Hi, my name is Dr. Caroline Batten, I'm here for the Oxford Fantasy podcast, and my honoured guest today is Dr. Megan Cavell, who's a lecturer in mediaeval English at the University of Birmingham. And we are chatting about fantastic beasts. Hi, Meghan. Hi. I jumped the gun there and said hello too early. There's nothing wrong with that. We're all keen to talk about weird animals, right? Totally. I love fantastic creatures. Don't we all?
So with animals and fantasy, there are loads and loads of authors who sort of make up their own amazing, fantastic creatures. And there are authors who draw on really explicit sources for their creations. I'm thinking The Witcher, for example, where all of the beings are taken from Polish folklore. But there are some fantasy animals that seem to kind of belong to everybody. Right. To be things that we all know about like unicorns and dragons.
And so I guess the first place to start is, in your opinion, what's the history of people making up weird fantasy creatures? Where do you start when you teach this? Where does this all come from? Like, take us through it. That's a hard question, Caroline, that's a big question. Can't we start with what's your favourite fantasy animal? No, I'm kidding. Much better. What is your favourite fantasy animal? Probably unicorns. Yeah. I'm an adult, so I don't really have a favourite anything.
Probably unicorns if pressed, just because I've grown up with The Last Unicorn book and film and then the comic book of it, I'm pretty obsessed with that whole series. But anyway, it's a really good question, the history of it. So I tend to start when I'm teaching, I start with classical studies and classical sources. So I usually start with Pliny the Elder's Natural History, which is a Latin text from the first century.
But of course, he's drawing on a lot of material that's already in circulation, not just in Latin or in Greek, but in all sorts of different languages and folklores. So we've got Jewish tales. He's got Egyptian, Indian material in there and then also Greek and Latin stuff. So it's kind of like he's a bit of a magpie and a collector and he just brings together all these different sources.
Sometimes he's good at telling you who his source is or where it's come from, and sometimes he just plops it in there, but usually I start with Pliny because he's good for all types of animals, real and not real. And sometimes he has strong opinions about the mythical ones and sometimes he just works them in as though they are actual animals that you can just kind of go and see at the zoo, if zoos existed then, which I suspect they did not. Maybe a menagerie.
So I start with that. But there's so much more that you could do. I mean, you could go further back. You could go to other countries, you could go to ancient Egypt, you could go back to Mesopotamian stuff if you're interested in archaeology especially. But I usually start with Pliny and then I kind of trace him forward.
I guess I start with him partly because he's so heavily drawn on in the mediaeval period, which is my area of research, and in mediaeval bestiaries, which take him, or they take people who've taken his material like Isidore of Seville, and they use that as the core for a lot of bestiary entries. Yeah, so what kind of fantastic animals do we get in Pliny? Oh, all sorts. So there's werewolves. There are dragons, of course.
There are unicorns. And he tells us, well, he tells us about the monoceros, which is sometimes conflated with the unicorn and sometimes not. So he tells us about this one horned creature that's part stag and part horse and I think it had elephant feet in his version. And it's very fierce and hard to catch. And then it's in Isidore of Seville, who's a 7th century historian who was drawing from Pliny in writing his Etymologies. It's in there that Isidore specifically says, the monoceros,
that is, the unicorn. So there's unicorns, basilisks, he's got some good bits on basilisks, So there's a bit of a Harry Potter linkage there, I guess, and loads more. So stuff that we would kind of recognise, like stuff that lasted for a while. Absolutely. These are the kind of big mythical animals. These aren't the made up ones that we get in any modern fantasy texts that are interested in building in new creatures as part of their narrative.
These are the ones, like you say, that belong to everyone and that we get in lots of different cultural contexts. That have a really long history, mythical beasts, basically, rather than just fantastic beasts. What's the distinction of being mythical and fantastic beasts? Well, I just made up the difference.
But mythical beasts, really, would be ones that appear in myths, so that we have in ancient texts, and fantastic beasts would be in whatever fantasy text you're reading, any creatures that are supernatural and made up, but that can encompass mythical creatures. So there will be some recognisable ones. But just to take a Harry Potter example, there's also going to be like the erumpent, which is a Rowling-created creature, not a mythical creature like the unicorn or dragon.
There's room for all sorts of different types of imagination and fictionalising in fantasy texts. Yeah, absolutely. So you also mentioned about mediaeval bestiaries that drew on Pliny and on Isidore. What's a bestiary? OK, so bestiaries are great.
If you are listening to this podcast while you are out for a walk, which is what I usually do when I'm walking, I listen to podcasts, You're going to have to go home immediately, go to any website like Bestiary.ca, or go to the Aberdeen Bestiary website and just look at the pictures of animals because bestiaries are the best thing in the world.
So it's a tradition in the 12th and 13th century. It does extend beyond that, but that's kind of when it's at its most popular, of collections of animals. So real and fantastic animals, also plants and stones, all brought together into one collection. And then you'll have a bit of text about them. You'll have a religious allegory about them, and you'll have their image, a painting or drawing or whatever.
