more.<\/p>\n

\"Eragon\"<\/a>Not least Robin Hobb’s dragon influenced Liveship<\/strong> series and George RR Martin’s A Game of Thrones<\/strong><\/em>, both of which had their beginnings in the mid-90s. Not to mention the more recent Eragon<\/em><\/strong> — and Balisan the Red in my own Thornspell<\/em><\/strong>.<\/p>\n

\"Reluctant<\/a>However, I can point to a much earlier story that heralds the contemporary theme: Kenneth Grahame’s 1898 children’s story, The Reluctant Dragon<\/em><\/strong>, 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.<\/p>\n

So the new, you see, is not as new as we may have thought, after all. \ud83d\ude42<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

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. \ud83d\ude09 Her look at the film inspired me to look at some of the great dragonslayers of legend and fantasy fiction — and then […]<\/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-32029","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-epicfantasy","category-funstuff"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/helenlowe.info\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/32029","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=32029"}],"version-history":[{"count":12,"href":"https:\/\/helenlowe.info\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/32029\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":32045,"href":"https:\/\/helenlowe.info\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/32029\/revisions\/32045"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/helenlowe.info\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=32029"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/helenlowe.info\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=32029"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/helenlowe.info\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=32029"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}