In the historical Middle-earth, the evidence shows that dragons were more than merely creatures of stories. Scaly, fire-breathing monsters, they occupied the shadowy world between waking and sleep, day and night, life and death. They could be heard booming under the ground or high on the hills. Their sour smell drifted across the countryside on the morning mist. Sometimes their scaly hide could be heard slithering and crackling in the dark of night. Even if people had never come face to face with a dragon, they knew that one day, without warning, their worst nightmare could come true.
Of course today, the notion of dragons being real seems a fanciful idea more appropriate to childhood – our process of growing up requires that we gradually fetter our fantasies, and replace them with an adult perspective relentlessly based on reality. So were the Anglo-Saxons childlike dreamers? On the contrary, they had to be intensely practical, for times were hard. Unreliable crops could lead to sudden famine. Disease could rage through villages unchecked by an understanding of sanitation hazards and spreading infection. And the lawless feuding of rival warlords sometimes flared up, leaving innocent victims dead in their wake. So was their belief that dragons were real a sign of primitive thought? A groping for order amid the chaos of quixotic and cruel events? A symptom of the degradation of human spirit during the Dark Ages? Being able to distinguish between reality and fantasy even determines today our distinction between sanity and madness. So did the people of Middle-earth live in a kind of collective delusional world?
These conventional interpretations of Middle-earth magical thinking miss an important ingredient. What distinguished their civilization was a sense that beyond the pragmatics of survival, the meaning of life lay in another, separate kind of reality – in the Otherworld of spirits, beings and greater forces. The practical matters of everyday life were best solved through common sense and logic. But answers to the deeper issues of what life is about lay not in rational thinking, but in the realms of imagination. Even in our scientifically-oriented culture, we realize that imagination is often the state of mind from which we connect with profound insights: from the extra-logical leaps of new paradigm thinking, to the creation of great art, and even to ways of knowing God. And for the people of Middle-earth, the dragon brought insights to people’s understanding of life’s vicissitudes, as we shall see.
But it also spread dread. The people of Middle-earth lived with a constant awareness of the perennial presence of this terrifying creature. The dragon’s hidden realm was the Lowerworld, reserved for the spirits of the dead. The dragon’s lairs, as entrances to the realm of the dead, were supercharged points of contact between the everyday, surface world of Middle-earth activity, and the timeless, subterranean layers of the Lowerworld – caves, burial mounds, crossroads and streams. And there, in the deepest darkness, lurked the dragons – apparently sleeping. But through eye-slits glowing red with internal combustion, these fire-breathers controlled the creation and destruction of whole civilizations. Perhaps stemming from a folk-memory of dinosaurs, embedded deep in human memory – even beyond the handing down of stories through thousands of generations they became a kind of instinctive adversary, rather like people’s inborn aversion to snakes, presumably an evolutionarily-evolved protection from poisonous snakes which in early times may have been more numerous and therefore a constant threat to well-being.
To understand the significance of the dragon, let us begin with the dread.
Finding the Dragon’s Lair
In the real landscape of ancient England there were hundreds of such ‘dragon-lairs’. There hid these monstrous creatures, like fireballs waiting to explode. Their lairs were mapped meticulously, like ancient minefields. The nature and naming of dragons’ lairs illustrates how, for the people of the Real Middle-earth, the natural landscape was an extension of their minds. Threads of the imagination were cast over the objective features of the physical world like a magical net, pulling together the hills, trees, streams and hollows within the deeper dimensions of inner experience. Tolkien used this perspective in The Hobbit, where the dwarf Thorin pored over an ancient map. In all the places marked there, he remembered well the most important landmarks – including the Withered Heath which, he said, used to be a breeding ground for dragons.
Today, a millennium later, we can still visit the original location of some of the most famous dragon lairs from the real Middle-earth. They can be identified through their ancient place-names, many of which have survived through a thousand years of history. Beneath their prosaic presence on a modern map of England lies the hidden terrain through which dragons dragged their scaly hides.
Anglo-Saxon land charters were legal documents which detailed the boundaries of pieces of property. Often prominent features of the landscape were used as markers – large and ancient trees, spreading their presence on the countryside for scores of generations; or manmade features constructed specifically as boundary markers, like fences, ditches and gates.
