Robin McKinley's Dragonhaven

To my great joy, Robin McKinley's new novel Dragonhaven is in paperback and affordable; McKinley, author of Beauty, Spindle's End, and Sunshine, is one of the most skilled and crafty writers of fantasy on the market...and one of our finest retellers of fairy tales. If I were at home and had a copy of her Spindle's End handy, I would type in the first paragraph from it and you could see what I mean. I will have to do so later. In this post, though, I am celebrating my chance to read Dragonhaven, with the promise of a review when I have finished. Here is a bit of the back cover copy:

Jake lives with his scientist father at the Makepeace Institute of Integrated Dragon Studies in Smokehill National Park--home to about two hundred of the remaining Draco australiensis, which is extinct in the wild. But dragon conservation is controversial. Detractors say dragons are much too dangerous and should be destroyed. Supporters say there is no record of them doing anything more threatening than eating sheep and they must be protected.

Just when I thought it would be a while yet before another Anne McCaffrey or Elizabeth Kerner appeared on the scene to give us an altogether fresh take on the dragon, here is this book with its marvelous premise. Bless the finders of new ideas, of new directions for old tales. Whether this novel turns out to be ecological fable or epic tale or both or something different entirely, I am delighted to pluck it from the shelf and turn to the first page.

If you have read McKinley's novel (I am coming a bit late to it after all) and have a thought or two, post a comment here....

Lightning's lover

My wife has given me to read Dragon Champion, a novel by E.E. Knight, and now, a few chapters in, I have come across a stray phrase that struck with its evocative beauty:

Lightning will light up a place she wants her lover Thunder to visit.

A mother dragon is telling her hatchling of the beauties of the world above their winter cave. Now, having heard the dragon's words, I don't think that I will ever look at lightning quite the same way again.

A Dragon's Story (Online Novel)

Dear readers, Chapter 1 of our fiction editor Andrew Hallam's online novel/editor bio is now up at Dante's Heart: A Journal of Myth, Fairytale, Folklore, and Fantasy. Those of you who have been with us for a while know that our editor bios are unusual. They may take the form of a myth or a poem or (in this case) a novel. In any case, they are serialized - they come in installments. Come enjoy the Prologue and Chapter 1 of Andrew's story, drop us a line at editors@dantesheart.com to let us know what you thought of it or to suggest a title for the novel, and watch for Chapter 2, which is coming soon!

Here are the first few sentences of Andrew's tale of wit, misadventure, and panache, to whet your appetite:

At last measure, Andrew's wingspan exceeded forty-five feet. He only emerged from his chrysalis about four weeks ago, but he is already beginning to grow white feathers....

"Their Mother Was a Fay..."

It has been a little while since very many people read Spenser, but The Faerie Queene is worth a second look. Spenser's poetry is unique in its enchantment and in the raw and visceral force of many of its images. For enchantment, consider this passage:

Their Mother was a Fay, and had the skill
Of secret things, and all the powers of nature
Which she by art could use unto her will,
And to her service bind each living creature....

Though I have no longing for power to bind living creatures, yet ah, for the skill of secret things! That is every scholar's wish and the wish of half the poets too.

Here is a passage for a raw and visceral velocity of sound and image (read this aloud, and you will see what I mean), one of my favorite passages on Dragons. The scaly beast has just been wounded, in battle with the Red Cross Knight:

For grief thereof, and devilish despite,
From his infernal furnace forth he threw
Huge flames, that dimmed all the heavens' light,
Enrolled in duskish smoke and brimstone blue;
As burning Aetna from his boiling stew
Doth belch out flames, and rocks in pieces broke,
And ragged ribs of mountains molten new,
Enwrapped in coalblack clouds and filthy smoke,
That all the land with stench, and heaven with horror choke.

Aetna, it is worth knowing, is the volcano that the Greeks named: "I burn."

