1 00:00:00,240 --> 00:00:04,080 Hi, my name is Dr. Caroline Batten, I'm here for the Oxford Fantasy podcast, 2 00:00:04,080 --> 00:00:09,810 and my honoured guest today is Dr. Megan Cavell, who's a lecturer in mediaeval English at the University of Birmingham. 3 00:00:09,810 --> 00:00:14,130 And we are chatting about fantastic beasts. Hi, Meghan. 4 00:00:14,130 --> 00:00:19,110 Hi. I jumped the gun there and said hello too early. There's nothing wrong with that. 5 00:00:19,110 --> 00:00:23,250 We're all keen to talk about weird animals, right? Totally. 6 00:00:23,250 --> 00:00:26,550 I love fantastic creatures. Don't we all? 7 00:00:26,550 --> 00:00:36,750 So with animals and fantasy, there are loads and loads of authors who sort of make up their own amazing, fantastic creatures. 8 00:00:36,750 --> 00:00:41,490 And there are authors who draw on really explicit sources for their creations. 9 00:00:41,490 --> 00:00:48,150 I'm thinking The Witcher, for example, where all of the beings are taken from Polish folklore. 10 00:00:48,150 --> 00:00:52,410 But there are some fantasy animals that seem to kind of belong to everybody. 11 00:00:52,410 --> 00:00:57,540 Right. To be things that we all know about like unicorns and dragons. 12 00:00:57,540 --> 00:01:09,720 And so I guess the first place to start is, in your opinion, what's the history of people making up weird fantasy creatures? 13 00:01:09,720 --> 00:01:15,150 Where do you start when you teach this? Where does this all come from? 14 00:01:15,150 --> 00:01:20,340 Like, take us through it. That's a hard question, Caroline, that's a big question. 15 00:01:20,340 --> 00:01:25,720 Can't we start with what's your favourite fantasy animal? No, I'm kidding. Much better. 16 00:01:25,720 --> 00:01:30,990 What is your favourite fantasy animal? Probably unicorns. 17 00:01:30,990 --> 00:01:36,690 Yeah. I'm an adult, so I don't really have a favourite anything. 18 00:01:36,690 --> 00:01:45,690 Probably unicorns if pressed, just because I've grown up with The Last Unicorn book and film and then the comic book of it, 19 00:01:45,690 --> 00:01:52,020 I'm pretty obsessed with that whole series. But anyway, it's a really good question, the history of it. 20 00:01:52,020 --> 00:01:59,580 So I tend to start when I'm teaching, I start with classical studies and classical sources. 21 00:01:59,580 --> 00:02:06,330 So I usually start with Pliny the Elder's Natural History, which is a Latin text from the first century. 22 00:02:06,330 --> 00:02:10,350 But of course, he's drawing on a lot of material that's already in circulation, 23 00:02:10,350 --> 00:02:15,300 not just in Latin or in Greek, but in all sorts of different languages and folklores. 24 00:02:15,300 --> 00:02:21,330 So we've got Jewish tales. He's got Egyptian, Indian material in there and then also Greek and Latin stuff. 25 00:02:21,330 --> 00:02:27,930 So it's kind of like he's a bit of a magpie and a collector and he just brings together all these different sources. 26 00:02:27,930 --> 00:02:33,990 Sometimes he's good at telling you who his source is or where it's come from, and sometimes he just plops it in there, 27 00:02:33,990 --> 00:02:39,600 but usually I start with Pliny because he's good for all types of animals, real and not real. 28 00:02:39,600 --> 00:02:44,940 And sometimes he has strong opinions about the mythical ones and sometimes he just works them 29 00:02:44,940 --> 00:02:50,830 in as though they are actual animals that you can just kind of go and see at the zoo, if zoos existed then, 30 00:02:50,830 --> 00:02:56,670 which I suspect they did not. Maybe a menagerie. 31 00:02:56,670 --> 00:03:01,290 So I start with that. But there's so much more that you could do. I mean, you could go further back. 32 00:03:01,290 --> 00:03:06,000 You could go to other countries, you could go to ancient Egypt, 33 00:03:06,000 --> 00:03:12,120 you could go back to Mesopotamian stuff if you're interested in archaeology especially. 34 00:03:12,120 --> 00:03:15,810 But I usually start with Pliny and then I kind of trace him forward. 35 00:03:15,810 --> 00:03:24,600 I guess I start with him partly because he's so heavily drawn on in the mediaeval period, which is my area of research, and in mediaeval bestiaries, 36 00:03:24,600 --> 00:03:30,990 which take him, or they take people who've taken his material like Isidore of Seville, 37 00:03:30,990 --> 00:03:36,240 and they use that as the core for a lot of bestiary entries. 38 00:03:36,240 --> 00:03:41,430 Yeah, so what kind of fantastic animals do we get in Pliny? Oh, all sorts. 39 00:03:41,430 --> 00:03:46,110 So there's werewolves. There are dragons, of course. 40 00:03:46,110 --> 00:03:51,060 There are unicorns. And he tells us, 41 00:03:51,060 --> 00:03:59,790 well, he tells us about the monoceros, which is sometimes conflated with the unicorn and sometimes not. 42 00:03:59,790 --> 00:04:08,790 So he tells us about this one horned creature that's part stag and part horse and I think it had elephant feet in his version. 43 00:04:08,790 --> 00:04:11,670 And it's very fierce and hard to catch. 44 00:04:11,670 --> 00:04:20,250 And then it's in Isidore of Seville, who's a 7th century historian who was drawing from Pliny in writing his Etymologies. 45 00:04:20,250 --> 00:04:23,790 It's in there that Isidore specifically says, the monoceros, 46 00:04:23,790 --> 00:04:31,050 that is, the unicorn. So there's unicorns, basilisks, he's got some good bits on basilisks, 47 00:04:31,050 --> 00:04:39,150 So there's a bit of a Harry Potter linkage there, I guess, and loads more. So stuff that we would kind of recognise, like stuff that lasted for a while. 48 00:04:39,150 --> 00:04:42,930 Absolutely. These are the kind of big mythical animals. 49 00:04:42,930 --> 00:04:52,200 These aren't the made up ones that we get in any modern fantasy texts that are interested in building in new creatures as part of their narrative. 50 00:04:52,200 --> 00:04:57,720 These are the ones, like you say, that belong to everyone and that we get in lots of different cultural contexts. 51 00:04:57,720 --> 00:05:03,330 That have a really long history, mythical beasts, basically, rather than just fantastic beasts. 52 00:05:03,330 --> 00:05:09,810 What's the distinction of being mythical and fantastic beasts? Well, I just made up the difference. 53 00:05:09,810 --> 00:05:20,450 But mythical beasts, really, would be ones that appear in myths, so that we have in ancient texts, and fantastic beasts would be in whatever fantasy text 54 00:05:20,450 --> 00:05:27,920 you're reading, any creatures that are supernatural and made up, but that can encompass mythical creatures. 55 00:05:27,920 --> 00:05:34,940 So there will be some recognisable ones. But just to take a Harry Potter example, there's also going to be like the erumpent, 56 00:05:34,940 --> 00:05:41,360 which is a Rowling-created creature, not a mythical creature like the unicorn or dragon. 57 00:05:41,360 --> 00:05:48,120 There's room for all sorts of different types of imagination and fictionalising in fantasy texts. 58 00:05:48,120 --> 00:05:55,260 Yeah, absolutely. So you also mentioned about mediaeval bestiaries that drew on Pliny and on Isidore. 59 00:05:55,260 --> 00:05:59,840 What's a bestiary? OK, so bestiaries are great. 60 00:05:59,840 --> 00:06:07,190 If you are listening to this podcast while you are out for a walk, which is what I usually do when I'm walking, I listen to podcasts, 61 00:06:07,190 --> 00:06:16,700 You're going to have to go home immediately, go to any website like Bestiary.ca, or go to the Aberdeen Bestiary website and just 62 00:06:16,700 --> 00:06:20,780 look at the pictures of animals because bestiaries are the best thing in the world. 63 00:06:20,780 --> 00:06:25,280 So it's a tradition in the 12th and 13th century. It does extend beyond that, 64 00:06:25,280 --> 00:06:31,340 but that's kind of when it's at its most popular, of collections of animals. 65 00:06:31,340 --> 00:06:39,620 So real and fantastic animals, also plants and stones, all brought together into one collection. 66 00:06:39,620 --> 00:06:41,750 And then you'll have a bit of text about them. 67 00:06:41,750 --> 00:06:49,250 You'll have a religious allegory about them, and you'll have their image, a painting or drawing or whatever. 