In the rolling countryside of Wiltshire rises a large mound called Dragon Hill. The view from the top of the mound is breathtakingly beautiful. In one direction sprawls the immense figure of a creature, carved aeons ago into the chalk which lies just beneath the grassland. The etched outline is that of the White Horse of Uffington, more than 350 feet from head to tail – possibly a depiction of Epona, an ancient Celtic horse goddess. In the opposite direction, open countryside undulates to the distant horizon where, in the soft light of dawn or dusk, the swell of the hills fades into the sky. Long ago the landscape below Dragon Hill, unbroken by buildings, roads and fields, would have been interspersed by the deep green treetops of extensive stands of woodland. In one of the ancient legends, this beautiful vista was the last sight to fill the serpentine eye-slits of the dragon before it was slain by St George.
The image of St George, a Christian knight astride his white horse, slaying the dragon with sword or spike, features in scores of now famous paintings and woodcuts produced over the centuries. In medieval Christian art the dragon came to represent the power of evil and darkness – the very pagan beliefs that the Christian missionaries, introducing the new religion from Rome, had to try to defeat. This was a difficult task, for the dragon was ubiquitous. And anyway, battles with dragons had an ancient tradition and a deeper meaning than this Christian version of the perpetual battles between religions.
The Dragon’s Hoard
In pre-Christian times the legends of the historical Middle-earth relate how dragons would discover treasure hidden in hoards by humans, often interred with their chiefs and kings in their burial mounds. The fiery beast would take possession of the whole mound. They heaped up the treasure and slept on it. In ancient England ‘wyrm-bed’ became a standard kenning or slang for gold.
Tolkien’s Smaug, Beowulf’s dragon, the Nibelung cycle’s Fafnir – poetic dragons all – were depicted as guarding a hoard of treasure. Generations of literary scholars assumed that such hoards were figments of fantasy by ancient authors and oral poets – just like the dragon itself. That was before the real treasure hoard was discovered – complete with a resident dragon.
Just south of Woodbridge, Suffolk, at a place called Sutton Hoo (Sutton being Anglo-Saxon for a settlement, and Hoo meaning ‘hill’ or mound – often denoting a burial mound), lies a famous burial mound reckoned by most experts to be that of King Redwald. Interred in 623 by the Anglii tribe, they buried with this chief’s body an entire 90 foot-long ship. And amidships, a treasure chest was packed with wondrous objects of gold, silver and gems to accompany him to the Otherworld, where he would thus be equally in glory. The glittering hoard included a solid gold buckle decorated with a rich ornament in an intricate interlace pattern, a gold lid for a purse, mounted with garnets; a gold and garnet sword pommel and mounts for a sword harness, a pair of gold shoulder clasps for gripping together a cloak, small gold and garnet strap ends, buckles and fittings, a superb Byzantine silver dish, a set of ten silver bowls, parts of a lyre, a large and magnificent decorated shield, an ornamental sceptre, bronze hanging bowls, cauldrons, drinking horn mounts and drinking vessels, coins, and a gilt bronze war helmet which is now the most famous icon of Dark Age Britain – the ‘Sutton Hoo helmet’.
This fabulous hoard was discovered in 1939 by an archaeologist called Basil Brown who was engaged by the landowner, Edith May Pretty to investigate the mounds which then lay hidden by weeds and rabbit warrens. Basil Brown was a self-taught archaeologist. One of his contemporaries, Richard Dumbreck, described him as
… a character; his pointed features gave him the, not inappropriate, appearance of a ferret and were invariably topped with a rather disreputable trilby hat, while a somewhat moist and bubbling pipe protruded dead ahead from his mouth. He had … gravitated to archaeology without any real training thanks to a quite remarkable flair for smelling out antiquities.
In May 1939 he uncovered a mound in which a King’s treasure had lain hidden for 1300 years, the main mound of Redwald. It confirmed that burial mound treasure was not merely a fancy of poets’ pens. It was material as well as symbolic gold.
And guarding this treasure from Sutton Hoo was a dragon. Exquisitely created in miniature by a goldsmith, like a dragon’s calling card, it was formed in gilt-bronze, and was mounted squatting across the front of the king’s great shield. This seventh-century dragon has a long snout and large mouth, huge, fierce-looking fangs, and bright eyes set far back in the head. It has four legs to power it across land, and two sets of wings folded back against the body. The body is covered in scales, detailed by the Middle-earth artist in tightly interwoven, finely drawn, curling strands of metal.
In the material world the hoards were sometimes real enough, as in the Sutton Hoo burial mound. But the dragon’s hoard of treasure often represented something much more important than mere grave goods. It was the pivotal point for understanding the fate of entire civilizations.
