Online Talk: Dragons and their Hoards

The dragon in his barrow, guarding heathen gold, has coiled around the English imagination since Beowulf. The existence of dragons is open to question but buried treasure is real. Its myths have been traced to an archaeological and ritual setting – barrow burials with grave-goods, the social afterlife of the dead in mounds, the identification of dead bodies with snakes and the association of snakes with wealth. If we bring these themes together we have a cohesive explanation for legends like that of Fafnir on the cursed gold. But is that too neat? A critical examination suggests that the hill of the dragon is not the mythical reflex of actual barrows, but instead a local and short-lived variation on images created as Germanic people engaged with Roman soldiers, Oriental textiles, Mediterranean snake-cults, Latin storytellers and Christian missionaries – as well as bags of hidden gold. Jeremy Harte has scanned landscapes legendary and real for his latest book Treasures on Earth and this promises to be a (metaphorically) enriching talk.