And it starts off using Pliny, using Isidore of Seville, and using an anonymous text called the Physiologus, which is descriptions of animals with a Christian allegory gloss. It uses those as the core texts, and then people just get really excited about it and they start adding it loads and loads more material. So you get longer and longer bestiaries. So you've got about 50 animals in the Physiologus.
By the end of this tradition, you've got bestiaries with one hundred and fifty animals. And they've got, not just sort of, not the foreign wildlife that's in the Physiologus, but you know, there's sheep in them and there's other made-up animals like the bonnacon, which shoots acidic poo at people who are trying to hunt it. What? Have you not heard of the bonnacon? I mean, never clearly we should write some new books to encompass this creature and its acid poo. The bonnacon is basically
an ox, but it has curving-in horns. So that's not a very useful defence mechanism. As a result, they have developed another defence mechanism, which is that it can shoot acid poo about a mile. Well, there's different accounts, different lengths, but there's lots of great images. So if you go, listeners, go and Google bonnacon, B O N N A C O N, and go to the images and you will see so many amazing hunters trying to stab bonnacons and just being sprayed with face-fulls of acid poo.
I love mediaeval literature and art. But where does this stuff come from? Like how how do people come up with this? I don't know about the bonnacon and I, I haven't spent that much time with it. But what I will say is that there's no accompanying allegory for this. So for a lot of the animals, most of the animals, there is an allegorical reason to include them, and there is not for this, which means I can only assume it's included for its humour value.
You don't need to make up a highfalutin rationale for including a poo ox. It's just funny. Yeah, it makes me think of the Exeter Book riddles, where you have some very sort of high flying riddles about like, oh, the divine storm brought to the Earth by God, and creation, and gospel books. And then you've also got the onion riddle, which is about genitalia just for the purpose of being funny and fun and life affirming.
Absolutely. But that's the nice thing about collections of material of which – the riddles are collections of very different types of material or written in the same way. But also bestiaries are different collections of material. And it's this kind of attempt to get all of creation, and that includes the high and the low. That includes the the unicorn, which is a symbol for Christ, or the Phoenix, another symbol for God, as well as the bonnacon, which is a poo ox.
Yeah. So so the original purpose of these bestiaries was to use animals for allegory.
Yeah. So bestiaries were probably first produced in monasteries or monastic contexts, so for monks, but then they become luxury objects and whether they're being produced newly or being existing ones are being sold in a secular context - ish, well, As far as there is a secular context in the Middle Ages, there are non-religious people that are aristocrats buying them and keeping them and using them, generally quite pious ones. So, yeah, they're being used for moral edification.
They're good for you to learn through animals, to learn through fantastic creatures, to learn through the plants that are in them. You look at the image, you read the basic description, then you read the allegory and you put together, basically you understand the order of the world around you, the order of creation, according to the Christian context in which these were written and drawn. So fantastic beasts are part of the way that the world is made in God's image.
Right. These are evidence of how great the Christian God is because he's made all these wonders, right? Absolutely. Yeah. And there's no differentiation at this point between mythical and real. I mean, the original texts that the bestiaries are drawing on are from the Mediterranean, from North Africa, from not the places that the bestiaries are being produced in northern Europe.
So there is an element of maybe they just didn't know these weren't real animals that they're including, because they're very far away from their sources. But equally, there's also room for the imagination and creativity. But these mythical animals appear in the Bible, and that's the ultimate reason that they can be drawn into the bestiary, because there are unicorns, there are dragons in the Bible, and you don't question the legitimacy of the biblical texts if you're Christian in this period.
So, yeah, so they get to be in there alongside animals who they could see walking around right next to them. Like sheep. Like sheep or hedgehogs. There's a really good bestiary hedgehog. Tell me about the bestiary hedgehog. So the hedgehog is said to roll around on fallen fruit and get the fruit all in its spines, which it then takes back to feed its babies with.
Sometimes it's apples, sometimes it's grapes. And so there are lots of excellent hedgehog images where it was just covered in little red fruits on its back and then it goes and it feeds its babies with these. It's like tiny kebabs. Yeah, that's adorable, but surely some of these authors at least would have maybe seen a hedgehog in the wild. Sure. Not with fruit stuck on it. So what's the line between fact and fiction here? I think it didn't matter if it was true.
If you knew it to not be true, it mattered that it was in an authoritative text and it was being passed around in that way and that you could learn a lesson from it. And if you could learn a lesson from it, then who cares if it's real or not? It is much more of a kind of intellectual and religious exercise. So it doesn't matter that you know that hedgehogs don't have fruit on their backs or that dragons don't exist.
What matters is that there's a description of it which you ruminate upon and look at the image and read the allegory and engage with scripture and the allegorical portion and think religiously. So it doesn't matter if it's not real. I mean, people must have known that parts of these weren't real. There are also some cool bits, especially in the bird sections, where there's a lot of natural observation that is clearly going on. So that's interesting to find.