The King’s Treasure
Treasure was central to an understanding of the mind of Middle-earth. Gold, in particular, was used as a mark of the success of a kingdom, whether it was gained as war booty, as tribute from subservient kingdoms, or through trade. But this level of success dealt with a deeper dimension than mere material wealth. For a person’s degree of success was a result of that individual’s luck, or personal charisma, or mana. It was a fundamental characteristic of life rather like fertility – and the luck of a chieftain could mark the fate of a whole tribe. In Snorri Sturluson’s account of the Battle of Stamford Bridge in 1066, King Harold of England interprets the fall of King Harald Sigurdsson from his horse as a loss of the royal luck; ‘Do you know the stout man who fell from his horse, with the blue cloak and the beautiful helmet?’ the English king asked. ‘That is the king himself,’ they answered. ‘A great man,’ said King Harold, ‘and of stately appearance is he, but I think his luck has left him.’ The defeat of the Norwegian king and his people ensued.
But this luck is more than we would mean by it. The Anglo-Saxon terms ‘eadig’ and ‘saelig’ are used to mean both ‘lucky’ and ‘rich’, and wealth is taken as a token of that quality on which the gods shower their blessings. The king was the charismatic holder of the tribal ‘luck’. When bad harvests continued in Sweden under the Ynglingar King Domaldi, in spite of rich sacrifices by the ruler, he was killed. The early Germanic king was, consequently, not a god and not all-powerful, but he was filled with a power on which his tribe depended for its well-being.
So hoards of treasure representing a tribe’s success were kept by the king in trust for his people – a quantifiable measure of his luck. And when the king gave a gift of an arm-ring, or a sword, from the hoard to a warrior or favoured servant – a common event in the mead-hall – it carried with it an obligation. It was a kind of debt.
Historians have suggested that all gifts from the king were accepted with a sense of this deeper dimension. The gifts were ‘on loan’ in a way, for they came from the king but on behalf of the tribe. Such a gift had a soul of its own. It would seek to return to the hoard through a reciprocal gift. Accepting a gift therefore implied an obligation. The honouring of gift obligations inspired some of the best dragon stories of the people of Middle-earth.
Fighting the Dragon
Great, bone-crunching and bloody accounts of battles with dragons were dramatized in the mead-halls by oral poets. Some of them – probably a small proportion – were written down and have survived until today. One of the most famous of all these accounts is the Anglo-Saxon poetic epic, Beowulf. In written form, it totals over three thousand lines.
The manuscript of the poem dates from about the year AD 1000. The first we hear of its existence was when it came into the hands of Lawrence Nowell, a sixteenth-century pioneer in Anglo-Saxon studies. He wrote his name on the manuscript and the date 1563. Of its earlier history we know nothing. In the seventeenth century the manusript found its way into the collection formed by Sir Robert Cotton. Today it is in the British Library. Historians reckon that the oral composition of the epic took place several hundred years before it was written down – perhaps in the seventh century. It tells the story of a man, Beowulf, who in youth achieved glory in a foreign land by fighting and killing first a monster called Grendel. The beast had been terrorizing the people of a kingdom ruled by Hrothgar, creeping into their mead-halls at night and ripping the warriors to pieces. After his heroic victory, Beowulf eventually became king and ruled his country well for fifty years. In his old age, he fought one more great battle, challenging a ferocious dragon who was attacking and destroying his people.
Michael Alexander’s inspired translation of Beowulf into modern English relates how, for an age, the dragon lay sleeping. He was guarding a treasure hoard, hidden in a burial mound raised high above the moor, on the sea coast. The ancient burial mound could be seen looming high on the clifftop, but no one knew of a way into it. But then one day a slave, on the run from a flogging and looking for shelter, stumbled upon the entrance. Finding his way inside, he came upon an enormous sleeping dragon. At first he was too terrified to move, in case the dragon woke up. But he was also overwhelmed by the sight of the tremendous store of treasure.
Tolkien retold this story in The Hobbit, as Bilbo stealing from under the dragon Smaug’s sleeping nose a magnificent gold two-handled cup. He wrote that although dragons cannot spend their treasure, they know it intimately, and realize immediately if any of it is missing. The dragon in Beowulf had been guarding his treasure for a very long time. ‘There were heaps of hoard-things in this hall underground which once in gone days gleamed and rang; the treasure of a race rusting derelict.’ The slave succumbed to temptation, stole a golden goblet, and made his escape.
When the dragon awoke, he realized the theft at once. Simmering and seething, he waited for nightfall to exact his terrifying revenge. As darkness fell, the dragon ‘issued forth flaming, armed with fire’, and flew around the kingdom vomiting flames and setting alight the timber halls and buildings, ‘the blazing rose skyward and men were afraid: the flying scourge did not mean to leave one living thing’.
