User talk:Paularblaster/Here be dragons

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

[edit] Creating this Sandbox Talkpage

so that what has turned into rather long and rambling contribution to "Talk:Dragon" won't clutter up that page.

The existing article for Dragon is just a mess. This is an attempt to create something coherent and relatively short that can act as a staging post to main articles on different (types of) dragons. One of the reasons the original article is such a mess is that there is no systematic distinction between two superficially similar mythological phenomena that play very different roles in their respective cultures: the (generally speaking) benevolent East Asian dragon (which has its own article as "Chinese dragon"), and the (generally speaking malevolent) Indo-European dragon (which has its own article as "European dragon" - rather unfairly to the Persians, and others). The dragon as what the hero most typically slays goes through Persia into Central Asia and Northern India, as well as into Europe: there's no such beast as a "European dragon" except as a collection of all the Indo-European dragons (Greek, Roman, Germanic, Slavic, whatever) not found in Asia. The dragonslayer is one of the oldest identifiable Indo-European cultural heroes - from what I gather just about the only bit of Proto-Indo-European myth that can be asserted with any degree of confidence at all. This isn't exactly OR: I only know the secondary literature, but it is perhaps rather abstruse secondary literature (or does that count as OR? I'm not sure that most wikipedians have quite the same definition of either "original" or "research" that an academic historian has). Can anybody tell me whether there are Chinese/Japanese/Korean/Vietnamese dragonslayers?

The dragonslayer myth arose long, long before Christianity, and developed irrespective of it (but also within it), so the current article's explanation of "evil" dragons in terms of medieval biblical interpretations of dragons as serpents, and serpents as tempters, can be ditched. The biblical "dragons" are a combination of Leviathan (dragon or not?) and a mistranslation of "jackal" that goes back to the Septuagint; but they are quite distinct from the biblical Serpent.

Where to start? The OED gives dragon as (among many other things) "a mythical monster, represented as a huge and terrible reptile" - the first sentence of the wikipedia article, in my view, puts it even better. The first sentence of the "Overview" could go into the heading as well, perhaps. After that ...

Straight away distinguish between (benevolent) East Asian dragons, (malevolent) Indo-European dragons (and where to put the pre-Columbian Peruvian dragons?). Make a section on each (with links to "main article" on each: currently "Chinese dragon" and "European dragon": should we have "Pre-Columbian American dragon" too?). In each section, subsections (again with "main article" links) to Chinese, Japanese, Vietnamese / Chuvash, Slavic, etc.

"Symbolism" should be treated separately in each case: they symbolise entirely different things in the two cultures best known for their dragons (Monotheistic/Dualist Indo-European, as against Confucianist/polytheistic East Asian).

Astronomy/astrology: does the dragon of the Chinese zodiac have anything to do with the constellation Draco, or is it just a coincidence that there are stellar dragons East and West?

--Paularblaster (talk) 01:03, 20 November 2007 (UTC)