But on the whole, the bestiary tradition is not as scientifically progressive as - there is observation going on in the 12th century. There is a movement of science and agriculture. There are people working in very real and practical ways with the natural world. And that's not what the bestiaries are doing. It's a fairly conservative tradition based in authority. And passing on knowledge. And it's a literary exercise,
then, it sounds like. It's about engaging intellectually with the world and sort of finding deeper meaning in the natural world rather than observing what's going on in the natural world and drawing conclusions from it. Absolutely. It's an intellectual exercise. It's a literary exercise to some extent, and it's about thinking through creation and becoming a better person
as a result. I often think that a lot of children's literature is quite bestiary-like in its pairing of text and image and overt moral instruction. It's much more narrative. We don't tend to just have – well, I was going to say you don't tend to just have collections of descriptions of animals, But really young children's literature is kind of like that. It is like that, yeah. Also, Aslan is not so far off from a bestiary lion, is he?
Yes, definitely. I mean, Lewis is clearly taking the mediaeval lion as Christ and just running away with it. Yeah, so maybe the best way to kind of think about this is to look at some individual creatures and sort of see how they go from bestiary animals to to fantasy. So, maybe we should start with the unicorn. OK. What's the unicorn like in the mediaeval bestiary tradition? What are the earliest unicorns like? You were talking about the monoceros.
So the unicorn is fearsome. It's one of the fearsome beasts, which is not what a modern unicorn is like at all. I like to think of the unicorn as having been domesticated by modern fantasy. The unicorn in the mediaeval tradition, in the classical tradition is this fierce beast that's horse- and stag-like, or one or the other, with a horn on its head. And it is very difficult to catch and it's usually aligned with women.
So a maiden can catch a unicorn. It will come to the maiden and it will lay its head in her lap. And there's lots of complicated stuff about sexuality going on there, the one-horned beast that will lay its head in the maiden's lap. And then she lures it in and then people come and stab it to death. So there's lots of mediaeval images of just horrific hunting scenes as well. And with all these sort of – this nice lady with a nice little unicorn in her lap, no, it's a fearsome beast.
And then all these people attacking it with weapons and quite gory puncture wounds, yeah, it's intense. So that's a mediaeval bestiary unicorn. And then when does it change? I don't know at what point the unicorn becomes a kind of domesticated horse who's just nice in the field or who's sort of hiding in the forest, who is last-unicorn-ing its way across the world to find its companions who have all been captured.
There's something quite gendered going on as well, I think where the movement is away from the fearsome, violent, heavily coded as masculine beast who is attracted to the maiden to the kind of unicorn that's quite feminised and gentle. I'm still thinking of The Last Unicorn. I'm just so obsessed with that book, which is brilliant, and the film, where it becomes a kind of hyper feminised, gentle creature.
And at that point, it's not the same animal as it was in the Middle Ages. I've never seen or read The Last Unicorn. So tell me all about it. Oh Caroline, OK. The first thing that you need to do is go and buy a copy of the book. So it's Peter S. Beagle's book, The Last Unicorn, and it is the story of – well, it is what it says in the title. It is the last unicorn.
So there's a unicorn who finds out just by happenstance that she's the last one of her kind and she thinks this can't possibly be true. I must go and find the other unicorns. And she starts this epic journey, where she meets a wizard and a travelling band of fantastic creatures and this kind of creepy travelling zoo menagerie thing. And she frees all of these – well, she frees all of these creatures who are not actually fantastic creatures. They've been bedazzled to look as though they are.
But there is one other fantastic creature, the harpy, and she apparently kind of the polar opposite of the unicorn in that she's violent and scary. So she frees these animals. She picks up the wizard who's with them, who is also a kind of servant of this nasty witch. And off they go on this journey to find her kin. And in the process, you discover that they've been driven into the ocean by the Red Bull. I don't know what the Red Bull symbolises. Menstruation possibly.
Well, there's a lot going on with time and ageing and the loss of innocence and childhood. And the Red Bull is this kind of beast that's pushing these innocent, sweet creatures away from, you know – yeah, it's kind of, fantasy as the childhood that we must grow out of and that he's driven into the ocean and out of reach. And I don't want to spoil it all. But she does find them. She does recapture her childhood innocence.
She does free the unicorns. Okay, I spoiled it. But there's this great cartoon. 80S, 90s, I don't know when it was made, I watched it as a child. And it's just wonderful and kind of anime, sort of anime style, it's just wonderful. And then there's also a graphic novel of it, which I'm just dying to teach someday because it's brilliant.
Well, that sounds really interesting and it's interesting, isn't it, how we have the sort of, you know, the fearsome beast, the mediaeval unicorn, who, as you say, is masculinised. Right. And is attracted to a maiden and is an allegory for Christ and his death. And then in something like The Last Unicorn, the unicorn's female, the harpy's female, all of this is about a kind of feminised childhood.