If you haven't read Spenser in a while, look for a copy! Like every great writer of fairy tales and fantasies, he reminds us that the world in which we walk is full of hidden wonders and hidden monsters, even in the mundanity of our daily lives: he demands that we peer below the surface of our choices and our encounters. He demands - in the first lines spoken in The Faerie Queene - that we "be well aware." These are beautiful and perilous lives we live.

Dragon on a Leaf: Mystery Solved!

Dear readers,

We have at last reached the end of one quest and have determined the identity of this piece, Autumn Gold, for which we have been searching since May:


The work is by Ursula Vernon; the owner of Amthrax's Lair was able to offer us this tip, and we have since contacted Ursula and confirmed it. You can visit Ursula Vernon's site, Metal and Magic, to see more of her work:

Sea Hag

Ursula Vernon is a freelance illustrator in the American South. When contacted about Autumn Gold, she remembered the piece with delight - it is a very old piece - and told us that she still has the tube of gold paint used to set the dragon infant on its leaf: "you never use that much gold." Her work ranges from the eerily beautiful to the decidedly odd, and you have probably come across some of it before. She has a knack for evoking wonder, though not always comfortable wonder:

Portrait of the Artist with a Crow in her Ribcage



Pregnant Mandrake

(Think John Donne: "Go and catch a falling star/Get with child a mandrake root...")


Woman with Bird Skull

Catch more of Ursula Vernon's work at her site. Her enthusiasm and vivacity for both art and life are terribly contagious ("Divorced, moved, moved back, kicked down, knocked around--but I'm ALIVE! And being an artist, being alive means that there's art!"), and as an artist she is relentlessly prolific. You can find dozens of intriguing works at her site, and somewhere over 600 if you look her up on deviantart (as ursulav). Well worth exploring her work. Those lines of text inscribed into the self-portrait, together with the whiteness of the crow, have me longing to meditate at length on that particular piece....

Dragon on a Leaf: Update!

A few of you who have been readers of this blog from the beginning may remember that in May we posted an inquiry about a painting of a baby dragon on a red leaf, asking if anyone had seen it or knew its title or artist. Today we received an e-mail from Rachel Schneider (many thanks!), who located a digital copy of the painting in the art collection called Amthrax's Lair on the University of Utah web server:


The painting is entitled Autumn, although the identity of the artist remains to us a mystery. Please comment or e-mail our editors if you know of the artist. In any case, here is the painting and now you can see why our chief editor loves it so much. It is like a haiku in watercolor, and so evocative of the small, accidental wonders we discover if we don't hurry too fast through the woods.

Ciruelo 2008

Ciruelo's 2008 dragons calendar is available - take a look! The art is of uneven quality, but afew paintings are so breathtaking that one would have to be mad to miss out on them. Only Michael Whelan is a match for white dragons!

I seem to be on a dragons kick of late. Does anyone remember Patricia A. McKillip's Forgotten Beasts of Eld? The book appears to have become as forgotten as the magical beasts it celebrates; I have been blessed enough to know a medievalist who remembers it. These days you are only likely to find this book in the young adult section of the bookstore, though it may be a rare young adult who will enjoy it. But ah! what a book. I remember the dragon, Gyld: The great wings unfurled, black against the stars. The huge bulk lifted slowly, incredibly, away from the cold earth, through the wind-torn, whispering trees.

When the sorceress whom the dragon obeys consents to leave her mountain fastness for the sake of love, she and her beau try to figure out where to put the dragon. We can store it in the wine cellar, her beloved remarks cheerfully.

That poor, cramped behemoth with its wings tight around it, sleeping in the dark in the scent of wine.

Another book worth reading - this one more recent - Elizabeth Kerner's Song in the Silence, now a complete trilogy. I must warn you that to read Kerner's novel(s) you must be in the mood for a very starry-eyed romance, but the books are alive with a vibrant and desperate poetry, and a deep humanity. The dragons are truly both new and ancient to the reader, and desperately memorable. There is one scene in which Lanen, the woman who heroes her way dauntlessly through the novel, midwifes a dragon through a breach birth, though the heat of the dragon mother sears her arms almost to the bone. Kerner's imagination is both raw and elegant.

