Emanuele Marostica

Dragons have always been present in the imaginary of mankind, since ancient myths about the creation of the world. The figure of the dragon is rooted in every culture, be it the evil serpent symbol of the devil typical of Western, Christian culture, or the benevolent creature that is bringer of rain in the Eastern tradition. Perhaps because of their importance in all the cultures of the world, dragons have also played a consequential role in fantasy literature, and indeed since J. R. R. Tolkien’s The Hobbit (1937), this creature has been a recurrent character in many works of the genre.
In this dissertation, the role of the dragon will be analyzed, especially in postwar fantasy fiction. More specifically, it will be shown how this mythical creature passed from being considered no more than a beast to be slain to a real icon of this literary genre. If in the ancient Western narratives, indeed, the dragon was regarded as a representation of chaos to be annihilated by a god or hero in order to restore a social balance previously subverted (Lionarons 1998), nowadays it is not necessarily seen as an enemy, but also as an advisor, an ally or even an inseparable companion for the main character of a novel.
We will focus mainly on some literary works that can serve as examples of such a transition, but we shall start by briefly analyzing the literary dragons in Beowulf and The Saga of the Volsungs, for they contributed enormously in shaping Tolkien’s Smaug: a dragon that, in turn, would have a great influence on all subsequent fantasies. Then we shall examine the role of dragons in Ursula Le Guin’s Earthsea sequence (1968-2001), noting how in her later novels they become protectors of order and no more agents of chaos. We will continue by examining the bond between dragons and their riders in Anne McCaffrey’s The Dragonriders of Pern series (1967-2012), the dragons depicted in Terry Pratchett’s Discworld series (1983-2015) – seen as imaginary beasts that can acquire shape and substance only if we truly believe in them – and finally their role in George R. R. Martin’s A Song of Ice and Fire (1996 ff.).
During our survey, we will compare the role of dragons to that of other fantasy creatures who underwent a similar evolution in the same period, such as the werewolf and the vampire, and we shall notice how all these literary monsters are nothing but different projections of our selves (Du Coudray 2006, Browning and Picart 2009). In conclusion, we shall see how in contemporary fantasy dragons can play at least five different roles: ‘the evil enemy to be slain or subjugated’; ‘the wise warden of order’; ‘the shapeshifter’; ‘the inseparable ally and life-long friend’; and finally ‘the wild but tameable beast’.
We shall focus mainly on literary works, but we will also make some references to other media, such as the main representations of dragon in cinema and role-playing games (RPGs).

George R. R. Martin’s series of novels A Song of Ice and Fire (henceforth ASoIaF) represents one of the most successful fantasies of all times. Ben Smith, Head of Books for publishing company Rebellion, admitted in an interview that nowdays ‘George Martin sells more books than the en-tire science fiction and fantasy section sells together’.  The popularity of the Game of Thrones series can be assigned to many factors, but in this essay I will focus my attention especially on its melding of high fantasy elements – which draw on the Tolkien tradition – with low fantasy ones. Particularly, I will show how this peculiar aspect of ASoIaF can be seen in the way magic is depicted, as it shares a lot of elements with the notion of magic typical of sword and sorcery.

The whole paper is basically an essay about Lovecraft and the concept of Cosmic Horror. There is no abstract since it was part of a series of essays to complete the Master course in Fantasy Literature at the University of Glasgow. I will just update the first paragraphs here below to give an idea of what the paper is about to anybody who would like to read it.


Howard Phillips Lovecraft is one of the most important authors of horror fiction: he, together with Edgar Allan Poe, inspired some of the greatest authors of the genre, including the supreme master of horror: Stephen King . During his life, he mainly owed his fame to his literary activity for the American magazine Weird Tales, and as time went by his writings ended up outlining a real fictional genre with well established features: the weird tale, as he himself defined it.
Weird Tales is one of the many pulp magazines which spread over in America in the early twenties: cheap magazines  which contained stories of various kind, but generally grotesque, fantastic, western and horror. Being a second class magazine, writing for Weird Tales was not regarded as important as writing for other magazines of the time, as for example the tradition-al “slicks”: Smart Set, Atlantic Monthly or Saturday Evening Post (Joshi 1990: 4-5). It was surely more accessible, a place where budding writers could be published more easily. And yet it gave fame to a lot of authors whose works have generated hundreds of adaptations –films, role-play games, board games and videogames– becoming a real mass phenomenon. Not only H. P. Love-craft, then, but also other more fantasy authors, like Clark Ashton Smith, Robert Ervin Howard and Fritz Leiber, who are still today associated with the concept of weird fiction.
The first time Lovecraft mentions the weird tale as a genre is in his essay ‘Supernatural Hor-ror in Literature’ (1927).