I missed the most important part from my description of the book, which is that in order to not be caught by the Red Bull, she is turned into a human woman by this wizard who is not very good at what he's doing and he can't turn her back. And then there's a kind of meditation on, she's now a woman. She's losing her magic. She's lost her innocence entirely. She's sort of just fading away and slowly becoming more and more human and less magical.
And so those kind of play with how you can retain that magic in your life and whether she should turn back into the unicorn because she won't be caught by the Red Bull if she's a human. But is it worth living? Yeah, it's great. It's really deep. Wow. Sounds like a really convoluted allegory about growing up. Totally, but also about time and about our past, because there's all this play with mediaeval knights as hunters of fantastic beasts.
So at one point in her journey, there's this Prince Lír who goes off hunting and killing dragons to bring back as trophies to give to her. And she's just sort of looking on going, I don't want this, why would I want this? And he's like, well, that's what knights do. So it's playing with the kind of mediaeval romance tropes as well.
It's great. But anyway, yes, to get back to your point, she's so heavily feminised that she is depicted as a human woman, as kind of, quite beautiful and waif-like and fully nude, at one point, human woman. It's fully, she's fully feminised, the unicorn. Yeah. Yeah. So what is she like then as a unicorn in the book? The film, the graphic novel. What are unicorns like in this world? Do you mean physically? Physically, also – Emotionally?
Their temperament, I don't know, what's the idea of a unicorn that The Last Unicorn puts forward? So, enigmatic and without the ability to regret. It's quite emphatic in this book that she doesn't, she's not able to regret until she's become a human and then when she's transformed back into a unicorn
she'll have this new ability to regret. But not as a unicorn. She's just this enigmatic creature who's kind of quite confident in the fact that it can't possibly be true that there are no other unicorns in the world and she will go and find them. She's hard and soft at the same time, tough as nails and willing to take on this huge Red Bull. But also, she's this very beautiful white horse that's clearly a kind of metaphor for childhood and the past.
And regret is clearly part of the adult human condition. Yeah. Yeah, totally. Yeah. Yikes. That hits a little close to home. It's so close to home. Right? How dare you. I think that's why I keep going back to it because, yeah, it meant something to me as a child when I first watched it as a film and I couldn't articulate why. But going back and watching it again as an adult, I just get the same kind of feeling of sorrow from it.
It's just beautiful. And reading it as well. It's beautifully written. I always felt the same way about that moment in Peter Pan when Peter comes back for Wendy, but she's a grown woman and she can't go with him to Neverland and she thinks to herself, woman, woman, let go of me. The passage of time is horrible. Truly. Especially during a pandemic. Ugh, tell me about it. But so, OK. So now we're in the sort of 'white horse world' of unicorns.
So the monoceros was not a white horse. I think the colour of the horse is quite, I don't know if that's modern. I don't think the bestiaries focus so much on what it looks like. Apart from that, it's part stag. So there's not, the stag is a tawny colour. It's not mentioned, I don't think. I need to go back and look at all the sources to see if it does come up somewhere. But no, that seems to be kind of part of its domestication, is its change in colour.
I'm determined to see this domestication process. But that seems like that is what's happening, right? And we get those famous tapestries, right, that depict unicorns in woodlands from the 14th century. And those creatures are again, they're meant to approach maidens, right, They come to meet women in the wood, and they're portrayed as these sort of delicate animals. Right. And the unicorn doesn't quite look like a horse. It does look like it's maybe part stag. The hooves are cloven.
The ears don't look quite horse-like, but it's very sort of slender and lovely in a sort of unexpected way. Yeah. That elongated body and very deer-like body. Stag-like body. Absolutely. And that's something that the animation for The Last Unicorn draws on.
It's very kind of, horse slash stag like. But then when you think about unicorns in other pop culture contexts, contemporary contexts, they're often like kind of blocky, horse-like or even pony-like, because they're all over children's clothing and merchandise as these sort of chubby little pony unicorns. And that's just, that process, that movement, is so telling. I think it was domestication. It's a completely different type of animal hybridity.
Interesting, too, isn't it, that once an animal gets feminised in our cultural narrative, then it becomes something for children, it stops being something serious and it becomes something for children and specifically for girls. Yes, I think there's also an element in which sensible adult grown up people don't believe in mythical creatures. So unicorns are for girls and dragons are also not to be believed, but they're ferocious and violent.
So we'll put them for boys. So there we are. Adults don't like to play with either of those because we know the truth. They don't exist and then they're gendered and separated out because there's such an obsession with binary gender in contemporary pop, pop culture, markets and capitalism and selling toys down children's throats. Every aspect of our culture? Yeah. No, absolutely.
And that actually leads us nicely into another magical creature who appears so often in fantasy literature and is, you know, widespread in folklore all over the world, which is of course the dragon. Part of any one of a number of gigantic lizard or serpent traditions that we get everywhere. So where where does the dragon that we get in English language fantasy – you know, fire breathing, scaly, claws, where does that dragon start? Yeah, so I mean, that's coming out of classical texts as well.