Fairy Tale Statues, Part II

In one of my earliest posts on this blog, I said that I was undertaking to collect a list of fairy tale/mythic/fantastic statues around the world. Here is another for the list - from the Forbidden City. Isn't it startling! A dragon in a turtle shell: I have not seen an image of the Asian lung portrayed so before, though, admittedly, I have also not been to the Far East, and it may be that this creature is more common than I would guess. To my western myopia, this dragon is majestic; the sculpture suggests both the sacred and the otherworldly, and there is also a tremendous vitality in the arching of the dragon's neck and the poise of its toes: this statue does seem very much as though it might start breathing and walking, without warning: moving with surprisingly swiftness across the courtyard, like a komodo across an open field. It is like the stone-turned people in the Witch's Castle in Narnia - a puff of breath, and they swing into motion. Now that I have shamefully exoticized this particular figure, I bow my head. I hope my astonishment gives no offense. I long to know more about the context for this sculpture: comment if you know. Certainly dragons carry tremendous and ancestral importance in China, but what is the particular and unique story behind this one?

I am fascinated by that shell....

A fresh poem on the dragon

A few lines from "Beknighted" by Jennifer Jerome, published this summer by Goblin Fruit:

I wait for you. Your bright foil
flames in the sun. Ancient scales
glitter in this dark cave; I hold
fire in my belly, long tail
coiled around my body to keep
the heat until you come....

Please visit the journal Goblin Fruit for the full poem - it is sweetly brief, and the last two lines are profound, which is something one says these days more often of speeches or of Academy Award-nominated films than of poems. Not since Beowulf have I felt so freshly introduced to a dragon. The slow pondering watchfulness (yet eagerness!) of the dragon on its hoard, as the fire builds in its body; the sun burning on the armor of the approaching knight.... Not that we haven't heard tales before from the dragon's perspective, but there is something vital and very true about this one. Sung from the wyrm to the knight, the poem is almost a love song, or almost a hunger song: perhaps those two are not always different. I love the first line: I wait for you.

Fairy Tale Statues

I am interested in collecting a list of statues around the world depicting fairy tales. Besides the famous examples (Peter Pan in Kensington Gardens), here are some our editors have stumbled upon nearly or certainly by accident - to the left, the Troll under the bridge in Seattle. This one is an especial wonder to me, as I grew up on a small farm near Seattle - and my family did raise a number of billy goats gruff.

More wonders of wood and stone from Washington state: small families of Scandinavian trolls can be seen standing, brilliantly painted and four feet tall, by the streets in Poulsbo; someone on Hood Canal long since collected enough driftwood of the right shape to create a dragon or dragon-like sea serpent on a narrow spit of land, so that from a distance its coils appear to be rising from the water.


Are there other fairy tales in stone or wood or metal around America? Someone on our continent needs to make a project of creating something like the Sacro Bosco in Italy, which Vicino Orsini established in the sixteenth century.

The Sacred Wood is a garden-forest populated with fabulous creatures, some of them peering out from behind branches or small shrubs, many of them now clothed in moss or lichens -- a labyrinth garden where the lost might wander and wonder. You might sit in what appears a safe spot for a long hour before looking up to realize there is a stone dragon watching you through the branches.

Help us collect such sites.... Where have we made to carve fairy tales into the actual landscape on which we breathe and walk?

Dragon on a Leaf

Some time back I stumbled across a painting on the Web depicting a red autumn leaf with an infant and extremely tiny dragon curled up in sleep on the leaf. The painting was beautiful, and (for me) captured something essential about the experience of wonder (finding, almost by accident, a dragon infant smaller than a thumbnail asleep among the leaves in fall: the painting is a haiku in color) - but for all of my quests on google, I am unable to learn the name of the painting or the artist, or find it again.

Maybe someone can help! Post a comment if the description of the painting sounds familiar.

Even if we don't find the painting, perhaps this post will spark a conversation on the evocation of wonder through small scenes, small details, small gestures toward the fantastic in art. No need to paint a Balrog in flames to produce awe....

Daniel