Nicholas Jubber
‘The dragon’s coming!’ said the woman beside me.
‘It better be,’ her partner added, ‘we’ve been waiting long enough!’
Down the high street came Tradinno the Dragon, making its way through the Bavarian town of Furth im Wald. Fifteen metres long, with wings vibrating over its scaly body, it breathed out fire behind teeth the size of stalactites – a magnificent contraption that needs five operators to keep it moving. It was preceded by a crowd of hundreds, dressed in chainmail, leather jerkins and raggedy tunics, pushing barrows loaded with animal skins and carrying banners and flags.
The people of Furth im Wald have been parading around their dragon since at least 1590. So deeply is the occasion rooted in the local culture that when church authorities tried to ban it in the nineteenth century, a civil conflict erupted, with gunshots fired and stones hurled through church windows. The climax of the occasion is the ‘Drachenstich’, a dragon-slaying drama that roughly maps the storyline of Saint George and the dragon. Previous generations saw the dragon as a symbol of romantic fantasy, a catch-all for Nazi-era prejudices, a representation of the Eastern Bloc during the Cold War. For the author and director behind the current iteration, Alexander Etzel-Ragusa, the dragon now ‘is echoing some of the issues we are dealing with today, climate change and our ecological crisis. The dragon stands for creation itself, for nature, and how man is treating nature. This is what we see with climate change, when nature strikes back.’
Around the world, on a series of journeys exploring the roots and histories behind monsters and the communities that gather around them, I witnessed a similar dynamic: monsters as visions into the climate crisis. It’s logical enough: for thousands of years, monsters have represented the wild places that humans gazed at, from Grendel skulking in the fens of mythical Denmark to the horned, shapeshifting oni of Japanese lore that haunt the snowy mountain passes. If we want to preserve the wild places, it stands to reason we must turn to the chimerae that countless generations have imaginatively installed there. Previously perceived as warning signs to tread no further – keep out of the woods, away from the mountain, out of the lake – now they are being remodelled as totemic figures to rally around, shorthand for entire environments.
In Cornwall, whose granite cliffs and standing stones have inspired a raft of folklore about giants, I volunteered at an annual pageant in the community of St Agnes, holding a collection tin as I joined the parade-goers following the giant Bolster’s path to a seaswept cliff. According to a tale that dates back at least as far as the eighteenth century, Bolster fell in love with a saint, who tricked him into bleeding himself to death in a cliff-hole. As Soozie Tinn, one of the pageant regulars and co-author of the rhyming script the performers were reciting, put it: ‘In the story, Bolster returns to the fields, the gorse and the heather, all these features that are specific to Cornwall, the things that Cornish people have grown up with.’ The story might require the giant to fall (in this case, he collapses to the ground, and ‘blood-runners’ carry long threads of red fabric down the cliffs to represent his blood-letting), but there’s a collective sigh in the audience as the giant falls. It’s the giant, after all, that everybody’s come to see – not the saint who tricks him to his death.
Across the Atlantic, down amongst the lakes and bayous of Louisiana, I found another monster bringing a community together, representing the wild places around them. In this case it was the rougarou, a werewolf whose name derives from the French ‘loup-garou’, reflecting the story’s ancestry in sixteenth century France before emigrants fled famine and religious wars. The communities that gather in southern Louisiana have faced many trials over the centuries, and in recent years they have been beset by natural disasters. When I visited, they were recovering from Hurricane Ida, whose 150mph blasts had carried off trees, roofs, cars, even entire houses. For Jonathan Foret, organiser of the Rougaroufest, this was an opportunity to come together, celebrating Louisiana’s distinctive culture and the community around Houma. ‘People are moving away, we’re losing so much land to the salt water, people are losing their livelihoods. So this gives people something to come back for, it enables them to share who they are.’ It’s one of the marvellous contradictions about monsters: ephemeral they may be, but few ideas are so deeply rooted, so bound to place.
As campaigners look for ways to marshall community spirit and gather to speak up for nature and our relationship with it, monsters are increasingly vital. We see this on Dartmoor, where Old Crockern – said to be visible on Crockern Tor – provides a visual rallying-point for the campaign to wild camp. In Orkney, I listened to tales of shapeshifting selkies, often wound around humanity’s extractive attitude to the sea; in Morocco, I heard creepy tales of the djinn, haunting people who’d strayed into their wild, abandoned patches. The fear of these supernatural beings as predators attacking intruders on their turf has always co-existed with ideas of protection and guardianship. But where narrative emphasis used to nudge more towards the hero’s journey, nowadays it’s inching towards the monsters and what makes them tick.
Which brings us back to the original meanings of the term: from the Latin ‘monstrare’ – to show, but also connected with ‘monere’ – to warn. Monsters have always warned us about our relationship with the wild places – all the way back to Humbaba the Terrible, who guards the cedar forest in the ancient epic of Gilgamesh, before the hero and his super-human companion Enkidu tear him down. ‘Monere’: the warning roars, louder than ever.
Respect the monsters and the wild places they guard.
Respect, or beware what will come to pass.
For Alexander in Furth im Wald, the dragon-slaying needed to be updated to recognise the dragon’s wrath and the logic behind it: ‘In our story,’ Alexander explained, ‘the dragon is not simply a monster. It watches over the people, guards them, keeps away dangerous animals like wolves, and gives them fire. But when it sees what they do with this new technology, the dragon is enraged.’ Which is why we need to follow the monsters – Tradinno the Dragon, Bolster the Giant, the Rougarou, Old Crockern, all the others. Follow them, gather around them, and heed their warnings. They are as magnificent as nature, as magnificent as the human imagination – for they combine these two wild forces, which are surely the wildest we know.
Nicholas Jubber is the author of six books of non-fiction and a winner of the Stanford/Dolman Travel Book Award. He can be found at instagram @nickjubber. His latest book is Monsterland: a journey around the world’s dark imagination.
Call to action: Read old tales of monsters and see how different ages have perceived them. Celebrate your neighbourhood monster at a communal occasion.