Fellow Travelers

Welcome to today’s episode of all dragons, all the time! hamsterwoman had a great post during Snowflake Challenge about favorite dragons, and I had it in mind when thinking about two dragonish books that I’ve read recently: I’m Afraid You’ve Got Dragons (Peter S. Beagle) and To Shape a Dragon’s Breath (Moniquill Blackgoose). (By “recently” I mean… in the last few months. It turns out I’m not the quickest at getting posts written up.) These are two very different books, but each of them is drawing something from the same well of recurring dragon tropes/types. I’ll list three here that feel important to me:

1. Probably the oldest and most famous (for Western/European-style dragons, at least) is the idea of the dragon as a monster that menaces damsels/princesses and must be slain by a brave knight. That one is so baked-in that pretty much every modern example I can think of is subverting it in some way. For examples of dragons that are unambiguously the villains of their stories, only two examples are coming readily to mind: Smaug from The Hobbit (who is really just the dragon from Beowulf in a fake mustache), and Maur from The Hero and the Crown. And both of those are subverting the original myth: THatC because Aerin is both the princess and the knight; The Hobbit because the “knight” (Bard) is a very minor character, while a small, clever burglar steals the show.

2. The idea that dragons are wise and intelligent, and can communicate with humans either telepathically or by direct speech. This one is almost ubiquitous.

3. The concept of dragons being bonded to individual humans—often overlapping with telepathic communication, and sometimes with only certain special humans possessing the ability to form the bond. This one I associate very strongly with the Pern books as my first encounter with the idea, but there may be earlier examples?

All of these show up, to varying degrees, in both books I’ve mentioned. I coincidentally ended up reading them close together in time, and it made for an interesting combination. I was originally going to write about both in a single post, but then I wrote a lot of words just about the first one, so I’m going to save To Shape a Dragon’s Breath for later.

So: I’m Afraid You’ve Got Dragons, by Peter S. Beagle. (Yes, the Last Unicorn Peter S. Beagle. He’s still writing good stuff!). The title gave me a very specific expectation of what this was going to be: something lighthearted, poking fun at the dragon-knight-princess trope, along the lines of the Enchanted Forest Chronicles.

Well… it isn’t quite that. There is certainly some trope-subverting going on here, but the tone is darker and the stakes are more serious than I had imagined. This world certainly has got dragons: a lot of different kinds of dragons, with multiple different dragon tropes in play. It definitely feels like just a small glimpse into a wider world, which is generally a plus for me, but there are some places I wish Beagle had dug more deeply into the worldbuilding and explained more about how all these things fit together.

For example: we start off with a prologue featuring three Wise Women, predicting the return of the Kings. The word “dragon” never appears in the prologue, but it becomes clear that the Kings are very big, very dangerous dragons. Do we ever hear from the Wise Women again, or learn anything about how one becomes a Wise Woman and what powers they have? We do not. The prologue takes place in (I think?) the distant past relative to the rest of the book; do we find out whether Wise Women are still a thing, or why the Kings stopped returning? Nope. Do we ever encounter any of the Kings? Yes… but in a way that leaves a lot of questions unanswered.

In the next chapter we meet Robert, who is arguably the main protagonist (more like #1 of 3 protagonists). Robert’s real name is Gaius Aurelius Constantine Heliogabalus Thrax. I can definitely see why he chooses to go by a nickname, though why “Robert” specifically I have no clue. Robert slays dragons for a living… but not in a glamorous way. He’s an exterminator. In this world, dragons—small ones—are ubiquitous pests that infest farms and buildings, regarded in the same way as, say, rats, or very large cockroaches. (Hence the title.) There is also a dragon market where dragons are sold for their hides and meat.

Robert ended up with this job by basically inheriting it from his late father (who was pretty clearly not a good guy). It’s an interesting piece of worldbuilding here that in this world girls are expected to be educated, while boys quit school very early to be apprenticed to a trade; Robert only learned to read because his sisters taught him. (Another example of something I wish the book dug into more—I’d expect it to have a larger impact on the position of women in their society than anything we see here.).