68 00:06:49,250 --> 00:06:57,110 And it starts off using Pliny, using Isidore of Seville, and using an anonymous text called the Physiologus, 69 00:06:57,110 --> 00:07:02,420 which is descriptions of animals with a Christian allegory gloss. 70 00:07:02,420 --> 00:07:10,040 It uses those as the core texts, and then people just get really excited about it and they start adding it loads and loads more material. 71 00:07:10,040 --> 00:07:17,450 So you get longer and longer bestiaries. So you've got about 50 animals in the Physiologus. 72 00:07:17,450 --> 00:07:24,750 By the end of this tradition, you've got bestiaries with one hundred and fifty animals. And they've got, not just sort of, 73 00:07:24,750 --> 00:07:32,130 not the foreign wildlife that's in the Physiologus, but you know, there's sheep in them and there's other made-up animals like the bonnacon, 74 00:07:32,130 --> 00:07:39,900 which shoots acidic poo at people who are trying to hunt it. What? Have you not heard of the bonnacon? 75 00:07:39,900 --> 00:07:47,940 I mean, never clearly we should write some new books to encompass this creature and its acid poo. The bonnacon is basically 76 00:07:47,940 --> 00:07:53,880 an ox, but it has curving-in horns. So that's not a very useful defence mechanism. 77 00:07:53,880 --> 00:08:00,660 As a result, they have developed another defence mechanism, which is that it can shoot acid poo about a mile. 78 00:08:00,660 --> 00:08:05,550 Well, there's different accounts, different lengths, but there's lots of great images. So if you go, 79 00:08:05,550 --> 00:08:13,230 listeners, go and Google bonnacon, B O N N A C O N, and go to the images and you will 80 00:08:13,230 --> 00:08:22,170 see so many amazing hunters trying to stab bonnacons and just being sprayed with face-fulls of acid poo. 81 00:08:22,170 --> 00:08:27,960 I love mediaeval literature and art. But where does this stuff come from? 82 00:08:27,960 --> 00:08:34,320 Like how how do people come up with this? I don't know about the bonnacon and I, I haven't spent that much time with it. 83 00:08:34,320 --> 00:08:40,110 But what I will say is that there's no accompanying allegory for this. 84 00:08:40,110 --> 00:08:46,660 So for a lot of the animals, most of the animals, there is an allegorical reason to include them, 85 00:08:46,660 --> 00:08:52,810 and there is not for this, which means I can only assume it's included for its humour value. 86 00:08:52,810 --> 00:08:59,500 You don't need to make up a highfalutin rationale for including a poo ox. 87 00:08:59,500 --> 00:09:07,150 It's just funny. Yeah, it makes me think of the Exeter Book riddles, where you have some very sort of high flying riddles about like, 88 00:09:07,150 --> 00:09:12,610 oh, the divine storm brought to the Earth by God, and creation, and gospel books. 89 00:09:12,610 --> 00:09:23,470 And then you've also got the onion riddle, which is about genitalia just for the purpose of being funny and fun and life affirming. 90 00:09:23,470 --> 00:09:28,300 Absolutely. But that's the nice thing about collections of material of which – the riddles are 91 00:09:28,300 --> 00:09:32,050 collections of very different types of material or written in the same way. 92 00:09:32,050 --> 00:09:39,280 But also bestiaries are different collections of material. And it's this kind of attempt to get all of creation, 93 00:09:39,280 --> 00:09:41,380 and that includes the high and the low. 94 00:09:41,380 --> 00:09:51,790 That includes the the unicorn, which is a symbol for Christ, or the Phoenix, another symbol for God, as well as the bonnacon, which is a poo ox. 95 00:09:51,790 --> 00:09:58,360 Yeah. So so the original purpose of these bestiaries was to use animals for allegory. 96 00:09:58,360 --> 00:10:08,170 Yeah. So bestiaries were probably first produced in monasteries or monastic contexts, so for monks, 97 00:10:08,170 --> 00:10:17,020 but then they become luxury objects and whether they're being produced newly or being existing ones are being sold in a secular context - ish, well, 98 00:10:17,020 --> 00:10:20,470 As far as there is a secular context in the Middle Ages, 99 00:10:20,470 --> 00:10:28,810 there are non-religious people that are aristocrats buying them and keeping them and using them, generally quite pious ones. 100 00:10:28,810 --> 00:10:32,860 So, yeah, they're being used for moral edification. 101 00:10:32,860 --> 00:10:40,360 They're good for you to learn through animals, to learn through fantastic creatures, to learn through the plants that are in them. 102 00:10:40,360 --> 00:10:44,420 You look at the image, you read the basic description, 103 00:10:44,420 --> 00:10:50,080 then you read the allegory and you put together, basically you understand the order of the world around you, 104 00:10:50,080 --> 00:10:56,200 the order of creation, according to the Christian context in which these were written and drawn. 105 00:10:56,200 --> 00:11:02,920 So fantastic beasts are part of the way that the world is made in God's image. 106 00:11:02,920 --> 00:11:08,350 Right. These are evidence of how great the Christian God is because he's made all these wonders, right? 107 00:11:08,350 --> 00:11:17,230 Absolutely. Yeah. And there's no differentiation at this point between mythical and real. 108 00:11:17,230 --> 00:11:22,480 I mean, the original texts that the bestiaries are drawing on are from the Mediterranean, 109 00:11:22,480 --> 00:11:28,540 from North Africa, from not the places that the bestiaries are being produced in northern Europe. 110 00:11:28,540 --> 00:11:32,980 So there is an element of maybe they just didn't know these weren't real animals 111 00:11:32,980 --> 00:11:37,210 that they're including, because they're very far away from their sources. 112 00:11:37,210 --> 00:11:41,920 But equally, there's also room for the imagination and creativity. 113 00:11:41,920 --> 00:11:51,070 But these mythical animals appear in the Bible, and that's the ultimate reason that they can be drawn into the bestiary, because there are unicorns, 114 00:11:51,070 --> 00:11:58,210 there are dragons in the Bible, and you don't question the legitimacy of the biblical texts if you're Christian in this period. 115 00:11:58,210 --> 00:12:09,010 So, yeah, so they get to be in there alongside animals who they could see walking around right next to them. Like sheep. Like sheep or hedgehogs. 116 00:12:09,010 --> 00:12:13,390 There's a really good bestiary hedgehog. Tell me about the bestiary hedgehog. 117 00:12:13,390 --> 00:12:24,220 So the hedgehog is said to roll around on fallen fruit and get the fruit all in its spines, which it then takes back to feed its babies with. 118 00:12:24,220 --> 00:12:31,160 Sometimes it's apples, sometimes it's grapes. And so there are lots of excellent hedgehog images where it was just covered in 119 00:12:31,160 --> 00:12:36,960 little red fruits on its back and then it goes and it feeds its babies with these. 120 00:12:36,960 --> 00:12:47,550 It's like tiny kebabs. Yeah, that's adorable, but surely some of these authors at least would have maybe seen a hedgehog in the wild. 121 00:12:47,550 --> 00:12:52,860 Sure. Not with fruit stuck on it. 122 00:12:52,860 --> 00:12:58,950 So what's the line between fact and fiction here? I think it didn't matter if it was true. 123 00:12:58,950 --> 00:13:01,500 If you knew it to not be true, it mattered that 124 00:13:01,500 --> 00:13:07,470 it was in an authoritative text and it was being passed around in that way and that you could learn a lesson from it. 125 00:13:07,470 --> 00:13:11,400 And if you could learn a lesson from it, then who cares if it's real or not? 126 00:13:11,400 --> 00:13:17,400 It is much more of a kind of intellectual and religious exercise. 127 00:13:17,400 --> 00:13:24,450 So it doesn't matter that you know that hedgehogs don't have fruit on their backs or that dragons don't exist. 128 00:13:24,450 --> 00:13:29,460 What matters is that there's a description of it which you ruminate upon and look at the image 129 00:13:29,460 --> 00:13:36,540 and read the allegory and engage with scripture and the allegorical portion and think religiously. 