Where you've got lots of descriptions of the dragon as the king of the serpents, or the most fearsome of the serpents, the basilisk is often the king of the serpents, but as kind of equated with serpents. And then it kind of develops its wings later, I think. But obviously, we have dragons all over the world in different contexts. I don't know enough about Chinese history and culture, but the dragon fulfils a very different function.
There's a very positive function, in contrast to the kind of fearsome, scary dragon we have in a lot of fantasy lit from the Western world. And that's partly because the dragon, I mean, if the unicorn is a symbol for Christ in the mediaeval bestiary tradition, the dragon is a symbol for the devil. And so it's violent and fierce and fiery, burning hell, and all those bad things are associated with it.
And that's why it's kind of elided with serpents as well, because of the serpent in the Garden of Eden. That's all kind of mashed together. Throw in some wings, focus on the big heavy tail, and the fearsome jaws and fire breathing. And it's just the kind of the epitome of all the bad stuff. Therefore, it's diabolic and it's definitely not feminised. Until, what, Shrek? Maybe before that, but. Shrek, I mean, that's first, like, sexy female dragon I've ever seen in pop culture.
Even that, the point of that is that it's a joke. The point of that is that it's subversive of gender norms, that you think the dragon's male because of course you do. And then it turns out that it's female and therefore not really a threat at all. A love interest, now. And I think that film is playing with those tropes. It's not necessarily propping them up, but it's definitely having a stab at those kinds of power dynamics and social dynamics.
Yeah, the joke, of course, in Shrek, is that we don't think the dragon could possibly be female, there's no chance of it, And then the sort of second part of the joke is that if the dragon's female, she's a terrifying woman. Right. And the fact that she's falling in love with the donkey is like an imminent threat to his well-being. Yeah, absolutely. First of all, if she's female, she must have a love interest because that's the point of women.
Now, we can't possibly have a female character who's not interested in love, although I think the film is playing with that to some extent, resisting it. To some extent. It is in the silliness of that episode, and playing it up so much, is satirising it. But yes, then of course, she's part of this kind of strange animal couple that doesn't belong together and she just becomes this love-soppy servant to him. Yeah, naturally. That's the thing with female monsters, isn't it?
They either have to get tamed and get less monstrous or their femininity makes them even worse monsters. I'm thinking a little bit of the Xenomorph from Alien. OK, yes. And I'm thinking also definitely of It, in Stephen King's IT, where the great revelation of a whole book, what was meant to be the most chilling moment, is when they discover – and the line that King writes is, 'It was female. And It was pregnant.'
Oh. Oh. So this fear of reproduction, that the monster can continue to reproduce itself and that we'll be overrun with monsters because the female body has this ability to reproduce itself. That's really interesting. Oh, I was going to say, I wonder what a baby dragon and donkey combo is.
But of course that happens at the end of Shrek, because just as the woman can't exist as a creature or a character in her own right, she also must fulfil her responsibility and have babies by the end of the story. And they make these really weird, non-threatening dragon donkey hybrids. Yeah, yeah. Such a strange film. It is such a strange film. I can't think too hard about Shrek or it does my head in. But then we have dragons in all sorts of other fantasy texts.
I mean presumably anyone who's listening to this is waiting for us to talk about Game of Thrones. Yes. So let's talk about Game of Thrones. Those dragons are all coded as male, aren't they? I like that we've turned this into a discussion about gender and sexuality, which is exactly the right thing to do with this.
But there's the kind of Mother of Dragons, Daenerys character, who has these – she's trying to, not tame, but, she is aligned with these violent male bodies who do her whims and her bidding, but in a kind of, much more of a Jurassic Park way, you have to respect the animal. The animal is really, the animal has its own wishes, but you can become a kind of, I don't know, keeper of the animals. She's doing this in a motherly capacity. Hmm.
Yeah. Well, then the thing that's sort of Jurassic Park-like especially about George R.R. Martin's dragons, they're not really innovative in terms of the way that the beasts are portrayed. Right. They're big, they're scaly. They breathe fire. They have claws, they're reptiles. It's not deviating too much from other fantasy dragons that we see.
But George is really interested in realpolitik, right? That's his whole thing, is that in the 'real' fantasy world, there are debts and blood and death and assault and your dragons need to eat people to stay alive. And so they are these sort of, they're there in some ways more animalistic than other dragons that we see, because that's what he's interested in, is the sort of, the gritty reality of dealing with a beast.
Yeah, absolutely. That's the only more about Shrek, which is the other humourous angle of the Donkey-Dragon relationship, is that he's a prey animal and she's a carnivore. She's a predator. So that relationship's not going to work on so many different levels. And if that story was played out in Game of Thrones, she would swoop down from the air, burn him up and eat him immediately. And probably the person who was riding him or using him as a pack donkey.
So, yes, absolutely. That kind of focus on the day-to-day, who needs to eat what, how are we going to feed these dragons that are enormous and are eating whole flocks of sheep and the shepherds? That's precisely I mean, you summarised it beautifully, what Martin does that's different to, but also building on a long tradition of other fantasy literature and historical writings.
