ROMANIAN DRAGONS
IN PETRE ISPIRESCU’S TALES
-an article by Alastair McBeath & Andrei Dorian Gheorghe
first published in The Dragon Chronicle,
Number 17, 2000 (Year of the Dragon)
Petre Ispirescu (1830-1887) is considered the most important Romanian collector
of old tales and legends.
When he was 14 years old, he worked as an apprentice printer,
later becoming the chief of the Romanian national printing works.
His principal book “Legends or Tales of the Romanians” was published in 1882,
and we have selected from the modern reprint (“Legende sau basmele romanilor”,
Publishing House for Literature, Bucharest, 1968) three balauri tales
to present in abridged form here.
The balauri are one type of Romanian dragon, as we discussed in an earlier article
(see TDC 13, July 1998, pp.21-23).
THE SEVEN-HEADED BALAUR
An emperor was terrorized by an evil, seven-headed balaur which lived
near his fortress, in a deep pit.
From time to time, the beast attacked and killed people who lived
around the fortress.
Things got so bad the emperor was forced to announce that whoever killed the
balaur would receive in reward half his empire and his daughter’s hand in marriage.
A group of young men formed themselves into an association to achieve the killing
of the dragon, and lay in wait for it near the castle wall.
They decided they should keep a fire going all night long for warmth and protection,
and vowed to kill whichever of them should let it go out.
The balaur appeared one night, when all but one of the young men slept,
the guardian of the fire.
He was a courageous youth though, and fought the dragon alone, conquering it,
and cutting off all seven of its heads.
Unluckily for him, the balaur’s blood flowed all over the fire, and put it out.
He went to find fire to rekindle the blaze, but had the forethought to cut out the
seven dragon’s tongues before he did so, in order to be sure of proving
his claim to having killed the beast.
As he went along, he met three characters who were responsible for the flow
of time: Murgila (whose name derives from amurg, “evening”),
Miazanoapte (“midnight”) and Zorila (from zori, “dawn”).
He tied each one of them to a separate tree, which perhaps represents his being
able to halt the flow of time temporarily, while he completed his errand.
These three figures appear to be stars in the Romanian folklore,
representing the passage of the night.
They might be the planet Jupiter seen in the evening sky, the star Vega
in Lyra the Lyre (known as the Great Star of Midnight in Romanian starlore)
and the planet Venus in the morning sky, all in summertime.
Further along, our hero managed to find a blazing fire, but the one-eyed giants
whose fire it was caught him and made him their prisoner.
Fortunately, he was able to escape quite quickly from their clutches, and taking
with him a burning brand from their fire, he returned to his comrades,
liberating the three guardians of the night from their trees on his way.
When he got back to the encampment, he found someone had stolen
the severed balaur’s heads.
This turned out to be a gipsy, who presented himself and the heads to the emperor,
claiming his prize as the saviour of the fortress.
The gipsy could not explain the missing tongues, however, whereupon our hero
presented said tongues, revealing the truth as to who had really killed the balaur.
He then received his promised reward.
GEORGE THE BRAVE
An imperial couple were very sad because they had no children.
Then one night, the empress dreamed that she walked in a field in which
all the flowers were paired-off, inclining their heads towards one another, kissing.
Butterflies also flew in pairs all over the meadow.
Suddenly, a terrific flying balaur appeared, chasing after a turtle dove,
which flew down and hid itself in the empress’s bosom.
Shocked and scared, the empress awoke with a start,
and discovered she was miraculously pregnant, giving birth nine months later
to a boy they named George.
George’s early destiny was to be difficult, however.
His parents lost him in a forest, where he was saved and suckled by a she-goat,
till an old forester found him.
The forester took the boy in as his adopted son, and when he grew into a youth,
he became a blacksmith in a nearby town.
This town was terrorized by Scorpia (see our article in TDC 14, October 1998,
pp.25-27, for details of this terrible draconic creature).
George decided he had to kill this “mother of the zmei”
(zmei are another type of Romanian dragon, detailed in our TDC 13 article).
To do so, he forged a strong sword, and lay in wait for her.
When Scorpia appeared, she was sucking in the air
and everybody she chanced to meet with it.
George was not dismayed.
He leapt at her, and plunged his sword right through her and on into the earth,
splitting Scorpia in two.
Then he bathed in her blood as it gushed forth, which made him invincible.
Later, he discovered his true imperial origins, and returned to his proper home.
This tale seems to be younger than the other Romanian dragon legends.
There are clear echoes from Greek myths in it too - the suckling of Zeus by the
goat-nymph Amaltheia, for instance, and the near-total invulnerability of
Achilles of Iliad fame or Siegfried in the Niebelung Saga.
THE THREE GOLDEN POMEGRANATES
A cheeky young prince was cursed by an old woman not to marry before
he could find the three golden pomegranates.
He set off on a long journey to seek them, and he eventually discovered the
garden in which they grew.
One of the obstacles he had to overcome to gain entrance to the garden
was a huge balaur, who had one wide-open jaw touching the sky,
and the other lying on the earth.
The prince boldly greeted the balaur with a cheery, “Good day, brother!”
The balaur was highly impressed by his friendly attitude, and replied,
“Good luck, brother!”, and allowed the prince to enter the garden
and take the three golden pomegranates.
The garden was a beautiful, paradisiacal place, but as the prince took
the three pomegranates, the garden shouted for help and cried to the
balaur to stop the prince.
The balaur replied, “No! Because I was forever punished to stay with
my mouth wide open, and my eyes fixed only on the stars, nobody ever said
‘Good day!’ to me before, or called me ‘brother’.
This man has by his kindness freed me from an age-old curse.”
So the prince escaped, and in one of the magical pomegranates, he discovered
his future wife, but that, as they say, is another story for another time!
We suggest there may be an astronomical explanation for this tale.
It may be due to the recognition of the slow shifting of the pole in the sky
over thousands of years.
At one time, around 3000 BCE, the pole star was Thuban in
the constellation Draco the Dragon, sometimes known as Alpha Draconis.
Now, the pole’s position has drifted to a point very close to the star Polaris
in Ursa Minor, the Little Bear.
The “liberation” of the dragon connecting the earth and the sky would occur as the
pole’s position moved out of Draco into the Little Bear, around 2000-3000 years ago.
See Alastair McBeath’s book Sky Dragons & Celestial Serpents
(Dragon’s Head Press, 1998) pp.2-3 for more details of this effect, called precession.
The tale also partly echoes that of the guardian dragon Ladon in the Greek myth
of the Garden of the Hesperides, who protected the golden fruits of
(probably astronomical) knowledge.
In the Greek tale the fruits were apples, not pomegranates, however.
…………………………………………………
BALAUR HAIKU
-by Andrei Dorian Gheorghe-
Guardian, good or
bad, strange like Alpha Draco-
nis losing its Pole.
|
|
|