My son reads aloud one chapter of English book everyday as his reading training. For last two weeks, he has been reading How To Train Your Dragon (2003, C. Cowell) which is adventure and fantasy story for kids. The storyline isn’t so complicated but one expression of dragon drew my interest so much.
“A real Sea Dragon from the bottom of the ocean can swallow ten large Viking ships in one gulp and not even notice. A real Sea Dragon is a cruel, careless mystery like the mighty ocean itself, one moment calm as a scallop, the next raging like an octopus. ” (p73)
So the image of dragon is described as an incarnation of the mysterious ocean itself. This idea would be in common in the west but bit unusual for east Asian because our Ryu (Dragon) lives in the bottom of silent lake and not signified the mighty ocean. The Ryu, however, has also super-natural power and is worshiped by man.
Both ideas of dragons in the west and the east could be a result of ancient people’s effort to know the universe but it is interesting that such prototypes still dominates our minds who live in this contemporary world.
