Tag: dragons

sewickedthread:

planeoftheeclectic:

personalprofundity:

redcabbageparty:

mzminola:

tanoraqui:

bladeoffenris:

amiseeingyourcolourormine:

raserus:

LIL BABBY

U CANT SCARE THE OCEAN

GO LAY DOWN

IT LOOKS LIKE TOOTHLESS

I like to believe that all the dragons in the world were magically cursed and turned into cats. But cats have never forgotten where they come from, hence the attitude.

I nearly didn’t reblog this but the above comment makes more sense than anything I’ve ever heard.

…that’s…that’s actually a story my mom used to tell me when I was little? That a dragon showed up at someone’s cottage so they gave it milk. And the dragon enjoyed the milk, so it kept coming back and got smaller and softer and purry-er until eventually it wasn’t a dragon anymore, it was a cat, and that’s where cats came from and why we keep giving them milk.

She might have gotten the story from Ursula K. Le Guin, or I have confused it with a different dragon story.

That’s also why cats tend to hoard their toys behind the couch!

Actually the story is even older. Written by a woman named Edith Nesbit, first published in 1899, it is called “The Dragon Tamers”. It predates Leguin and other fantasy biggies like Lewis and Tolkien.

Nesbit actually can be credited with being one of the first authors that began to shift myths and legends to more fantasy-like stories (fantasy as a genre how we know it, wasn’t around then because it was just part of literature, especially British literature). In fact, many scholars who study fantasy literature and children’s literature believe that, since her children’s stories were so popular with children in England, the stories and their content prompted Tolkien (the first to coin fantasy as its own genre in his essay “On Fairy Stories”) to take up the stories of dragons and elves and fairies as they’d have been children when she was writing.

Tolkien was born in 1892. He would have been 7 when “The Dragon Tamers” was first published. Edith Nesbit did a LOT for modernizing myths, legends, and lore as a children’s author, maybe more than we will ever know.

http://www.online-literature.com/edith-nesbit/book-of-dragons/6/

Let’s hear it for Edith Nesbit.