The Flight of Dragons might remind some of the 1982 animated film featuring the voice acting James Earl Jones, but for me that title represents the 1979 book by Peter Dickinson which lent its name to the movie. The book is a work of speculative natural history that posits that dragons were real and attempts to explain their physiology and behavior using historical and literary sources from around the world and across history.
It is this book that was brought to my mind by the discussion last Wednesday. Our fundamental problem seemed to be that we did not seem to be able to make sense of dragons in some fundamental way because they did not fall into the pattern of the other animals that we have looked at thus far. An animal like the elephant or the “cameleopard’ has a real animal attached to what may have been a medieval misinterpretation. The dragon does not have a real analog there. We can compare it to a large serpent or constrictor, but these seem inadequate explanations for Beowulf’s fire-breathing dragon, or the healing dragons of the East. I’m beginning to wonder if Peter Dickinson didn’t have the right idea. He presumed that dragons were, in fact, real, and attempted to make sense of the various sources he examined with the presumption that they were referring to real animals.
