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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Alzrius" data-source="post: 9597559" data-attributes="member: 8461">I just finished reading a 1999 reprint of <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ernest_Ingersoll" target="_blank">Ernest Ingersoll</a>'s 1928 book, Dragons and Dragon Lore.I had a hard time getting into this one at first. Part of the reason for that was because, perhaps because I'd been reading several more recently-written books with an anthropological focus, I expected this to be a rigorous treatise on the development on dragons in human myth. In that regard, I was half-right; Ingersoll covers a lot of ground where dragons (and similar serpent-monsters) appear in human myth, though I won't go so far as to call this comprehensive.However, his scholarship about the origins and spread of dragon stories was more speculative than I'd expected. He leans heavily into inference, often to the point of assumption, about how these tales spread. We're told, for instance, about the presence of draconic deities and monsters in some of the earliest myths from Sumeria; it's then presumed that these are the source of nagas and similar snake monsters in Indian folklore, totally on the basis that the former are older than the latter and so must have been exported eastward as a byproduct of trade and emigration. That may very well be true, but here the presumption seems to be sufficient to declare it so.The other thing which made it difficult for me to get into this book was its...let's say "parochial" view towards Asian cultures. To give an example of this, here's an excerpt of the opening from chapter four:"Today, when one hears the word 'dragon' one's mind almost inevitably pictures the fantastic figure embroidered in red and gold thread on some gorgeous Chinese garment, or winding its clouded way about the lustrous curves of a Japanese vase. To Western eyes it is hardly more than a quaint conventionalized ornament, but to Orientals, let me repeat, it is an embodiment of all the significance of natural history and ancient philosophy—the natural and supreme symbol of their race and culture. Again, the Western man looks on the dragon as something as mythical as the Man in the Moon, but the great mass of people in China, Tibet, and Korea, at least, believe in the lung (its ancient name) as now alive, active and numerous—believe in it with as firm and simple a faith as our infants put in the existence of Santa Claus, or the Ojibway in his Thunder Bird, or you and I in the law of gravitation."Maximum. Cringe.I enjoy reading a lot of old books, especially nonfiction, because I think that the past has a great deal to teach us, and that even the mistakes, the ignorances, and even the prejudices of our ancestors can be informative. But that doesn't make things like the above any easier to read, let alone try and extract something valuable from.Having said that, I'll reiterate that there is worthwhile information here. Ingersoll's insights about the dragon (outside of its Christianized context, where it's representative of sin in general and Satan in particular) as being repeatedly associated with water across myriad cultures—from the watery chaos of Tiamat to the rain-bringing dragons of Chinese myth to Japan's <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ry%C5%ABjin" target="_blank">Ryūjin</a>—is interesting to consider. Likewise the consideration of how <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Saint_George_and_the_Dragon" target="_blank">the legend of Saint George</a> has spread across Europe, to the point where the English people appropriated it to being a local myth instead of one that happened on the other side of the continent. There's a lot of interesting material in here (heck, I'd never heard of the <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Golden_Legend" target="_blank">Golden Legend</a> before it was casually mentioned in this text) if the antiquated tenor of its text can be overlooked.All of which is to say that I don't think the time I spent reading this was wasted, but this isn't the book I'd hand someone if I were trying to convince them of the value in reading old books.</blockquote>

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