Dragon Day
Why do we love them so much?
Today I celebrate the publishing of MAGIC NO MORE, my entry into dragon fantasy, under my pen name Joss Stirling. I hope you’ll find it a little different for the usual fare in this genre. It does have a love story that has its seeds in this first part, but perhaps the deepest attachment in book 1 might just be with Marah’s dragon Galahad.
Not that he’s her dragon in the sense of a pet. You don’t keep dragons as pets or Oxford burns down (that’s how the story starts).
Please do buy it and review it if you like fantasy adventure stories. Suitable for 16+
And here are some useful links for reviews -
Amazon - https://www.amazon.co.uk/Magic-No-More-Joss-Stirling-ebook/dp/B0DVZRMLCY/
Goodreads - https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/226501505-magic-no-more
Many thanks for helping me launch this new book - I really appreciate it.
Love of dragons
My own love of putting dragons in books long pre-dates this one. In fact, it was where I started when writing The Companions Quartet for my children. The tone is very different - a children’s fantasy about the secret Society for the Protection of Mythical Creatures. There are lots of dragons in that set of four novels, including a golden one called Argand, and a dragon hatching scene.
I suppose my dragons tend to be the ‘friendly’ to human sort - or mostly friendly. Marah has a worrying encounter with a large one in Lisbon but you need to read the story to find that out. In MNM, they are also wild and following their own creaturely instincts so that doesn’t make them easy shipmates on the voyage in the book.
Friendly v hostile
In the hostile camp (mostly), is Tolkien. Smaug and the older dragons in Middle-earth do the work of Melkor and Sauron, even if they also have their own agenda. The influence of their treasure on those that try to hold on to it is malign, like that of Fafnir, the original dragon inspiration in the Völsunga Saga and the one at the end of Beowulf.
Tolkien examined his own interest in dragons in his humorous Christmas lecture given in 1938 at the Natural History Museum in Oxford. (Professor John Holmes from Birmingham University does a wonderful re-enactment with the original slides - do catch his performance if you can. I believe he is returning to do it in Oxford in April.) Tolkien links story dragons to dinosaurs and surely this must be where some of the stories come from as our ancestors came across the bones of ‘terrible lizards’? What is fascinating though to me is that, while we associate them with fire in the West, it is as common in the East to think of them as bringers of storms and rain.
Maybe that will be the next story?
And the answer…
So in answer to my question, I think we love them because they link to an imagined past, are vast, they fly, breathe fire (or bring water). Dragons aren’t mammals so they have that extra bit of otherness. They thrill and scare and seduce us with their beauty.
What do you think?