Martin Arnold, The Dragon: Fear and Power. London: Reaktion, 2018, 328 pp., many b/w and color ill.

The figure of the dragon represents a topic of shared interest among medievalists and modern readers young and old. The dragon is simply ‘in’ and has always appealed to public culture throughout time and also across the world. Many medieval heroic poems, many modern narratives, films, images, and other art works are deeply determined by the appearance of dragons, mostly fearsome, terrifying, alienating creatures, unless we turn to some East-Asian cultures. Dragons have been studied already for a long time, and Martin Arnold simply adds here another, well researched monograph on this topic, which covers it very broadly, although much more could be said, of course, about individual texts or art works not dealt with here. It is not easy to come to terms with dragons because they are so ubiquitous and yet refuse easy answers. They belong to the corpus of archetypal images, but there is no hard-core scientific evidence for their existence.