If we're talking about mothers as well, the idea, Dany says at one point that her dragons are the only children she'll ever have. What's going on there with motherhood and beasts and the way that her story ends in Game of Thrones? Yeah, I mean, not – to focus on the kind of monstrous mother, like you would think that that women must fulfil this role of being a mother.
which she can't do and therefore fills the void, not with as many modern pet keepers do with a cuddly little fluffy thing, but with these vicious creatures, suggests that her maternal instinct has gone wrong somehow. But equally, it's imbued with a huge amount of power. And I don't think it's criticised in the books. It's lauded as a kind of I mean, there are so many monstrous mothers in that book. Cersei is such a great example. It really moves away from the norms of genteel motherhood.
It's questioning all of those kinds of normalised gender tropes, and it's doing that with her, too. But this kind of hybridity and monstrosity involved in being the Mother of Dragons, gives her power. I don't think it's a criticism of her. I really wish the show ended with the episode before it ended and she had just burned everyone. I don't hate that as an alternative ending to Game of Thrones. And also not died.
I think it's such a copout that her male lover has to kill her in the end, because that's – there's so much that's subversive about the way relationships are played out. And that still seems to be back to our old tropes of male violence and female, well, femicide, the murder of women. I know that she did a bad thing in burning everyone up. But wouldn't that be the kind of – as a post capitalist dream, we just burn the world down? I think that would be quite fun as a fiction, not reality,
just for the record. I mean, for the record, we are not advocating the burning of the world, but there is a sense almost in which the burning of everything would be a fitting end to Game of Thrones, this sense that there's rot in the system that we can't actually properly eradicate and that Targaryen power as exemplified by the dragon, right, is power,
but it's also fire and blood. So do you think when Daenerys sics her dragons on people who are her opponents, she is a kind of, she's metaphorically consuming them, through her children's literal consumption of them? I mean, she's a colonial figure. She is a colonial figure. And what's really interesting is that the only person we see her dragons eat in the show is a child in Meereen.
I think that is probably sort of an appropriate symbol of how Daenerys as the mother and the saviour in Meereen has actually not saved the city from anything at all. When we think about colonialism and when we think about the way that some people exert cultural hegemony over others. This is like – it's such a precise and awful and bloody metaphor for that kind of violence. Certainly that's something that the show never really grappled with in a suitable way.
The colonialism of its own casting decisions was also a problem in its – its racial dynamics were deeply problematic. But I think it did at least turn her from the white saviour into a kind of violent colonialist that she clearly was always on the path to become. So that's one little check for her. But her violence is only really condemned by the show when it's wreaked against the white people of King's Landing. Yes. Yes.
I wondered if we were going to bring the dragon round to Old Norse because I was thinking when you were talking about eating hearts, I was thinking about various Old Norse figures who can talk to dragons or who eat bits of creatures and get to understand their speech and things like that. Well, I mean, yeah, let's – so we've had our sort of animal dragons, right.
Our sort of Jurassic Park bestial dragons. And then we've got the other tradition that comes down to us through Tolkien of the clever dragon. Right, the talking dragon, and that comes from Old Norse stuff and in part from Beowulf as well. Völsunga saga has a really fascinating dragon. And because Tolkien liked this dragon so much, so much of our sword and sorcery dragons descend from this Old Norse ideal because Tolkien was so into it. Right.
So the ah, the idea that dragons hoard gold, that dragons sit on, that they like gold, that they sit on it and they don't let other people have it. And if you take something from it, the dragon will lay waste to the countryside. That comes from Beowulf, where Beowulf, the aged king, is confronted with this dragon who wreaks havoc on Geatland when a slave steals a cup from his hoard, which is what Bilbo does in The Hobbit, incidentally. So this idea of the dragon as a symbol of greed, right?
The dragon as a symbol of using gold the wrong way, not using it to give to your followers and make social bonds and give rewards and bring everybody together. But sitting on the gold for your own purposes, that's a mediaeval dragon ideal. And the dragon that we get in Völsunga saga is like that, too. He's called Fafnir and he used to be a person of some kind.
He becomes so obsessed with a hoard of gold that his father has, that he kills his father and then he goes and he sits on the gold, he sits with it. And the suggestion is that he turns into a dragon because he's so gold obsessed that it sort of transforms him into this creature and his other brother, Reginn, gets the hero, Sigurdr, to kill Fafnir for him. And so Sigurdr gets himself into a hole with his sword and he waits until the dragon crawls over him, belly to the ground,
and then he stabs up into it. And so that's also where we get this idea that the dragon's belly is a weak spot, right. That it's this armoured lizard except for its underbelly. And when, as Fafnir is dying, he speaks to Sigurdr and he tries to get him to say his name. And Sigurdr doesn't. He sort of talks very cleverly. He talks in riddles. He doesn't want Fafnir to know his name. And Fafnir tries to warn him about trusting Reginn. He tries to drive a wedge there and it doesn't really work.
