As I mentioned in my post about dragon book and podcast recommendations, I wanted to read The Penguin Book of Dragons. It’s not that commonly available, but I had a free afternoon so I went to the library to get this book and a few others.
The Penguin Book of Dragons collects texts about dragons from a wide range of sources, including:
- The Greco-Roman world
- Early Christian texts
- Northern European literature
- Medieval Europe
- Byzantium
- Asia
and all the way to children’s literature.
If you’re interested in how dragons have been understood and portrayed through the ages and in different cultural contexts, this is the book for you. Most of the translations are easy to read and there’s enough from each category that I could get a good sense of how dragons were seen differently in each culture – I thought the way dragons were treated in apocryphal literature to be particularly interesting.
Unlike The Penguin Book of Japanese Verse, which had a long and detailed introduction to the genre, The Penguin Book of Dragons prefers to give short prefaces to each section. So if you’re looking for analysis, you might want to find another book to supplement your reading (and I definitely want to read more analysis about how dragons have been viewed and how that view has involved – please send your recommendations if you have any)!
If you’re a fan of dragons and you’re looking to read more widely about them, this is definitely the book for you. Some of the texts are extracts, so I can see this as a good jumping off point to other books as well. As for me, I also need to start reading the other books that I put on the TBR list – it’s fairly short so I would like to be able to read them all by the end of the year.