Indeed dragons not only existed from our earliest history, they’ve been seen as recently as the 19th century, with some references in the early 20th.
However, the most famous dragon is probably the one memorialized in Lewis Carroll’s poem, Jabberwocky.
The opening of the poem, in his own handwriting, appears below:
This poem was written in 1855 for Carroll's family, and later published as part of the famous novel, Alice in Wonderland.
Lewis Carroll’s childhood
Lewis Carroll--whose real name was Charles Lutwidge Dodgson--was raised in Croft on Tees, in Yorkshire just south of Darlington. His father was the rector at Croft, and the rectory gardens were probably the inspiration for the most famous scenes in Alice in Wonderland.
Amid pastoral glory, local legend honors the Sockburn Peninsula, the southernmost area which is formed where the River Tees makes a wide turn about a mile east of Carroll’s town of Croft.
Sockburn, in County Durham, has always been a agricultural center, and is famous for Viking-age sculpture.
Sockburn Peninsula was also the home of a worm, wyrm, or more popularly, wyvern.
Worms and Wyverns
The word comes from the German, lindwurm, which means “snake-worm.”
In both Anglo-Saxon and Viking legends, “worms” are usually vicious dragons.
In modern tradition, a worm or wyvern is a dragon that appears like a large serpent, but with wings, two legs with talons for feet, and a tail with a large barbed point.
Our classic images of dragons are often based upon this “worm” image, partly thanks to the illustration by Italian naturalist, Ulisse Aldrovandi, who owned the body of a lindworm that had been killed near Bonn in 1572.
Aldrovani’s 1640 book, The History of Serpents and Dragons, included his illustration of a classic dragon, based on his own specimen, as well as an earlier sketch by Pierre Belon.
So, we can assume that the Sockburn Worm was a large and winged dragon.
The Legend of the Sockburn Worm
The Sockburn Worm was well-known through the 14th century as a dangerous dragon which had ravaged the area, regularly killing and eating almost all of the nearby livestock.
Sockburn residents were terrified of the Worm, for it had killed several men who’d challenged it. Likewise, the local economy suffered badly since this part of Northern Yorkshire relied upon agriculture for income.
There would have been a far larger loss of life if the people of Sockburn had no warning of the dragon’s approach. Fortunately, the dragon’s venom gave him such an odor, people could find shelter as he approached and only the livestock were lost.
Go To Page: 1 2