And then he dies. And Sigurdr is roasting the heart of the dragon for Reginn, who wants to eat it. And he touches it with his finger and he burns himself. And so he puts his finger in his mouth and he gets some of the dragon blood in his mouth. And that allows him to understand birds. And he hears these two birds talking, saying that Reginn is planning to betray Sigurdr and kill him and take the whole hoard for himself. And so Sigurdr kills Reginn instead.
So this sort of clever, crafty talking dragon who is all about making you doubt, right, poking holes in your ideals, trying to get to you. We get that from Fafnir. So dragons are very long lasting, I think, because of the sort of potency of this symbolism.
Right. That if it's everything evil, everything dangerous, all wrapped up into one creature, then you can have a sort of bestial evil or you can have a very clever intelligent evil that's sort of reminiscent of the mediaeval tradition of the way that the devil kind of, you know, reels you in a little bit. Right. Yeah. And hence that riddling speech, which is interesting considering we brought up riddles before.
But that riddling talk, that deceptive talk that you can't quite get a handle on couldn't be more different from the context of Old English and Latin riddles being written around the same time where they're being used to reflect on spiritual issues or on their intellectual exercises. They're not there to deceive, but at the same time, they can lead you down the wrong route. If you sold the onion as a penis instead of an onion, then that's you being a bit naughty.
Not the riddle, it's not the riddles fault. But you have that kind of deceptive sliding language of riddling, which we see in these texts. Funny how that comes back around. I mean, arguably in The Last Unicorn, we have some kind of riddling areas where she's trying to figure out where these other unicorns are and she talks to a butterfly. And the butterfly seems to speak in riddles and in snippets of different pop cultural contexts.
And she just wants a straight answer, and he sort of brings out an etymology or a bit of a song or all these different things. And she's frustrated by this. And he's a flying creature, too. So bird like. Dragon like. Well, and animals talking in riddling speech is something that we get a lot. The Sphinx is our sort of original nonhuman animal that speaks in a riddle.
I mean, even like the Cheshire Cat in Alice in Wonderland sort of talks in the way that everybody talks in Wonderland, which is a little bit upside-down, it seems to mean something, but then it doesn't quite. Now there's sort of, there's a way in which animals can kind of embody the dangerous potential of speech, right, because it's not human and so it's one step removed from us, we can sort of look at the dangerous possibilities of lying, of deceiving, of manipulation.
Yeah, absolutely. So to kind of wrap up our discussion. Speaking about people and animals and the difference between them, it might be good to talk a little bit about some of the sort of human animal hybrid type creatures that we get in fantasy texts. And I wonder if maybe mermaids and sirens would be good. Well there's your power of speech, absolutely. The dangers of speech. Good segue. So tell me about mermaids. Okay, so, mermaids. But I mean, this is, insofar as, well.
OK, I was going to say, insofar as humans can be domesticated, but of course we've domesticated ourselves. They, the mermaid over time has become the kind of soft and comfortable creature who is not at all like her original form, because initially we don't have mermaids, we have sirens, and we have these in classical literature. We have these in natural histories from that period, although clearly evoked as a metaphor when they appear in natural histories, they're not painted as real.
They're described as a metaphor. And the sirens are these women who are half woman, half either fish or bird. They actually start off as bird women and become fish women and they lure men with their beautiful singing to their deaths in the ocean. So we have them as birds initially. And then we have some really cool bestiaries where it describes them as fish women, but shows them as bird women or vice versa.
Or sometimes both. Does it have both? I don't remember. But then they become very clearly associated with fish only. But it's that singing element that associates them with birds who are known for their melodious voices, and then they become half fish, half woman and lure sailors to their doom. We have a good example. In the 13th century Middle English version of the Physiologus, which is quite a pretty version, beautifully versified.
Its poetics are really nice. And there's a mermaid in that who lures men to their death. But then over time, we jump and we get The Little Mermaid film, which is also very interested in the power of the voice and song in a way that I hadn't really thought about until I studied mediaeval literature. But she's a siren as well. Her voice lures the prince and then her voice is appropriated and that lures the prince and dazzles him and almost leads to his doom until she gets her voice back.
So that's really quite cool, playing with that. Yeah. My favourite character in The Little Mermaid has always been Ursula. Yeah, she's great. Talk about hybridity. She's brilliant. Well, and that's the thing. And she is more hybrid than the mermaids. Right. Who have sort of a full human form attached to a tail. They're sort of, there's the human bit and then there's the fish bit. With Ursula, her sort of octopus body is also her sexy dress.
Yes. It kind of merges in a way that the other bodies don't. And her purple skin. And her body's different from the other bodies in the film because it's big, right? She's fat, she's curvaceous. And that first scene when she drapes herself over a rock and says that she's wasted away into practically nothing. Yeah, yeah. And she's purple throughout her body. So that's bringing the animal through.