130 00:13:36,540 --> 00:13:42,300 So it doesn't matter if it's not real. I mean, people must have known that parts of these weren't real. 131 00:13:42,300 --> 00:13:51,150 There are also some cool bits, especially in the bird sections, where there's a lot of natural observation that is clearly going on. 132 00:13:51,150 --> 00:13:52,950 So that's interesting to find. 133 00:13:52,950 --> 00:14:02,130 But on the whole, the bestiary tradition is not as scientifically progressive as - there is observation going on in the 12th century. 134 00:14:02,130 --> 00:14:06,840 There is a movement of science and agriculture. 135 00:14:06,840 --> 00:14:11,880 There are people working in very real and practical ways with the natural world. 136 00:14:11,880 --> 00:14:20,720 And that's not what the bestiaries are doing. It's a fairly conservative tradition based in authority. 137 00:14:20,720 --> 00:14:25,020 And passing on knowledge. And it's a literary exercise, 138 00:14:25,020 --> 00:14:31,770 then, it sounds like. It's about engaging intellectually with the world and sort of finding deeper meaning in 139 00:14:31,770 --> 00:14:36,840 the natural world rather than observing what's going on in the natural world and drawing conclusions from it. 140 00:14:36,840 --> 00:14:39,180 Absolutely. It's an intellectual exercise. 141 00:14:39,180 --> 00:14:47,730 It's a literary exercise to some extent, and it's about thinking through creation and becoming a better person 142 00:14:47,730 --> 00:14:59,160 as a result. I often think that a lot of children's literature is quite bestiary-like in its pairing of text and image and overt moral instruction. 143 00:14:59,160 --> 00:15:06,870 It's much more narrative. We don't tend to just have – well, I was going to say you don't tend to just have collections of descriptions of animals, 144 00:15:06,870 --> 00:15:10,500 But really young children's literature is kind of like that. It is like that, yeah. 145 00:15:10,500 --> 00:15:16,020 Also, Aslan is not so far off from a bestiary lion, is he? 146 00:15:16,020 --> 00:15:26,140 Yes, definitely. I mean, Lewis is clearly taking the mediaeval lion as Christ and just running away with it. 147 00:15:26,140 --> 00:15:31,660 Yeah, so maybe the best way to kind of think about this is to look at some individual 148 00:15:31,660 --> 00:15:39,670 creatures and sort of see how they go from bestiary animals to to fantasy. 149 00:15:39,670 --> 00:15:47,050 So, maybe we should start with the unicorn. OK. What's the unicorn like in the mediaeval bestiary tradition? 150 00:15:47,050 --> 00:15:51,480 What are the earliest unicorns like? You were talking about the monoceros. 151 00:15:51,480 --> 00:15:58,060 So the unicorn is fearsome. It's one of the fearsome beasts, which is not what a modern unicorn is like at all. 152 00:15:58,060 --> 00:16:03,910 I like to think of the unicorn as having been domesticated by modern fantasy. 153 00:16:03,910 --> 00:16:06,610 The unicorn in the mediaeval tradition, 154 00:16:06,610 --> 00:16:14,230 in the classical tradition is this fierce beast that's horse- and stag-like, or one or the other, with a horn on its head. 155 00:16:14,230 --> 00:16:21,070 And it is very difficult to catch and it's usually aligned with women. 156 00:16:21,070 --> 00:16:26,740 So a maiden can catch a unicorn. It will come to the maiden and it will lay its head in her lap. 157 00:16:26,740 --> 00:16:31,180 And there's lots of complicated stuff about sexuality going on there, 158 00:16:31,180 --> 00:16:38,440 the one-horned beast that will lay its head in the maiden's lap. And then she lures it in and then people come and stab it to death. 159 00:16:38,440 --> 00:16:43,180 So there's lots of mediaeval images of just horrific hunting scenes as well. 160 00:16:43,180 --> 00:16:49,360 And with all these sort of – this nice lady with a nice little unicorn in her lap, no, it's a fearsome beast. 161 00:16:49,360 --> 00:16:57,130 And then all these people attacking it with weapons and quite gory puncture wounds, yeah, it's intense. 162 00:16:57,130 --> 00:17:02,350 So that's a mediaeval bestiary unicorn. And then when does it change? 163 00:17:02,350 --> 00:17:16,060 I don't know at what point the unicorn becomes a kind of domesticated horse who's just nice in the field or who's sort of hiding in the forest, 164 00:17:16,060 --> 00:17:24,250 who is last-unicorn-ing its way across the world to find its companions who have all been captured. 165 00:17:24,250 --> 00:17:32,680 There's something quite gendered going on as well, I think where the movement is away from the fearsome, violent, 166 00:17:32,680 --> 00:17:42,250 heavily coded as masculine beast who is attracted to the maiden to the kind of unicorn that's quite feminised and gentle. 167 00:17:42,250 --> 00:17:52,330 I'm still thinking of The Last Unicorn. I'm just so obsessed with that book, which is brilliant, and the film, where it becomes a kind of hyper feminised, gentle creature. 168 00:17:52,330 --> 00:17:59,470 And at that point, it's not the same animal as it was in the Middle Ages. I've never seen or read The Last Unicorn. 169 00:17:59,470 --> 00:18:06,760 So tell me all about it. Oh Caroline, OK. The first thing that you need to do is go and buy a copy of the book. 170 00:18:06,760 --> 00:18:14,600 So it's Peter S. Beagle's book, The Last Unicorn, and it is the story of – 171 00:18:14,600 --> 00:18:18,650 well, it is what it says in the title. It is the last unicorn. 172 00:18:18,650 --> 00:18:27,950 So there's a unicorn who finds out just by happenstance that she's the last one of her kind and she thinks this can't possibly be true. 173 00:18:27,950 --> 00:18:32,510 I must go and find the other unicorns. And she starts this epic journey, 174 00:18:32,510 --> 00:18:43,610 where she meets a wizard and a travelling band of fantastic creatures and this kind of creepy travelling zoo menagerie thing. 175 00:18:43,610 --> 00:18:49,760 And she frees all of these – well, she frees all of these creatures who are not actually fantastic creatures. 176 00:18:49,760 --> 00:18:52,580 They've been bedazzled to look as though they are. 177 00:18:52,580 --> 00:19:02,750 But there is one other fantastic creature, the harpy, and she apparently kind of the polar opposite of the unicorn in that she's violent and scary. 178 00:19:02,750 --> 00:19:08,840 So she frees these animals. She picks up the wizard who's with them, who is also a kind of servant of this nasty witch. 179 00:19:08,840 --> 00:19:12,860 And off they go on this journey to find her kin. 180 00:19:12,860 --> 00:19:19,790 And in the process, you discover that they've been driven into the ocean by the Red Bull. 181 00:19:19,790 --> 00:19:26,210 I don't know what the Red Bull symbolises. Menstruation possibly. 182 00:19:26,210 --> 00:19:33,530 Well, there's a lot going on with time and ageing and the loss of innocence and childhood. 183 00:19:33,530 --> 00:19:41,430 And the Red Bull is this kind of beast that's pushing these innocent, sweet creatures away from, you know – 184 00:19:41,430 --> 00:19:48,590 yeah, it's kind of, fantasy as the childhood that we must grow out of and that he's driven into the ocean and out of reach. 185 00:19:48,590 --> 00:19:54,410 And I don't want to spoil it all. But she does find them. 186 00:19:54,410 --> 00:19:58,550 She does recapture her childhood innocence. 187 00:19:58,550 --> 00:20:04,790 She does free the unicorns. Okay, I spoiled it. But there's this great cartoon. 188 00:20:04,790 --> 00:20:16,230 80S, 90s, I don't know when it was made, I watched it as a child. And it's just wonderful and kind of anime, sort of anime style, it's just wonderful. 189 00:20:16,230 --> 00:20:22,730 And then there's also a graphic novel of it, which I'm just dying to teach someday because it's brilliant. 190 00:20:22,730 --> 00:20:27,410 Well, that sounds really interesting and it's interesting, isn't it, how we have the sort of, 191 00:20:27,410 --> 00:20:31,730 you know, the fearsome beast, the mediaeval unicorn, who, as you say, is masculinised. 192 00:20:31,730 --> 00:20:38,180 Right. And is attracted to a maiden and is an allegory for Christ and his death. 193 00:20:38,180 --> 00:20:49,220 And then in something like The Last Unicorn, the unicorn's female, the harpy's female, all of this is about a kind of feminised childhood. 194 00:20:49,220 --> 00:20:56,930 I missed the most important part from my description of the book, which is that in order to not be caught by the Red Bull, 195 00:20:56,930 --> 00:21:04,640 she is turned into a human woman by this wizard who is not very good at what he's doing and he can't turn her back. 196 00:21:04,640 --> 00:21:08,510 And then there's a kind of meditation on, she's now a woman. 