Old Dragon-Spells

The young have so little patience for the old, sometimes, and scorn the slow and the frail.  Yet in some ways, age brings a kind of power.  Lafcadio Hearn, a notable folklorist of the early twentieth century who lived in Japan, wrote about the ways that ghosts and biological memory – the oldest remnants of humanity, as it were – shape the course of human destiny.  In Elizabeth Bisland’s collection, The Japanese Letters of Lafcadio Hearn, he argues, “The race feeling is the most powerful of all impulses; stir it deeply, – and to the living the value of life and fame and love and all else disappear like smoke; and the dead become the masters; and the living only instruments.”

Smaug is no ghost, but a vast incarnation of physical energy.  His power, though, lies not just in his body, but also in his mind and his magic.  Bilbo finds this out as he tries to hide from the beast.  “Whenever Smaug’s roving eye, seeking for him in the shadows, flashed across him, he trembled, and an unaccountable desire seized hold of him to rush out and reveal himself and tell all the truth to Smaug.  In fact he was in grievous danger of coming under the dragon-spell.” 

 

The young may hold vitality, but the old and the dragons have truth in their bones.  And, in fact, Smaug’s power may have only increased with age.  He boasts, “I laid low the warriors of old and their like is not in the world today.  Then I was but young and tender.  Now I am old and strong, strong, strong…” 

When faced with the old that are strong, with their wisdom and cunning and magnificence, it may be that the young, the naïve, the innocent, will look on with wonder and tremble… for the old dragons are still casting their spells.

Image: Arthur Rackham

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