But the charters also stamped the landscape with mythological footprints. On 10 April 739, Aethelheard, King of the West Saxons, inked his signature to a vellum document granting land at Crediton, Devon to the Bishop of Sherborne for the purpose of building a monastery. This place survives as a town near Exeter, just north-east of the Dartmoor National Park. The extent of the land for the monastery was marked out precisely in the document as ‘… from the boundary ridge to Luha’s tree, from Luha’s tree to the enclosure gate, from the enclosure gate to Dodda’s ridge, from Dodda’s ridge to Grendel’s pit…’ But Grendel was no ordinary natural feature. He was a legendary man-eating monster. Dragons, as we shall see, had particular significance and meaning for the people of Middle-earth, but also in those times the creatures of the earth were not categorized so precisely as now, with our Linnaean system and certainly dragons belonged to the more general genre of monsters. It will help us understand people’s relations with dragons to consider first how they dealt with the monster, Grendel, immortalized in the great Anglo-Saxon poem Beowulf. This poem is reckoned by historians to have been composed sometime between the middle of the seventh and the end of the tenth century, and written in Anglo-Saxon. The language is archaic now, and has to be translated into modern English. It was written in England, and the events it describes are in a ‘once upon a time’ but quasi-real historical period, and set in Scandinavia. Undoubtedly, the poem was performed orally in the mead halls of England, especially those of East Anglia, where scholars reckon the poem to have originated. It is likely that the story developed gradually, perhaps by more than one storyteller, before it was finally written down. Here, Grendel is described in snatches, for he was glimpsed only in the flickering firelight of night, before he carried out his destruction.
And Grendel was an experience the people of Middle-earth would have preferred to do without. He loomed up out of the night, and melted back like a phantom into darkness. But we know from other beliefs of these times that for the people of Middle-earth listening to this story, he was not an apparition. The name Grendel is connected with an Old Norse term meaning ‘to bellow’ – a booming growl of a large creature – and the word eventually came into the later Middle-English as ‘grindel’, meaning angry. Grendel entered the mead halls silently at night, smashed brave warriors to pieces, and carried their corpses back into the wilderness from whence he came. In his rage, he drowned out the screams of his victims, and left the smell of fear and blood. The Anglo-Saxon audience would have accepted these monsters as monsters, not as abstract symbols of evil, plague or war. Such creatures had a kind of material reality, as well as an Otherworld identity.
Grendel and his kind menaced people’s lives in all areas of the country, and in various parts of the landscape. The monster was particularly associated with low-lying, watery places, echoed in the cognate old East Anglian dialect word grindle, meaning ‘drain’ or ‘ditch’. In AD 931, King Athelstan of Wessex issued a charter in which a certain lake in Wiltshire is identified as a grendles mere. Other place-names mentioned in old charters, Grindles bec and Grendeles pyt, were likewise places that were lairs of the beast.
The Beowulf poet describes the habitat of the monster as an intimate, familiar landscape, surrounding the mead-halls where the lines of the poem were being performed orally: ‘It is not far from here, measured in miles’, says the poet, ‘that the mere stands over which frosty thickets hang – a wood firm of root covers over the water…’. Marshland and bogs had special significance as liminal areas of the landscape. They hovered between the known and unknown. They were neither dry land nor water. Seemingly fordable, they could, without warning, suck animals or people down into the darkness of the Lowerworld, the land of the dead.
The Lowerworld was a place of wisdom for wizards. In an oral culture, people who died took with them a lifetime of knowledge, of experience. So this place underneath the everyday world was packed with potential words to the wise – tips, techniques and spells. Wizards could risk journeys there, conjure conversations with the dead, and then return. But for the ordinary person, to be sucked into its dark depths was the end.
The Beowulf poet describes Grendel’s liquid lair as no ordinary feature of the landscape: ‘At night there, something uncanny happens: the water burns’. Even animals would rather die rather than plunge in: ‘On its bank, the heather-stepper halts: the hart in flight from pursuing hounds will turn to face them with firm-set horns and die in the wood rather than dive beneath its surface. That is no good place.’ The ‘Grendel’s Pits’ of Middle-earth maps were unwelcome landmarks. The presence of these beasts must have issued from the land like a menacing mist rising from a swamp, threatening to manifest as a monster.