197 00:21:08,510 --> 00:21:18,890 She's losing her magic. She's lost her innocence entirely. She's sort of just fading away and slowly becoming more and more human and less magical. 198 00:21:18,890 --> 00:21:24,860 And so those kind of play with how you can retain that magic in your life and whether she 199 00:21:24,860 --> 00:21:29,630 should turn back into the unicorn because she won't be caught by the Red Bull if she's a human. 200 00:21:29,630 --> 00:21:33,800 But is it worth living? Yeah, it's great. 201 00:21:33,800 --> 00:21:40,160 It's really deep. Wow. Sounds like a really convoluted allegory about growing up. 202 00:21:40,160 --> 00:21:49,070 Totally, but also about time and about our past, because there's all this play with mediaeval knights as hunters of fantastic beasts. 203 00:21:49,070 --> 00:21:58,040 So at one point in her journey, there's this Prince Lír who goes off hunting and killing dragons to bring back as trophies to give to her. 204 00:21:58,040 --> 00:22:02,180 And she's just sort of looking on going, I don't want this, why would I want this? 205 00:22:02,180 --> 00:22:08,140 And he's like, well, that's what knights do. So it's playing with the kind of mediaeval romance tropes as well. 206 00:22:08,140 --> 00:22:16,190 It's great. But anyway, yes, to get back to your point, she's so heavily feminised that she is depicted as a human woman, 207 00:22:16,190 --> 00:22:22,010 as kind of, quite beautiful and waif-like and fully nude, 208 00:22:22,010 --> 00:22:25,530 at one point, human woman. It's fully, she's fully feminised, the unicorn. 209 00:22:25,530 --> 00:22:29,150 Yeah. Yeah. 210 00:22:29,150 --> 00:22:32,630 So what is she like then as a unicorn in the book? 211 00:22:32,630 --> 00:22:37,160 The film, the graphic novel. What are unicorns like in this world? 212 00:22:37,160 --> 00:22:42,320 Do you mean physically? Physically, also – Emotionally? 213 00:22:42,320 --> 00:22:53,390 Their temperament, I don't know, what's the idea of a unicorn that The Last Unicorn puts forward? So, enigmatic and without the ability to regret. It's quite 214 00:22:53,390 --> 00:23:01,310 emphatic in this book that she doesn't, she's not able to regret until she's become a human and then when she's transformed back into a unicorn 215 00:23:01,310 --> 00:23:11,460 she'll have this new ability to regret. But not as a unicorn. She's just this enigmatic creature who's kind of quite confident in the fact that 216 00:23:11,460 --> 00:23:16,500 it can't possibly be true that there are no other unicorns in the world and she will go and find them. 217 00:23:16,500 --> 00:23:22,780 She's hard and soft at the same time, tough as nails and willing to take on this huge Red Bull. 218 00:23:22,780 --> 00:23:33,810 But also, she's this very beautiful white horse that's clearly a kind of metaphor for childhood and the past. 219 00:23:33,810 --> 00:23:38,400 And regret is clearly part of the adult human condition. 220 00:23:38,400 --> 00:23:42,280 Yeah. Yeah, totally. Yeah. Yikes. 221 00:23:42,280 --> 00:23:47,410 That hits a little close to home. It's so close to home. Right? How dare you. 222 00:23:47,410 --> 00:23:57,270 I think that's why I keep going back to it because, yeah, it meant something to me as a child when I first watched it as a film and I couldn't articulate why. 223 00:23:57,270 --> 00:24:02,650 But going back and watching it again as an adult, I just get the same kind of feeling of sorrow from it. 224 00:24:02,650 --> 00:24:07,380 It's just beautiful. And reading it as well. It's beautifully written. 225 00:24:07,380 --> 00:24:13,080 I always felt the same way about that moment in Peter Pan when Peter comes back for Wendy, 226 00:24:13,080 --> 00:24:21,510 but she's a grown woman and she can't go with him to Neverland and she thinks to herself, woman, woman, let go of me. 227 00:24:21,510 --> 00:24:28,740 The passage of time is horrible. Truly. Especially during a pandemic. 228 00:24:28,740 --> 00:24:37,980 Ugh, tell me about it. But so, OK. So now we're in the sort of 'white horse world' of unicorns. 229 00:24:37,980 --> 00:24:46,800 So the monoceros was not a white horse. I think the colour of the horse is quite, I don't know if that's modern. 230 00:24:46,800 --> 00:24:52,390 I don't think the bestiaries focus so much on what it looks like. Apart from that, it's part stag. 231 00:24:52,390 --> 00:24:56,220 So there's not, the stag is a tawny colour. 232 00:24:56,220 --> 00:25:01,110 It's not mentioned, I don't think. I need to go back and look at all the sources to see if it does come up somewhere. 233 00:25:01,110 --> 00:25:05,610 But no, that seems to be kind of part of its domestication, 234 00:25:05,610 --> 00:25:08,160 is its change in colour. 235 00:25:08,160 --> 00:25:17,040 I'm determined to see this domestication process. But that seems like that is what's happening, right? And we get those famous tapestries, 236 00:25:17,040 --> 00:25:22,710 right, that depict unicorns in woodlands from the 14th century. 237 00:25:22,710 --> 00:25:27,360 And those creatures are again, they're meant to approach maidens, 238 00:25:27,360 --> 00:25:34,800 right, They come to meet women in the wood, and they're portrayed as these sort of delicate animals. 239 00:25:34,800 --> 00:25:39,690 Right. And the unicorn doesn't quite look like a horse. 240 00:25:39,690 --> 00:25:43,740 It does look like it's maybe part stag. The hooves are cloven. 241 00:25:43,740 --> 00:25:53,820 The ears don't look quite horse-like, but it's very sort of slender and lovely in a sort of unexpected way. 242 00:25:53,820 --> 00:25:59,070 Yeah. That elongated body and very deer-like body. 243 00:25:59,070 --> 00:26:05,670 Stag-like body. Absolutely. And that's something that the animation for The Last Unicorn draws on. 244 00:26:05,670 --> 00:26:14,280 It's very kind of, horse slash stag like. But then when you think about unicorns in other pop culture contexts, contemporary contexts, 245 00:26:14,280 --> 00:26:19,260 they're often like kind of blocky, horse-like or even pony-like, because they're all over 246 00:26:19,260 --> 00:26:25,260 children's clothing and merchandise as these sort of chubby little pony unicorns. 247 00:26:25,260 --> 00:26:29,010 And that's just, that process, that movement, is so telling. 248 00:26:29,010 --> 00:26:34,350 I think it was domestication. It's a completely different type of animal hybridity. 249 00:26:34,350 --> 00:26:43,620 Interesting, too, isn't it, that once an animal gets feminised in our cultural narrative, then it becomes something for children, 250 00:26:43,620 --> 00:26:50,400 it stops being something serious and it becomes something for children and specifically for girls. 251 00:26:50,400 --> 00:26:58,860 Yes, I think there's also an element in which sensible adult grown up people don't believe in mythical creatures. 252 00:26:58,860 --> 00:27:07,080 So unicorns are for girls and dragons are also not to be believed, but they're ferocious and violent. 253 00:27:07,080 --> 00:27:13,740 So we'll put them for boys. So there we are. Adults don't like to play with either of those because we know the truth. 254 00:27:13,740 --> 00:27:24,050 They don't exist and then they're gendered and separated out because there's such an obsession with binary gender in contemporary pop, 255 00:27:24,050 --> 00:27:30,390 pop culture, markets and capitalism and selling toys down children's throats. 256 00:27:30,390 --> 00:27:34,020 Every aspect of our culture? Yeah. No, absolutely. 257 00:27:34,020 --> 00:27:43,800 And that actually leads us nicely into another magical creature who appears so often in fantasy literature and is, you know, 258 00:27:43,800 --> 00:27:46,290 widespread in folklore all over the world, 259 00:27:46,290 --> 00:27:56,730 which is of course the dragon. Part of any one of a number of gigantic lizard or serpent traditions that we get everywhere. 260 00:27:56,730 --> 00:28:07,590 So where where does the dragon that we get in English language fantasy – you know, fire breathing, scaly, claws, where does that dragon start? 