Marduk Wrote:
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> "Why's it very telling? "
>
> because the church claimed to have defeated
> serpents all over the place where there were none
> to be defeated except in Wales which they had
> trouble christianising

'They' never had trouble "christianising" Wales because Christianity was well established in Wales by the end of the fifth century CE ... long before the "christianised anglo saxons" put in an appearance.

As for the Welsh keeping their "monstrous serpent" because they "were never conquered by christianised anglo saxons" (cue image of the fluttering Welsh Dragon on its field of green and white), this is just silly, which is why I drew attention to the dragon standards of the Christian Anglo-Saxon kings in my previous post.

Besides, given your argument above, it strikes me as being a little ironic that the red dragon became the official Welsh flag in 1953 at the direct behest of Queen Elizabeth II, an archetypal ‘christianised anglo saxon’ monarch if ever there was one.

> did you miss the point or what Damian

I didn't miss the point. I just didn't think your 'point' had much to commend it in the first place.

Incidentally, the story of St George slaying the dragon is first mentioned in a late thirteenth-century Latin collection of saints' lives. By that date, the story would have been understood as a straight-forward allegory of a true Christian defeating the Devil, and is unlikely to have been understood as referring to pre-existing pagan practices.

As far as the association of St George and the Dragon with Dragon Hill in Berkshire is concerned, the earliest record of this association dates from as recently as the mid-1850s. There's also a local tradition in Herefordshire (recorded in the early twentieth century) that the fight between St George and the Dragon took place in the village of Brinsop. Needless to say, neither tradition has much to commend it in terms of antiquity.

Oh, and as far as the tale of St Columba and the monster of "the River Ness" is concerned, I think you'll find that the original source doesn't make any claims that Columba banished the monster permanently. It was more a temporary command to "Go back at once", at which the monster "fled away" from the swimmer it was about to attack. There's no particular description of the monster either, so there's no reason to assume it was necessarily a dragon or a serpent. After all, the majority of lake-monsters and river-monsters in Scottish, Irish and Welsh traditions are described as horses or cows; others as monsters combining a horse's head with the body of an eel, serpent, or fish.






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My dear sir, in this world it is not so easy to settle these plain things. I have ever found your plain things the knottiest of all.

- Moby-Dick by Herman Melville

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'I am beginning to believe that nothing is quite so uncertain as facts.

- Edward S. Curtis

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'We are coming now rather into the region of guesswork', said Dr Mortimer.
'Say, rather, into the region where we balance probabilities and choose the most likely. It is the scientific use of the imagination, but we have always some material basis on which to start our speculation', [replied Holmes].

- The Hound of the Baskervilles by Arthur Conan Doyle

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'It never does to be too sure, you know, in these matters. Coincidence killed the professor.'

- "Novel of the Black Seal" by Arthur Machen