And I don't know if this is true or not, but I heard read that her character was based off the famous drag queen Divine. So there's another element of of complicating gender and sexuality going on there as well. And she's fabulous. I think about this connexion a lot because I love Divine, who was an amazing drag queen. The star of all of John Waters' most famous and provocative films.
And Divine would paint herself with this incredible face, with these hugely arched, pencil thin eyebrows, big red lips and a beauty spot exactly the way Ursula has, and Divine sort of embodied this incredible kind of gender play. Right. Of femininity that was not meant to be pretty. That was not meant to be nice, but that was meant to be looked at and that was meant to be sexual and that was meant to take up space.
Ursula takes up space. As we're talking about dragons, Maleficent in Sleeping Beauty. Right. For the sort of big boss fight. She turns into a dragon, she becomes a dragon for the prince to slay, to sort of make it easier that he kills her. She doesn't go out to face him as a woman. She becomes an animal so that he can kill her. Ursula for the final boss battle is herself.
Just gigantic. Huge. Yeah. Taking up all of this space as this sort of, human animal hybrid with her incredible tentacles, and so, again, what's frightening is suspect femininity. And the huge amount of power that she has in becoming enormous and in taking up space is also her downfall because the ship is weaponized and can plunge into her heart and kill her, whereas if she'd been very small, that would've been quite difficult to do. So her power is what leads to her death.
But isn't it kind of cool that's in such a mainstream text, we have a famous drag artist appearing? All Disney villains are queer-coded. Oh, wow. Yes, OK. I immediately thought of Scar from The Lion King, absolutely queer-coded. And then and also his interest in kind of moving between different communities is subversive. And why would he want to go and live with hyaenas?
There's something going on there with an interest in keeping the nation pure, which is really disturbing, actually really disturbing. We have loads of villains like Scar and like Jafar in Disney who fall into the trope of the sissy villain. Yeah, right. So the hero has brawn and the villain has brains, right. The villain is clever and he speaks very articulately and sort of in a kind of snakelike way. Riddles, he speaks in riddles. Manipulative, like a dragon, like Fafnir.
And so the sissy villain is really convenient for Disney because he doesn't engage in brutish violence of the sort that would scare children, but also because the sissy villain, the natural enemy to the heterosexual love story that Disney is so invested in is the disaffected queer person. Yeah. Yeah. And that kind of, the lack of interest in reproduction. There's lots of really good queer theory on queerness as death, as a death drive.
That's the term. The death drive. Yes. Because there's no interest in reproducing in a heteronormative way. The only end result, then, can be death, which is theoretically very interesting, obviously not true. But from a theoretical perspective, they all, all those characters, embody that death drive, don't they? Yeah, and a desire to dismantle social structures and desire to concentrate power in themselves and a desire to prevent heterosexual union.
Right. That's sort of their main job is to get in the way of the hero and the heroine. And in The Lion King, that results in a barren landscape that can't sustain itself. It results in death for everyone. I think it's really telling that if you want to talk about animals in fantasy and in literature, what you end up talking about is people, and who gets to be a person and who is aligned with the monstrous. Yeah, well, that's a question of hybridity, isn't it?
We talked, we said we were going to talk about mermaids because of these creatures who are part human, part not human. And the discomfort of what you do with those bodies, what you do with the fish that can talk and has opinions and has a powerful voice or what you do with a centaur who's a powerful horse, an educator in classical context, but also violent and can attack you with weapons.
All these hybrid bodies are our anxiety provoking and uncomfortable, and they're often aligned with other kinds of cultural anxieties and social anxieties in really interesting ways.
And you really put your finger on it. So much of fantasy creatures is about troubling the- they're scary because they trouble the boundaries between things and something that is a hybrid human creature troubles our idea of what is human, how we define ourselves as humans, where do we start and stop, what makes us different from animals and mediaeval people had very fixed theological ideas about what distinguishes us from animals. But that's, we're still flesh and blood, right?
We still live on the planet. We still need to eat food. And we are part of and apart from the natural world. And so it's troubling when those boundaries get get crossed and it's dangerous. Right. What's out there in the sea? Maybe it's a siren, who will lure you to your death. Yes. The fear of the unknown and all of these things brought together, which are then complicated even more when evolutionary thinking becomes the dominant narrative instead of theological thinking.
And then that's when people start putting these, start policing these boundaries in really problematic ways with cultures they encounter in other contexts. And then you see dehumanisation and you see horrific, violent, racist thinking coming through as well, which we should always interrogate when we when we think about these texts.
If you think about the power dynamics of what's going on with policing the boundaries in human-animal relationships, we also have to think about human-human relationships and where dehumanising other people have benefited people who already have an enormous amount of privilege and wealth and power. That's gone down quite dark and pedagogical route,
but it's really important to think about. Yeah, and animal studies as a field, a field I'm really interested in, is just now realising that you can't talk about animality without talking about race and cultural constructions of otherness. Because it's always the question of who deserves to be a person. Yeah, absolutely.