261 00:28:07,590 --> 00:28:11,330 Yeah, so I mean, that's coming out of classical texts as well. 262 00:28:11,330 --> 00:28:18,530 Where you've got lots of descriptions of the dragon as the king of the serpents, or the most fearsome of the serpents, 263 00:28:18,530 --> 00:28:24,410 the basilisk is often the king of the serpents, but as kind of equated with serpents. 264 00:28:24,410 --> 00:28:31,640 And then it kind of develops its wings later, I think. But obviously, we have dragons all over the world in different contexts. 265 00:28:31,640 --> 00:28:37,410 I don't know enough about Chinese history and culture, but the dragon fulfils a very different function. 266 00:28:37,410 --> 00:28:47,330 There's a very positive function, in contrast to the kind of fearsome, scary dragon we have in a lot of fantasy lit from the Western world. 267 00:28:47,330 --> 00:28:53,150 And that's partly because the dragon, I mean, if the unicorn is a symbol for Christ in the mediaeval bestiary tradition, 268 00:28:53,150 --> 00:29:00,230 the dragon is a symbol for the devil. And so it's violent and fierce and fiery, burning hell, 269 00:29:00,230 --> 00:29:03,830 and all those bad things are associated with it. 270 00:29:03,830 --> 00:29:09,800 And that's why it's kind of elided with serpents as well, because of the serpent in the Garden of Eden. 271 00:29:09,800 --> 00:29:19,880 That's all kind of mashed together. Throw in some wings, focus on the big heavy tail, and the fearsome jaws and fire breathing. 272 00:29:19,880 --> 00:29:23,300 And it's just the kind of the epitome of all the bad stuff. 273 00:29:23,300 --> 00:29:34,280 Therefore, it's diabolic and it's definitely not feminised. Until, what, Shrek? Maybe before that, but. Shrek, I mean, 274 00:29:34,280 --> 00:29:38,810 that's first, like, sexy female dragon I've ever seen in pop culture. 275 00:29:38,810 --> 00:29:41,030 Even that, the point of that is that it's a joke. 276 00:29:41,030 --> 00:29:47,240 The point of that is that it's subversive of gender norms, that you think the dragon's male because of course you do. 277 00:29:47,240 --> 00:29:51,990 And then it turns out that it's female and therefore not really a threat at all. 278 00:29:51,990 --> 00:29:55,910 A love interest, now. And I think that film is playing with those tropes. 279 00:29:55,910 --> 00:30:03,390 It's not necessarily propping them up, but it's definitely having a stab at those kinds of power dynamics and social dynamics. 280 00:30:03,390 --> 00:30:10,290 Yeah, the joke, of course, in Shrek, is that we don't think the dragon could possibly be female, there's no chance of it, 281 00:30:10,290 --> 00:30:17,280 And then the sort of second part of the joke is that if the dragon's female, she's a terrifying woman. 282 00:30:17,280 --> 00:30:24,030 Right. And the fact that she's falling in love with the donkey is like an imminent threat to his well-being. 283 00:30:24,030 --> 00:30:30,750 Yeah, absolutely. First of all, if she's female, she must have a love interest because that's the point of women. 284 00:30:30,750 --> 00:30:34,500 Now, we can't possibly have a female character who's not interested in love, 285 00:30:34,500 --> 00:30:40,260 although I think the film is playing with that to some extent, resisting it. 286 00:30:40,260 --> 00:30:47,950 To some extent. It is in the silliness of that episode, and playing it up so much, is satirising it. 287 00:30:47,950 --> 00:30:58,620 But yes, then of course, she's part of this kind of strange animal couple that doesn't belong together and she just becomes this love-soppy servant to him. 288 00:30:58,620 --> 00:31:03,570 Yeah, naturally. That's the thing with female monsters, isn't it? 289 00:31:03,570 --> 00:31:09,600 They either have to get tamed and get less monstrous or their femininity makes them even worse 290 00:31:09,600 --> 00:31:15,860 monsters. I'm thinking a little bit of the Xenomorph from Alien. OK, yes. 291 00:31:15,860 --> 00:31:25,830 And I'm thinking also definitely of It, in Stephen King's IT, where the great revelation of a whole book, what was meant to be 292 00:31:25,830 --> 00:31:34,810 the most chilling moment, is when they discover – and the line that King writes is, 'It was female. And It was pregnant.' 293 00:31:34,810 --> 00:31:41,940 Oh. Oh. So this fear of reproduction, that the monster can continue to reproduce itself and that 294 00:31:41,940 --> 00:31:48,790 we'll be overrun with monsters because the female body has this ability to reproduce itself. 295 00:31:48,790 --> 00:31:53,550 That's really interesting. Oh, I was going to say, I wonder what a baby dragon and donkey combo is. 296 00:31:53,550 --> 00:32:01,080 But of course that happens at the end of Shrek, because just as the woman can't exist as a creature or a character in her own right, 297 00:32:01,080 --> 00:32:07,500 she also must fulfil her responsibility and have babies by the end of the story. 298 00:32:07,500 --> 00:32:11,950 And they make these really weird, non-threatening dragon donkey hybrids. 299 00:32:11,950 --> 00:32:20,820 Yeah, yeah. Such a strange film. It is such a strange film. I can't think too hard about Shrek or it does my head in. 300 00:32:20,820 --> 00:32:23,840 But then we have dragons in all sorts of other fantasy texts. 301 00:32:23,840 --> 00:32:29,730 I mean presumably anyone who's listening to this is waiting for us to talk about Game of Thrones. 302 00:32:29,730 --> 00:32:36,150 Yes. So let's talk about Game of Thrones. Those dragons are all coded as male, aren't they? 303 00:32:36,150 --> 00:32:43,710 I like that we've turned this into a discussion about gender and sexuality, which is exactly the right thing to do with this. 304 00:32:43,710 --> 00:32:50,580 But there's the kind of Mother of Dragons, Daenerys character, who has these – 305 00:32:50,580 --> 00:32:59,790 she's trying to, not tame, but, she is aligned with these violent male bodies who do her whims and her bidding, 306 00:32:59,790 --> 00:33:06,070 but in a kind of, much more of a Jurassic Park way, you have to respect the animal. 307 00:33:06,070 --> 00:33:15,210 The animal is really, the animal has its own wishes, but you can become a kind of, I don't know, keeper of the animals. 308 00:33:15,210 --> 00:33:19,320 She's doing this in a motherly capacity. Hmm. 309 00:33:19,320 --> 00:33:26,190 Yeah. Well, then the thing that's sort of Jurassic Park-like especially about George R.R. Martin's dragons, 310 00:33:26,190 --> 00:33:30,570 they're not really innovative in terms of the way that the beasts are portrayed. 311 00:33:30,570 --> 00:33:35,040 Right. They're big, they're scaly. They breathe fire. They have claws, they're reptiles. 312 00:33:35,040 --> 00:33:40,680 It's not deviating too much from other fantasy dragons that we see. 313 00:33:40,680 --> 00:33:49,170 But George is really interested in realpolitik, right? That's his whole thing, is that in the 'real' fantasy world, 314 00:33:49,170 --> 00:33:58,350 there are debts and blood and death and assault and your dragons need to eat people to stay alive. 315 00:33:58,350 --> 00:34:05,280 And so they are these sort of, they're there in some ways more animalistic than other dragons that we see, 316 00:34:05,280 --> 00:34:12,840 because that's what he's interested in, is the sort of, the gritty reality of dealing with a beast. 317 00:34:12,840 --> 00:34:15,840 Yeah, absolutely. That's the only more about 318 00:34:15,840 --> 00:34:24,930 Shrek, which is the other humourous angle of the Donkey-Dragon relationship, is that he's a prey animal and she's a carnivore. 319 00:34:24,930 --> 00:34:29,400 She's a predator. So that relationship's not going to work on so many different levels. 320 00:34:29,400 --> 00:34:37,380 And if that story was played out in Game of Thrones, she would swoop down from the air, burn him up and eat him immediately. 321 00:34:37,380 --> 00:34:43,200 And probably the person who was riding him or using him as a pack donkey. 322 00:34:43,200 --> 00:34:51,180 So, yes, absolutely. That kind of focus on the day-to-day, who needs to eat what, how are we going to 323 00:34:51,180 --> 00:34:57,240 feed these dragons that are enormous and are eating whole flocks of sheep and the shepherds? 324 00:34:57,240 --> 00:35:03,570 That's precisely I mean, you summarised it beautifully, what Martin does that's different to, 325 00:35:03,570 --> 00:35:10,050 but also building on a long tradition of other fantasy literature and historical writings. 