Grendel was not a dragon, but his character helps us to understand theirs. They were separate species, but similarly prescient beasts. Dragons lurked in the landscape, ready to erupt at cataclysmic moments in the aeons of time. And everyone knew where they were – their lairs were hidden, but always known, and named. By the end of the eighth century, most of the villages in England had already been formed. Many still survive today with their original names, or close derivations, or can be identified in early forms in ancient land charters, or the Domesday Book. And these place-names suggest that hundreds of sites may have been originally identified as dragon-lairs.
Drakes
The people of Anglo-Saxon England would have had no doubt about the appearance of dragons. They knew their size and shape. How they moved and walked. How they sounded. Their flight paths. Dragons who could fly, they called drakes, and those that were confined to reptilian slithering across the ground, wyrms.
Flying dragons must have got around, for many place-names are based on the word drake. Sometimes they were sited at dramatic promontories, on hills topped by trees, like visual antennae to the fire-breathers that coursed below. So Drakenage (Drake’s edge) Farm, in Warwickshire, adds to ‘drake’ the word ‘edge’, which in Old English denoted the crest of a narrow ridge. It undulated above the landscape like the spiny back of an enormous, half-hidden dragon, sleeping – until disturbed, of course. Not a peaceful thought. Especially since ‘edge’ also connoted the power to cut with the sharpened edge of a heavy sword – or in this case, ripping talons and tearing teeth.
People in those days would have travelled on foot – a speed at which features of the landscape stay in your view for far longer than when speeding past in a car or train. A spiny ridge would make a menacing horizon – especially if you believed that it was gazing back at you through hidden, slitted eyes. Conceptions which hang between material reality and the power of our imaginations are the most haunting. And for those people who sometimes had to walk across such ridges as winter footpaths, to avoid the wet valleys, walking lightly on one’s feet must have been the norm, if there was a possibility that, when disturbed, the whole ridge could erupt into an enraged dragon.
Nearby, on today’s A442 road running west of Stourbridge, lies the town of Drakelow. In Anglo-Saxon times this road was a track, the town a village. And the name reveals the brooding presence of a resident dragon. The ancient word ‘low’ was directly connected to dragons, for it originally meant both to ‘live under the ground, lying dead and buried’, as in a burial mound, and also ‘to flame, to blaze, and to be on fire with passion’. Dragons may have slept ‘like the dead’ for generations, but they were hardly cold-blooded reptiles. Their internal flames flickered perpetually, ready to spit fire. Was the ‘low’ of this dragon lair a natural hill, visited once by a dragon flying in for a reconnoitre? Or was it occupied long-term, perhaps as a burial mound?
Dragley Beck, in Lancashire, was also the haunt of a fire-breather. In ancient times a ‘beck’ referred to a rugged, coursed stream with an especially stony bed. These streams twisted through the landscape like the ominous, bony spine of a serpent-dragon lying hidden beneath the water. Were these streams avoided, like the death-bogs of a Grendel monster? Or did people fish from them, very carefully? Did they fish from the bank, or dare to enter the water and stand on the dragon’s backbone – perhaps slipping an offering into the water to appease the monster?
So the derivations of place-names not only reveal the locations of the lairs, they also tell us something about the nature of the dragons who hid there. The ancient lair names show the drake as huge, snaky, spiny-backed and fire breathing, sunk in deep holes, stony streams, or high on ridges and ancient burial mounds where it lay sleeping, as if dead and buried. Until disturbed.
Then, terrifyingly, the dragon emerged from such deep hiding places, its screaming roar booming across the countryside. The people of Middle-earth knew what dragons sounded like. We know they were loud from the place-name of Drakeholes, in Nottinghamshire. In Old English ‘hole’ had two meanings; a burrow dug into the ground by an animal, and a yell or scream, as in the modern-day word to ‘holler’. So Drakeholes was named after the underground lair of a dragon, from which the beast was heard to make its scream. Perhaps a roar, but higher pitched than a Grendel. In the Celtic legend of ‘Lludd and Llefelys’, we hear of a terrifying scream which echoed every May Eve over every hearth in Britain. It left all animals and trees and the earth and the waters barren. It was found to be the scream of a dragon in combat with an invading dragon, the battle taking place in the Lowerworld in a lair beneath the mid-point of the country.