Beowulf, the great but aged king, resolved to fight the dragon. In preparation he had a special shield made of iron, for he knew that the traditional linden-wood shield would turn to ashes against the dragon’s fire. Gathering together a posse of twelve of his bravest warriors, he had them led by the hapless slave who stole the goblet, to find the entrance to the burial mound. The account of the battle is hair-raising, even now after 1,000 years and many changes in the tradition of story-telling.
Clad in his mail-shirt and gripping his iron shield, Beowulf peered up from the rocky foot of the cliff. He saw in the cliff-face a stone archway. The king bellowed as loudly as he was able. When the dragon heard the human voice, his hot breath billowed from the rock and ‘the ground boomed’.
Beowulf unsheathed his famous sword, a mighty heirloom, which had cut down many with its sharp edge. The dragon burst from the burial mound, surging, flaming and coiling. Fire swept around Beowulf’s shield, and he knew he could not stand his ground very long. He struck a violent blow to the dragon’s head with his huge sword. The famous blade bit into the dragons’ scales and, meeting the bone, it blunted. ‘The blow made the dragon savagely angry, and it reared back and spat death-fire. The sparks of their battle blazed out over the sea. Fire enclosed Beowulf; he felt bitter pain.’
Seeing their leader engulfed in flame, the brave band of handpicked warriors turned on their heels and fled. All except one: Wiglaf. Gripping his sword and wooden shield, he stood by Beowulf. The dragon roared again, and Wiglaf’s wooden shield was withered back to the boss by the billow of fire. Beowulf, recovered a little from the shock of the dragon’s first attack, swung his huge sword again with all his strength; it struck into the dragon’s head, but this time the blade snapped.
The dragon flew forward and grasped Beowulf’s neck between his fangs. Streams of blood from Beowulf covered them both. Wiglaf jumped forward, his hand burning in the flames, and struck his sword not at the dragon’s head but in the softer throat. The sword went in, the dragon’s fire immediately spluttered and abated. The huge jaws slackened and dropped Beowulf. Gravely injured, Beowulf staggered up, pulled out a stabbing knife and struck it deep into the serpent’s body. The huge dragon lay still, mortally wounded. Scorched by its own flames, the dragon’s blackened body stretched 50 feet along the ground. But the wounds the dragon had inflicted on Beowulf began to burn and swell, and he could feel the poison the dragon had injected into him boiling in his chest. Beowulf was dying. He staggered back, fell and lay dead.
Beowulf’s grieving people threw the body of the dragon into the sea. They then built in tribute to Beowulf, a stronghold near the dragon’s lair, high on the headland. They cremated their great king on a funeral pyre, and his ashes, along with all the hoard of jewellery and gold, was placed in the stronghold and sealed up for ever.
The Dragon’s Taboos
This powerful poem echoes deep elements of the minds of the people of Middle-earth, and what the dragon meant to them. Lines of the poem speak of times when the treasure was first interred in the burial mound, long before the battle between Beowulf and the dragon. ‘In another age’, an unknown man, ‘brows bent’ in sadness and despair, walked along a deserted beach. He was dragging sacks heavy with treasure. He struggled down to an area of flat moorland which rose from the headland. There, through a narrow fissure in the rock, he prepared a new burial chamber, a barrow in which to bury the gold hoard. ‘Hold, ground, the gold of earls!’ he exclaimed. ‘Men could not. Cowards they were not who took it from thee once, but war-death took them.’ In other words, man had once taken the gold from the ground, but the great, rich kingdom had fallen in battles, lost its grandeur and ended. This man was the last survivor of an ancient clan, commending his people’s treasure to the earth with the curse that it must destroy whoever removes it.
It was the end of a cycle of history. The man guarded the gold until his own death. And at that point, the dragon arrived, ‘swimming through the gloom enfolded in flame’, to ‘guard for an age’ the gold hoard. The dragon is the guardian of the aeon, the natural time in which a civilization rises, prising gold and wealth from the ground, and then falls, and eventually returns it there. It is a never-ending cycle. The past and the future coil around the present like the Norse World Serpent – the biggest dragon of all, chewing on its own tail, its body never-ending.
In an age of exchange of wealth through gifts, largesse, tribute and dowry, the handling of wealth was a delicate and elaborate issue carrying moral and ethical overtones. The presence of the dragon pointed to the potency and consequences of negative, acquisitive and selfish aspects of hoarding and breach of trust. The Beowulf story was always told in verse, like the casting of a spell, set apart from the everyday pragmatic use of language. Verse was more than entertainment – it carried with it the force of ‘galdor’, or singing of magic charms.