326 00:35:10,050 --> 00:35:20,770 If we're talking about mothers as well, the idea, Dany says at one point that her dragons are the only children she'll ever have. 327 00:35:20,770 --> 00:35:28,480 What's going on there with motherhood and beasts and the way that her story ends in Game of Thrones? 328 00:35:28,480 --> 00:35:39,220 Yeah, I mean, not – to focus on the kind of monstrous mother, like you would think that that women must fulfil this role of being a mother. 329 00:35:39,220 --> 00:35:48,640 which she can't do and therefore fills the void, not with as many modern pet keepers do with a cuddly little fluffy thing, 330 00:35:48,640 --> 00:35:57,610 but with these vicious creatures, suggests that her maternal instinct has gone wrong somehow. 331 00:35:57,610 --> 00:36:02,800 But equally, it's imbued with a huge amount of power. And I don't think it's criticised in the books. 332 00:36:02,800 --> 00:36:07,720 It's lauded as a kind of I mean, there are so many monstrous mothers in that book. 333 00:36:07,720 --> 00:36:16,180 Cersei is such a great example. It really moves away from the norms of genteel motherhood. 334 00:36:16,180 --> 00:36:23,890 It's questioning all of those kinds of normalised gender tropes, and it's doing that with her, too. 335 00:36:23,890 --> 00:36:30,670 But this kind of hybridity and monstrosity involved in being the Mother of Dragons, gives her power. 336 00:36:30,670 --> 00:36:39,940 I don't think it's a criticism of her. I really wish the show ended with the episode before it ended and she had just burned everyone. 337 00:36:39,940 --> 00:36:47,320 I don't hate that as an alternative ending to Game of Thrones. And also not died. 338 00:36:47,320 --> 00:36:51,760 I think it's such a copout that her male lover has to kill her in the end, 339 00:36:51,760 --> 00:36:57,400 because that's – there's so much that's subversive about the way relationships are played out. 340 00:36:57,400 --> 00:37:04,430 And that still seems to be back to our old tropes of male violence and female, 341 00:37:04,430 --> 00:37:11,230 well, femicide, the murder of women. I know that she did a bad thing in burning everyone up. 342 00:37:11,230 --> 00:37:18,370 But wouldn't that be the kind of – as a post capitalist dream, we just burn the world down? 343 00:37:18,370 --> 00:37:22,030 I think that would be quite fun as a fiction, not reality, 344 00:37:22,030 --> 00:37:27,880 just for the record. I mean, for the record, we are not advocating the burning of the world, 345 00:37:27,880 --> 00:37:34,600 but there is a sense almost in which the burning of everything would be a fitting end to 346 00:37:34,600 --> 00:37:42,970 Game of Thrones, this sense that there's rot in the system that we can't actually properly 347 00:37:42,970 --> 00:37:49,120 eradicate and that Targaryen power as exemplified by the dragon, right, is power, 348 00:37:49,120 --> 00:37:58,420 but it's also fire and blood. So do you think when Daenerys sics her dragons on people who are her opponents, 349 00:37:58,420 --> 00:38:05,980 she is a kind of, she's metaphorically consuming them, through her children's literal consumption of them? 350 00:38:05,980 --> 00:38:09,880 I mean, she's a colonial figure. She is a colonial figure. 351 00:38:09,880 --> 00:38:19,570 And what's really interesting is that the only person we see her dragons eat in the show is a child in Meereen. 352 00:38:19,570 --> 00:38:27,190 I think that is probably sort of an appropriate symbol of how Daenerys as the mother 353 00:38:27,190 --> 00:38:32,590 and the saviour in Meereen has actually not saved the city from anything at all. 354 00:38:32,590 --> 00:38:43,760 When we think about colonialism and when we think about the way that some people exert cultural hegemony over others. 355 00:38:43,760 --> 00:38:52,340 This is like – it's such a precise and awful and bloody metaphor for that kind of violence. 356 00:38:52,340 --> 00:38:57,080 Certainly that's something that the show never really grappled with in a suitable way. 357 00:38:57,080 --> 00:39:07,730 The colonialism of its own casting decisions was also a problem in its – its racial dynamics were deeply problematic. 358 00:39:07,730 --> 00:39:15,530 But I think it did at least turn her from the white saviour into a kind of violent colonialist that she clearly was always on the path to become. 359 00:39:15,530 --> 00:39:18,870 So that's one little check for her. 360 00:39:18,870 --> 00:39:26,960 But her violence is only really condemned by the show when it's wreaked against the white people of King's Landing. Yes. Yes. 361 00:39:26,960 --> 00:39:32,690 I wondered if we were going to bring the dragon round to Old Norse because I was thinking when you were talking about eating hearts, 362 00:39:32,690 --> 00:39:45,500 I was thinking about various Old Norse figures who can talk to dragons or who eat bits of creatures and get to understand their speech and things like that. 363 00:39:45,500 --> 00:39:49,520 Well, I mean, yeah, let's – so we've had our sort of animal dragons, right. 364 00:39:49,520 --> 00:39:56,660 Our sort of Jurassic Park bestial dragons. And then we've got the other tradition that comes down to us through Tolkien of the clever dragon. 365 00:39:56,660 --> 00:40:03,740 Right, the talking dragon, and that comes from Old Norse stuff and in part from Beowulf as well. 366 00:40:03,740 --> 00:40:10,220 Völsunga saga has a really fascinating dragon. And because Tolkien liked this dragon so much, 367 00:40:10,220 --> 00:40:19,830 so much of our sword and sorcery dragons descend from this Old Norse ideal because Tolkien was so into it. 368 00:40:19,830 --> 00:40:20,450 Right. 369 00:40:20,450 --> 00:40:29,480 So the ah, the idea that dragons hoard gold, that dragons sit on, that they like gold, that they sit on it and they don't let other people have it. 370 00:40:29,480 --> 00:40:34,820 And if you take something from it, the dragon will lay waste to the countryside. 371 00:40:34,820 --> 00:40:38,720 That comes from Beowulf, where Beowulf, the aged king, 372 00:40:38,720 --> 00:40:50,420 is confronted with this dragon who wreaks havoc on Geatland when a slave steals a cup from his hoard, 373 00:40:50,420 --> 00:40:57,200 which is what Bilbo does in The Hobbit, incidentally. So this idea of the dragon as a symbol of greed, right? 374 00:40:57,200 --> 00:41:00,470 The dragon as a symbol of using gold the wrong way, 375 00:41:00,470 --> 00:41:07,010 not using it to give to your followers and make social bonds and give rewards and bring everybody together. 376 00:41:07,010 --> 00:41:13,700 But sitting on the gold for your own purposes, that's a mediaeval dragon ideal. 377 00:41:13,700 --> 00:41:17,970 And the dragon that we get in Völsunga saga is like that, too. 378 00:41:17,970 --> 00:41:24,560 He's called Fafnir and he used to be a person of some kind. 379 00:41:24,560 --> 00:41:40,040 He becomes so obsessed with a hoard of gold that his father has, that he kills his father and then he goes and he sits on the gold, he sits with it. 380 00:41:40,040 --> 00:41:46,430 And the suggestion is that he turns into a dragon because he's so gold obsessed 381 00:41:46,430 --> 00:41:52,130 that it sort of transforms him into this creature and his other brother, 382 00:41:52,130 --> 00:41:59,900 Reginn, gets the hero, Sigurdr, to kill Fafnir for him. 383 00:41:59,900 --> 00:42:09,590 And so Sigurdr gets himself into a hole with his sword and he waits until the dragon crawls over him, belly to the ground, 384 00:42:09,590 --> 00:42:17,780 and then he stabs up into it. And so that's also where we get this idea that the dragon's belly is a weak spot, right. 385 00:42:17,780 --> 00:42:21,710 That it's this armoured lizard except for its underbelly. 386 00:42:21,710 --> 00:42:28,880 And when, as Fafnir is dying, he speaks to Sigurdr and he tries to get him to say his name. 387 00:42:28,880 --> 00:42:33,440 And Sigurdr doesn't. He sort of talks very cleverly. He talks in riddles. 388 00:42:33,440 --> 00:42:40,940 He doesn't want Fafnir to know his name. And Fafnir tries to warn him about trusting Reginn. 389 00:42:40,940 --> 00:42:46,620 He tries to drive a wedge there and it doesn't really work. 390 00:42:46,620 --> 00:42:53,720 And then he dies. And Sigurdr is roasting the heart of the dragon for Reginn, who wants to eat it. 391 00:42:53,720 --> 00:43:01,970 And he touches it with his finger and he burns himself. And so he puts his finger in his mouth and he gets some of the dragon blood in his mouth. 