One of the danger places was at crossroads. Drake’s Cross, just south of Birmingham, marks the lair of one such dragon. From Drakelow it is barely twenty miles as the crow – or dragon – flies; perhaps it was an alternative nesting site of the same dragon. In ancient England, crossroads were not only places where human pathways intersected, but were also entrances – or exit-places connected to the realm of the dead. Spirits travelled along trackways made by people, by animals, by nature. And criminals were hung on crosses at crossroads, because the location would speed their souls’ journey down into the Lowerworld, avoiding the unpleasant possibility that their souls would hang around among the world of the living, haunting them with evil intent. Crossroads were unsuitable places to linger in the days of Middle-earth.
Wyrms
Not all dragons flew. There were also long, slithering wingless dragons who crawled over the landscape like huge reptiles. In Old English they were called ‘worms’, although clearly a different order of creature from the small, friendly garden worm of today. The word derives from the Scandinavian ‘orm’, which means ‘snake’. Even the largest snakes bear little relation to dragons, of course. For how big were these crawling, or flying, fiery creatures? Ancient descriptions range from dragons about as large as alligators, to the 50-foot dragon in the epic Anglo-Saxon poem Beowulf, all the way to Jormungand, the world-serpent of later Norse legend which wound itself completely around the world, and grasped its own tail in its fangs.
These wyrm-dragons were related to monsters like the killer creature Grendel. Place-names for their lairs include Wormwood, in the Peak District National Park, at a place just outside the village of Hassop, and South Ormsby in Lincolnshire – ‘orm’ names which came when the Norse invaded eastern England in the eighth century.
Tolkien’s dragon Smaug, who dominated The Hobbit, was a combination of these two types of Anglo-Saxon dragon – the drake and the wyrm. In Tolkien’s own illustrations, his dragon has the curious upturned nose that is the consistent facial feature of dragons from the Viking north-west, although it exists in no real reptiles except the crocodilians. And Tolkien explained in a letter that the name is the past tense smaug of a Germanic verb smugan, ‘to squeeze through a hole’. So Smaug, while able to fly, also had the serpent-like body of a ‘worm’ dragon. Perhaps the different kinds of dragons could interbreed!
While many would consider that the language of dragons is too fanciful to use today, more at home in children’s story-books than in adult discourse, we could nevertheless concede that there is a role for a more esoteric and poetic language in describing the qualities of a site in the landscape. Such imagery can be more appropriate than our supposedly more credible scientific terms. In painting, for instance, the terms movement, rhythm, tone and texture have a different meaning from the same terms in music and are certainly different from their meaning in physics. In any area where human perception, consciousness and emotions interact with non-human factors, simple scientific descriptions in the physical sense are inadequate. Intuitive language and imaginative images can better describe a myriad of subtle factors. For our ancestors, the imagination was the doorway from the everyday to the Otherworld. And there was a constant flowing of the imagination into the material world. The sense of reality in Middle-earth was more an awareness of realities, in the plural.
Many ancient cultures have had a similar sensitivity to dragon lairs in the landscape. For example, the aesthetic science known to the Chinese as the geomantic system of ‘feng-shui’, that is, ‘wind and water’, studies the currents of subtle energy which permeate all landscapes with their hills, rocks, trees and rivers. Traditional Chinese landscape artists followed this principle, treating the landscape like the physiognomy of Mother Earth, and trying to imbue their art with a deep sense of ‘dragon veins’ running through the landscape. In their eyes, every part of the landscape is animated by dragon’s breath.
And for the Chinese, the dragon is the animating principle of every place. It represented the living spirit of trees and rocks, of pools, rivers, mountains and seas, of bridges and buildings, of men and women and children.
For the people of the historical Middle-earth, the dragon was not a totally negative creature. A fearsome beast, yes, but one whose presence fired the landscape with magical power, and who embodied the fate of whole civilizations. And in the real Middle-earth, as we shall see in the next chapter, the dragon’s hoard of treasure influenced the fate of entire civilizations.