Monsters, Dragons & Fairies by Rozan Yunos

Two thousand years of legend and lore about the menace and majesty of dragons, which have breathed fire into our imaginations from ancient Rome to 'Game of Thrones' Buy The Penguin Book of Dragons (Penguin Classics) As historian Scott Bruce, editor of the newly released Penguin Book of Dragons, explains, dragons in the medieval mindset stood “as the enemies of humankind, against which we measure the prowess of our heroes.” As such, they were neatly and easily folded into Christian tradition, “often cast … as agents of the devil or demons in disguise.” But dragons held a special place in both the modern imagination and the medieval one. Medieval people told tales about all kinds of monsters, including ghosts, werewolves and women who turned into serpents on Saturdays. In the European Middle Ages, monster stories served as religious teaching tools, offering examples of what not to do, manifestations of the threats posed by the supernatural and the diabolical, and metaphors for the evil humans do to one another. Though horror today is most often about entertainment-the thrill of the jump scare or the suspense of the thriller-it hasn’t always been that way. Dragons and other monsters, nights dark and full of terror, lurked largely in the domain of stories-tales, filtered through the intervening centuries and our own interests, that remain with us today.Īs Halloween approaches, we’re naturally thinking about scary stories. These are images long associated with the European Middle Ages, yet most (all) medieval people went their whole lives without meeting even a single winged, fire-breathing behemoth.

The gallant knight charging to rescue the maiden from the scaly beast.

Monsters, Dragons & Fairies by Rozan Yunos