392 00:43:01,970 --> 00:43:04,940 And that allows him to understand birds. 393 00:43:04,940 --> 00:43:14,810 And he hears these two birds talking, saying that Reginn is planning to betray Sigurdr and kill him and take the whole hoard for himself. 394 00:43:14,810 --> 00:43:18,380 And so Sigurdr kills Reginn instead. 395 00:43:18,380 --> 00:43:31,100 So this sort of clever, crafty talking dragon who is all about making you doubt, right, poking holes in your ideals, trying to get to you. 396 00:43:31,100 --> 00:43:40,160 We get that from Fafnir. So dragons are very long lasting, I think, because of the sort of potency of this symbolism. 397 00:43:40,160 --> 00:43:47,720 Right. That if it's everything evil, everything dangerous, all wrapped up into one creature, 398 00:43:47,720 --> 00:43:55,370 then you can have a sort of bestial evil or you can have a very clever intelligent evil 399 00:43:55,370 --> 00:44:00,230 that's sort of reminiscent of the mediaeval tradition of the way that the devil kind of, 400 00:44:00,230 --> 00:44:04,430 you know, reels you in a little bit. Right. 401 00:44:04,430 --> 00:44:10,190 Yeah. And hence that riddling speech, which is interesting considering we brought up riddles before. 402 00:44:10,190 --> 00:44:11,540 But that riddling talk, 403 00:44:11,540 --> 00:44:19,220 that deceptive talk that you can't quite get a handle on couldn't be more different from the context of Old English and Latin riddles 404 00:44:19,220 --> 00:44:29,700 being written around the same time where they're being used to reflect on spiritual issues or on their intellectual exercises. 405 00:44:29,700 --> 00:44:35,420 They're not there to deceive, but at the same time, they can lead you down the wrong route. 406 00:44:35,420 --> 00:44:41,030 If you sold the onion as a penis instead of an onion, then that's you being a bit naughty. 407 00:44:41,030 --> 00:44:51,420 Not the riddle, it's not the riddles fault. But you have that kind of deceptive sliding language of riddling, which we see in these texts. 408 00:44:51,420 --> 00:44:55,820 Funny how that comes back around. I mean, arguably in The Last Unicorn, 409 00:44:55,820 --> 00:45:03,410 we have some kind of riddling areas where she's trying to figure out where these other unicorns are and she talks to a butterfly. 410 00:45:03,410 --> 00:45:09,890 And the butterfly seems to speak in riddles and in snippets of different pop cultural contexts. 411 00:45:09,890 --> 00:45:17,210 And she just wants a straight answer, and he sort of brings out an etymology or a bit of a song or all these different things. 412 00:45:17,210 --> 00:45:21,590 And she's frustrated by this. And he's a flying creature, too. 413 00:45:21,590 --> 00:45:29,330 So bird like. Dragon like. Well, and animals talking in riddling speech is something that we get a lot. 414 00:45:29,330 --> 00:45:35,010 The Sphinx is our sort of original nonhuman animal that speaks in a riddle. 415 00:45:35,010 --> 00:45:41,810 I mean, even like the Cheshire Cat in Alice in Wonderland sort of talks in the way that everybody talks in Wonderland, 416 00:45:41,810 --> 00:45:47,210 which is a little bit upside-down, it seems to mean something, but then it doesn't quite. 417 00:45:47,210 --> 00:45:55,250 Now there's sort of, there's a way in which animals can kind of embody the dangerous potential of speech, right, 418 00:45:55,250 --> 00:46:00,440 because it's not human and so it's one step removed from us, 419 00:46:00,440 --> 00:46:06,710 we can sort of look at the dangerous possibilities of lying, of deceiving, of manipulation. 420 00:46:06,710 --> 00:46:11,750 Yeah, absolutely. So to kind of wrap up our discussion. 421 00:46:11,750 --> 00:46:17,330 Speaking about people and animals and the difference between them, it might be good to talk a little 422 00:46:17,330 --> 00:46:24,860 bit about some of the sort of human animal hybrid type creatures that we get in fantasy texts. 423 00:46:24,860 --> 00:46:32,000 And I wonder if maybe mermaids and sirens would be good. Well there's your power of speech, absolutely. 424 00:46:32,000 --> 00:46:38,190 The dangers of speech. Good segue. So tell me about mermaids. Okay, so, mermaids. 425 00:46:38,190 --> 00:46:42,080 But I mean, this is, insofar as, well. 426 00:46:42,080 --> 00:46:48,140 OK, I was going to say, insofar as humans can be domesticated, but of course we've domesticated ourselves. 427 00:46:48,140 --> 00:46:58,730 They, the mermaid over time has become the kind of soft and comfortable creature who is not at all like her original form, 428 00:46:58,730 --> 00:47:05,280 because initially we don't have mermaids, we have sirens, and we have these in classical literature. 429 00:47:05,280 --> 00:47:08,840 We have these in natural histories from that period, 430 00:47:08,840 --> 00:47:15,890 although clearly evoked as a metaphor when they appear in natural histories, they're not painted as real. 431 00:47:15,890 --> 00:47:28,310 They're described as a metaphor. And the sirens are these women who are half woman, half either fish or bird. 432 00:47:28,310 --> 00:47:40,910 They actually start off as bird women and become fish women and they lure men with their beautiful singing to their deaths in the ocean. 433 00:47:40,910 --> 00:47:42,980 So we have them as birds initially. 434 00:47:42,980 --> 00:47:52,190 And then we have some really cool bestiaries where it describes them as fish women, but shows them as bird women or vice versa. 435 00:47:52,190 --> 00:47:59,540 Or sometimes both. Does it have both? I don't remember. But then they become very clearly associated with fish only. 436 00:47:59,540 --> 00:48:06,260 But it's that singing element that associates them with birds who are known for their melodious voices, 437 00:48:06,260 --> 00:48:12,080 and then they become half fish, half woman and lure sailors to their doom. 438 00:48:12,080 --> 00:48:22,910 We have a good example. In the 13th century Middle English version of the Physiologus, which is quite a pretty version, beautifully versified. 439 00:48:22,910 --> 00:48:28,950 Its poetics are really nice. And there's a mermaid in that who lures men to their death. 440 00:48:28,950 --> 00:48:34,400 But then over time, we jump and we get The Little Mermaid film, 441 00:48:34,400 --> 00:48:42,260 which is also very interested in the power of the voice and song in a way that I hadn't really thought about until I studied mediaeval literature. 442 00:48:42,260 --> 00:48:51,560 But she's a siren as well. Her voice lures the prince and then her voice is appropriated and that lures the 443 00:48:51,560 --> 00:48:59,060 prince and dazzles him and almost leads to his doom until she gets her voice back. 444 00:48:59,060 --> 00:49:06,200 So that's really quite cool, playing with that. Yeah. My favourite character in The Little Mermaid has always been Ursula. 445 00:49:06,200 --> 00:49:10,640 Yeah, she's great. Talk about hybridity. She's brilliant. 446 00:49:10,640 --> 00:49:15,440 Well, and that's the thing. And she is more hybrid than the mermaids. 447 00:49:15,440 --> 00:49:20,840 Right. Who have sort of a full human form attached to a tail. 448 00:49:20,840 --> 00:49:25,580 They're sort of, there's the human bit and then there's the fish bit. With Ursula, 449 00:49:25,580 --> 00:49:30,680 her sort of octopus body is also her sexy dress. 450 00:49:30,680 --> 00:49:35,570 Yes. It kind of merges in a way that the other bodies don't. 451 00:49:35,570 --> 00:49:40,540 And her purple skin. And her body's different from the other bodies in the film because it's big, right? 452 00:49:40,540 --> 00:49:51,930 She's fat, she's curvaceous. And that first scene when she drapes herself over a rock and says that she's wasted away into practically nothing. 453 00:49:51,930 --> 00:49:55,460 Yeah, yeah. And she's purple throughout her body. 454 00:49:55,460 --> 00:49:57,530 So that's bringing the animal through. 455 00:49:57,530 --> 00:50:05,780 And I don't know if this is true or not, but I heard read that her character was based off the famous drag queen Divine. 456 00:50:05,780 --> 00:50:13,220 So there's another element of of complicating gender and sexuality going on there as well. 457 00:50:13,220 --> 00:50:20,450 And she's fabulous. I think about this connexion a lot because I love Divine, who was an amazing drag queen. 