The story of Beowulf suggests that in the Old English tradition, gold itself seems to have been animate, charged with a power capable of killing. Interfering with its natural condition could bring wealth but also risked destruction. And this is what happens in Beowulf, where the dragon is there at the beginning of a civilization, guarding the treasure left by the last. As long as the taboo against disturbing the natural balance of events was not violated, then the civilization could continue. But if someone tried to interfere with the ordained balance – as by stealing the treasure – then destruction came.
The dragon’s role as guardian ‘for an age’ of hoards is central to the nature of life. Note that the dragon does not guard ‘for ever’. Only ‘for an age’. Ages, and dragons, come and go. And come again. Aion is a Greek word that denotes the sap of life, and hence a lifespan; later it came to mean an epoch, or an ‘age’.
The Cycles of Time
At the heart of the dragon stories lies the fact that the peoples of the real Middle-earth had a conception of time different from our own. They did not believe in linear, unfolding time, beginning from some point distant in the past and disappearing into the future. Rather they experienced time as a constant. History, the past, was always with them in their daily lives, affecting the present.
In the ancient Norse legends, the story was told of perpetual battles between the god Thor, and the World Serpent. It was prophesied that at the end of time, called Ragnarok, Thor would slay the world serpent. But he would only manage to stagger back nine paces before he died of its poison, like Beowulf. The dying dragon killed the heroes too, at the end of an age.
The dragon is first and foremost a snake, which rejuvenates each time it sloughs its skin. It dies and is reborn. The inevitability of the dragon’s return lies at the heart of the Middle-earth understanding of life. Everything was in perpetual cycle. Dawn to dawn, summer to summer and aeon to aeon. The dragon was the animating force behind all of death and rebirth. And beyond the material creation of treasure by humans, this sense of cyclic time points the way to the nature of the dragon’s real treasure. The gold and silver of the dragon’s hoard were the symbols of eternal circling time: the sun and the moon. These perpetual orbs in the sky were the dragon’s most precious wish-fulfilling jewel, reborn every day and night no matter however many times they died and sank beneath the horizon.
In Tolkien’s story The Hobbit, the dragon Smaug was slain by an arrow fired from a bow. But as psychologist Daniel Noel points out, this incident was more than a simple execution to rid the town of a monster. A deeper story powers the action. The man who killed the dragon Smaug was called Bard. He was a man who had three gifts: firstly, the gift of prophecy, that caused him to anticipate the dragon’s coming and warn the people of Lake-town. Secondly, an ‘unfailing arrow’, which was an heirloom. It had been passed from father to son down a line descended from Girion, Lord of Dale, whose realm had been destroyed by the dragon when it entered the region one hundred and seventy-one years before. And thirdly, the understanding of birds. This inherited understanding allowed him to learn the dragon’s weak point from an old thrush that had listened to Bilbo and the dwarves. So Bard was no ordinary bowman. He had special gifts of the kind we associate with shamans or spiritual warriors. When Bard slayed Smaug, he was carrying out a sacred act which lies deep at the heart of the beliefs of Middle-earth. The dying of the dragon marked a new age, the beginning of a new civilization.
So the Anglo-Saxons regarded the dragon’s hoard as a sign of a people’s luck. But it carried with it deep responsibilities. If people behaved dishonourably, and did not acknowledge their obligations as receivers of gifts, then the dragon would become enraged. He was the wyrd of an epoch – an age coming to an end. In the annals of a thousand years ago, The Anglo-Saxon Chronicle recorded sightings of drakes flying high and leaving trails of fire. The entry for AD 793 says:
This year came dreadful fore-warnings over the land of the Northumbrians, terrifying the people most woefully: these were immense sheets of light rushing through the air, and whirlwinds, and fiery dragons flying across the firmament. These tremendous tokens were soon followed by a great famine: and not long after, on the sixth day before the ides of January in the same year, the harrowing inroads of heathen men made lamentable havoc in the church of God in Holy-island, by rapine and slaughter.
And 300 years earlier, when the Saxons had landed to settle in England, and saw the deserted Roman towns, with ‘bright castles, many bath houses, lofty pinnacles’, brought down by the Wyrd destiny of civilizations, they knew what had happened. Forces greater than the politics of Rome had driven them out. The Roman age was over. And the corollary was that the Anglo-Saxons thought themselves ‘chosen’ as the next civilization. Just so long as they did it right. And that meant, for starters, steering clear of the Roman ruins of Fag Flor, Caister-by-Norwich, and Bath. They built their own homes in the ‘good’ places, populated by the spirits. This was the deeper dimension of their history – an abiding sense of destiny. If they lived in accordance with the wishes of Mother Earth, and the precepts of the dragon and its treasure, then they were destined to thrive in their new homeland.