Terror, or Ruminations On Dragons

[tlvop]

People in these days speak of terror often. They speak of flames and death and suffocation and men with axes and machine guns, they speak of cold creeping cancer, of minds turned against themselves, of that ever present danger of loss.

It is an old, tired terror. It is a terror less of the thing and more of that which promises to follow—the constant litany of but I am too young to die.

That is not what terror used to be. Terror used to be long, sinuous muscle, arched back and arched neck and arched wings, covered in scales the size of small plates. Terror used to wise, angry eyes and poisonous breath and long, fearsome fangs.

Terror used to be real, used to reach back to the hindbrain and wring tears from the bravest of men, forcing heroes to their knees out of sheer ancestral horror, overwhelmed by what stood before them.

This is terror: unbridled, untamed, and undimmed by ages past.

This is the dragon.

Comments

[rymenhild.livejournal.com]

Oh, well said. Well said.

Wæs se grimma gæst Grendel haten,
mære mearcstapa, se þe moras heold,
fen ond fæsten; fifelcynnes eard
wonsæli wer weardode hwile,
siþðan him scyppend forscrifen hæfde
in Caines cynne.

My translation won't do this passage from Beowulf justice -- try reading the Old English aloud to hear what it sounds like -- but the passage means

That grim spirit was named Grendel, the notorious walker in the borderlands, who ruled the waste, the fen in its fastness; for a time he governed the region of monsters, the unblessed men, since the Creator had exiled him among the family of Cain.

[dictator-duck.livejournal.com]

I am late! But thank you so much! And also: thank you for sharing the Beowulf suggestion with me, I am going to get it out once I am back at school. Which translation was it you suggested, again?

[rymenhild.livejournal.com]

Seamus Heaney is my personal favorite, because he's really good at communicating the feeling of the poem. Also, your university library should have a hardcover edition of Heaney with the Old English on the facing page, and even if you don't understand Old English, it's great to be able to look at it.