Robert hates his job, because he likes dragons! Unbeknownst to anyone outside the household, a half-dozen or so small dragons share his family’s home, somewhere between pets and adopted family members. The dragons don’t talk, but they are clearly intelligent, and, according to Robert, they tell him their names when they’re ready. “It’s not words. They just do. You have to wait really hard, until you feel the name.” (The dragon self-naming feels very Pern to me, but without the one-to-one dragon-human bond.) Robert’s interactions with his dragon friends are extremely cute, and he knows a lot about the many different dragon types and their traits, which we get to hear about at several points in the story—I enjoyed this, and wanted more about his dragon knowledge.

Meanwhile, protagonist #2, Princess Cerise of Bellemontagne, flees the palace to escape the large crowd of annoying princes who are there to vie for her hand in marriage. She goes out to the woods, where she has been secretly teaching herself to read—because royalty, even female royalty, never gets reading lessons either. (Oh, come ON, Beagle! This was the single most implausible piece of worldbuilding for me.) Anyway, I feel like we’ve seen a fair number of other smart, practical, plucky princesses in other stories, but Cerise is a charming example of the type.

Cerise’s study session is interrupted by protagonist #3, the extremely handsome and personable Reginald, crown prince of the large and powerful neighboring kingdom. All of a sudden, the whole hand-in-marriage thing is not looking so bad! Cerise rushes back to get her parents to spruce up the castle to impress him, because currently it’s in a sad state. Among other things, it’s got a terrible infestation of, well, you guessed it. So… who ya gonna call?

Robert and his assistants Elfrieda and Ostvald duly show up for their pest-control job at the castle. Based on my impressions of the book so far, I was expecting that they would somehow find a clever way to allow the castle’s dragons to escape, or maybe even find new homes for them. But… no. They’ve been hired to kill dragons, and that’s what they do. As they haul cartloads of dead dragons to the market for sale, Robert’s only consolation is that they’ve killed them fairly quickly, in contrast to other methods sometimes used at the market. This is the first place where I really felt the narrative taking a darker turn than I’d expected.

Later, we see the flip side of this: larger marauding dragons have destroyed some nearby villages, leaving no survivors. Again, there’s nothing cute or funny about this; we don’t really see graphic violence on the page, but the horror of the resulting scenes of destruction is clear. The narrative is unflinching about the harm dragons and humans can inflict on one another.

One thing I really appreciated about this book was the respect it has for (nearly) all the characters. No one is just there for comic relief, even when it would be very easy to fall into that mode. It could have been a big joke that, say, Ostvald and Elfrieda don’t know how to behave properly in the palace, or that Cerise and Reginald are pampered royalty who don’t know how to fight dragons, but it never is. Everyone is doing their best and comes off as genuinely heroic in their own way.

This is particularly impressive in Reginald’s case, because
( minor spoilers )

Then there’s a somewhat comical chain of unrequited attraction, in which Ostvald has a crush on Elfrieda, who in turn has a crush on Robert, who in turn has a crush on Cerise, who in turn has a crush on Reginald, who in turn… doesn’t appear to have any romantic interest in anyone. Again, this would potentially be a place for some characters to make fools of themselves, but everyone pretty much gets to maintain their dignity.

( minor spoilers regarding romantic pairings )


More thoughts on dragons require some detail about the ending:
( major spoilers )

Anyway: I found this an enjoyable book, and a worthy addition to the field of dragon literature, although I don't think any of the dragons here are going to become nominees for my "favorite dragons" list.

And now, a word from our sponsor: The title of this post irresistibly suggested itself to me based on the title of I’m Afraid You’ve Got Dragons and the connections I wanted to make with other dragonish books. However, it is also unavoidably making me think of these “We’ve got crab legs” commercials from the 80’s. I had thought they were commercials for Red Lobster, but apparently they’re advertising someplace called Sea Galley, which I don’t even remember being aware of as a restaurant that existed, let alone eating there. Nevertheless the song and visual image from the last part of this ad are indelibly seared into my memory. So… it’s either an incredibly effective commercial, or an incredibly ineffective one, depending upon one’s interpretation.