Dragons/Serpent

Text: Yvain   

    

The Medieval Bestiary on dragons    

" The dragon's strength is found in its tail, not in its teeth. Its lashing tail does great harm, and the dragon kills anything it catches in its coils. The dragon is the enemy of the elephant, and hides near paths where elephants walk so that it can catch them with its tail and kill them by suffocation. It is because of the threat of the dragon that elephants give birth in the water. The dragon's venom is harmless. The dragon has a crest and a small mouth. When the dragon is drawn from its hole into the air, it stirs up the air and makes it shine."   

Literary Context   

"For a treacherous and venomous creature deserves to be harmed. Now the serpent is poisonous, and fire bursts forth from its mouth -- so full of wickedness is the creature. So my lord Yvain decides that he will kill the serpent first."  

"With his sword, which cuts so clean, he attacks the wicked serpent, first cleaving him through to the earth and cutting him in two, then continuing his blows until he reduces him to tiny bits."

"He cleaned his sword of the serpent's poison and filth; then he replaced it in its scabbard"     

Yvain refers to the creature here as a serpent, which the bestiary uses as a larger categorical term. It is likely that the serpentine creature we encounter in the text is a dragon because it breathes fire. The text makes it clear how reviled dragons are, and that gratuitous violence is a deserved fate for these beasts. Some of the information given by the bestiary is in direct opposition to the text -namely the bit about venom being harmless (which to me sounds contradictory in and of itself) which serves as an example that because bestiaries are literature and a product of human storytelling, there will be discrepancies in accounts (especially in mythical characters) and that authors were not necessarily working from one official bestiary -if they even researched bestiaries at all -that is why this projects focuses on overarching traditions rather than factual minutiae. That said, all three mediums presented here acknowledge dragons as extremely dangerous.   

Modern Representation   

The trio from Harry Potter ride a dragon; Harry didn't so much fight a dragon, as he did confuse it to steal a golden egg. Dragons are not largely imbued with morality in this medium; they are not seen as good or bad per se, but merely extremely dangerous beasts.