458 00:50:20,450 --> 00:50:26,660 The star of all of John Waters' most famous and provocative films. 459 00:50:26,660 --> 00:50:34,580 And Divine would paint herself with this incredible face, with these hugely arched, pencil thin eyebrows, 460 00:50:34,580 --> 00:50:46,400 big red lips and a beauty spot exactly the way Ursula has, and Divine sort of embodied this incredible kind of gender play. 461 00:50:46,400 --> 00:50:49,220 Right. Of femininity that was not meant to be pretty. 462 00:50:49,220 --> 00:50:58,200 That was not meant to be nice, but that was meant to be looked at and that was meant to be sexual and that was meant to take up space. 463 00:50:58,200 --> 00:51:03,590 Ursula takes up space. As we're talking about dragons, Maleficent in Sleeping Beauty. 464 00:51:03,590 --> 00:51:05,630 Right. For the sort of big boss fight. 465 00:51:05,630 --> 00:51:13,460 She turns into a dragon, she becomes a dragon for the prince to slay, to sort of make it easier that he kills her. 466 00:51:13,460 --> 00:51:17,390 She doesn't go out to face him as a woman. 467 00:51:17,390 --> 00:51:24,680 She becomes an animal so that he can kill her. Ursula for the final boss battle is herself. 468 00:51:24,680 --> 00:51:33,600 Just gigantic. Huge. Yeah. Taking up all of this space as this sort of, 469 00:51:33,600 --> 00:51:38,460 human animal hybrid with her incredible tentacles, and so, again, 470 00:51:38,460 --> 00:51:46,960 what's frightening is suspect femininity. And the huge amount of power that she has in becoming enormous and 471 00:51:46,960 --> 00:51:54,660 in taking up space is also her downfall because the ship is weaponized and can plunge into her heart and kill her, 472 00:51:54,660 --> 00:52:02,130 whereas if she'd been very small, that would've been quite difficult to do. So her power is what leads to her death. 473 00:52:02,130 --> 00:52:09,840 But isn't it kind of cool that's in such a mainstream text, we have a famous drag artist appearing? 474 00:52:09,840 --> 00:52:13,380 All Disney villains are queer-coded. Oh, wow. 475 00:52:13,380 --> 00:52:20,520 Yes, OK. I immediately thought of Scar from The Lion King, absolutely queer-coded. 476 00:52:20,520 --> 00:52:26,800 And then and also his interest in kind of moving between different communities is subversive. 477 00:52:26,800 --> 00:52:29,100 And why would he want to go and live with hyaenas? 478 00:52:29,100 --> 00:52:39,670 There's something going on there with an interest in keeping the nation pure, which is really disturbing, actually really disturbing. 479 00:52:39,670 --> 00:52:47,470 We have loads of villains like Scar and like Jafar in Disney who fall into the trope of the sissy villain. 480 00:52:47,470 --> 00:52:52,720 Yeah, right. So the hero has brawn and the villain has brains, right. 481 00:52:52,720 --> 00:53:01,840 The villain is clever and he speaks very articulately and sort of in a kind of snakelike way. Riddles, he speaks in riddles. 482 00:53:01,840 --> 00:53:06,130 Manipulative, like a dragon, like Fafnir. 483 00:53:06,130 --> 00:53:16,180 And so the sissy villain is really convenient for Disney because he doesn't engage in brutish violence of the sort that would scare children, 484 00:53:16,180 --> 00:53:27,810 but also because the sissy villain, the natural enemy to the heterosexual love story that Disney is so invested in is the disaffected queer person. 485 00:53:27,810 --> 00:53:33,520 Yeah. Yeah. And that kind of, the lack of interest in reproduction. 486 00:53:33,520 --> 00:53:39,130 There's lots of really good queer theory on queerness as death, as a death drive. 487 00:53:39,130 --> 00:53:46,480 That's the term. The death drive. Yes. Because there's no interest in reproducing in a heteronormative way. 488 00:53:46,480 --> 00:53:53,500 The only end result, then, can be death, which is theoretically very interesting, obviously not true. 489 00:53:53,500 --> 00:53:58,750 But from a theoretical perspective, they all, all those characters, embody that death drive, don't they? 490 00:53:58,750 --> 00:54:11,680 Yeah, and a desire to dismantle social structures and desire to concentrate power in themselves and a desire to prevent heterosexual union. 491 00:54:11,680 --> 00:54:18,160 Right. That's sort of their main job is to get in the way of the hero and the heroine. 492 00:54:18,160 --> 00:54:23,280 And in The Lion King, that results in a barren landscape that can't sustain itself. 493 00:54:23,280 --> 00:54:31,630 It results in death for everyone. I think it's really telling that if you want to talk about animals in fantasy and in literature, 494 00:54:31,630 --> 00:54:39,400 what you end up talking about is people, and who gets to be a person and who is aligned with the monstrous. 495 00:54:39,400 --> 00:54:42,670 Yeah, well, that's a question of hybridity, isn't it? 496 00:54:42,670 --> 00:54:49,360 We talked, we said we were going to talk about mermaids because of these creatures who are part human, part not human. 497 00:54:49,360 --> 00:54:52,660 And the discomfort of what you do with those bodies, 498 00:54:52,660 --> 00:55:04,510 what you do with the fish that can talk and has opinions and has a powerful voice or what you do with a centaur who's a powerful horse, 499 00:55:04,510 --> 00:55:10,510 an educator in classical context, but also violent and can attack you with weapons. 500 00:55:10,510 --> 00:55:17,020 All these hybrid bodies are our anxiety provoking and uncomfortable, 501 00:55:17,020 --> 00:55:25,270 and they're often aligned with other kinds of cultural anxieties and social anxieties in really interesting ways. 502 00:55:25,270 --> 00:55:32,140 And you really put your finger on it. So much of fantasy creatures is about troubling the- 503 00:55:32,140 --> 00:55:40,690 they're scary because they trouble the boundaries between things and something that is a hybrid human creature 504 00:55:40,690 --> 00:55:47,050 troubles our idea of what is human, how we define ourselves as humans, where do we start and stop, 505 00:55:47,050 --> 00:55:54,490 what makes us different from animals and mediaeval people had very fixed theological ideas 506 00:55:54,490 --> 00:55:58,840 about what distinguishes us from animals. But that's, we're still flesh and blood, right? 507 00:55:58,840 --> 00:56:06,970 We still live on the planet. We still need to eat food. And we are part of and apart from the natural world. 508 00:56:06,970 --> 00:56:12,280 And so it's troubling when those boundaries get get crossed and it's dangerous. 509 00:56:12,280 --> 00:56:17,710 Right. What's out there in the sea? Maybe it's a siren, who will lure you to your death. 510 00:56:17,710 --> 00:56:22,330 Yes. The fear of the unknown and all of these things brought together, 511 00:56:22,330 --> 00:56:29,860 which are then complicated even more when evolutionary thinking becomes the dominant narrative instead of theological thinking. 512 00:56:29,860 --> 00:56:36,940 And then that's when people start putting these, start policing these boundaries 513 00:56:36,940 --> 00:56:41,170 in really problematic ways with cultures they encounter in other contexts. 514 00:56:41,170 --> 00:56:48,850 And then you see dehumanisation and you see horrific, violent, racist thinking coming through as well, 515 00:56:48,850 --> 00:56:52,660 which we should always interrogate when we when we think about these texts. 516 00:56:52,660 --> 00:56:57,910 If you think about the power dynamics of what's going on with policing the boundaries in human-animal relationships, 517 00:56:57,910 --> 00:57:05,650 we also have to think about human-human relationships and where dehumanising other people have benefited people who 518 00:57:05,650 --> 00:57:13,330 already have an enormous amount of privilege and wealth and power. That's gone down quite dark and pedagogical route, 519 00:57:13,330 --> 00:57:21,640 but it's really important to think about. Yeah, and animal studies as a field, a field I'm really interested in, is just now realising that you 520 00:57:21,640 --> 00:57:30,430 can't talk about animality without talking about race and cultural constructions of otherness. 521 00:57:30,430 --> 00:57:34,510 Because it's always the question of who deserves to be a person. 522 00:57:34,510 --> 00:57:36,731 Yeah, absolutely.