These children, as I told, being eat;
Men, women, girls and boys,
Sighing and sobbing, came to his lodging,
And made a hideous noise:
‘O save us all, More of More Hall,
Thou peerless knight of these woods;
Do but slay this dragon, who won’t leave us a rag on,
We’ll give thee all our goods.’
‘Tut, tut,’ quoth he, ‘no goods I want;
But I want, I want, in sooth,
A fair maid of sixteen that’s brisk and keen,
And smiles about the mouth:
Hair black as sloe, skin white as snow,
With blushes her cheeks adorning;
To anoynt me o’er night, ere I go out to fight,
And to gird me in the morning.’
This being done, he did engage
To hew the dragon down;
But first he went, new armour to
Bespeak at Sheffield town;
With spikes all about, not within but without,
Of steel so sharp and strong;
Both behind and before, arms, legs, and all o’er,
Some five or six inches long.
Had you but seen him in this dress,
How fierce he looked and how big,
You would have thought him for to be
Some Egyptian porcupig:
He frighted all, cats, dogs, and all,
Each cow, each horse, and each hog;
For fear they did flee, for they took him to be
Some strange outlandish hedge-hog.
It is not strength that always wins,
For wit doth strength excell;
Which made our cunning champion
Creep down into a well,
Where he did think this dragon would drink,
And so he did in truth;
And as he stooped low he rose up and cried ‘boh!’
And hit him in the mouth.
Our politick knight, on the other side
Crept out upon the brink,
And gave the dragon such a crack,
He knew not what to think.
‘Aha,’ quoth he, ‘say you so, do you see?’
And then at him he let fly
With hand and with foot, and so they both went to’t,
And the word it was, hey, boys, hey!
‘Oh,’ quoth the dragon with a deep sigh,
And turned six times together,
Sobbing and tearing, cursing and swearing,
Out of his throat of leather;
‘More of More Hall! O thou rascàl!
Would I had seen thee never;
With that thing at thy foot thou hast pricked me sore,
And I’m quite undone for ever.’
‘Murder, murder,’ the dragon cried,
‘Alack, alack, for grief;
Had you but missed that place, you could
Have done me no mischief.’
Then his head he shaked, he trembled and quaked,
And down he laid and cried;
First on one knee, then on back tumbled he,
And groaned, and kicked, and died.”
We sometimes see allusions in poetry and the press to the sowing of dragons’ teeth. The reference is always to some subject of civil strife, to some burning question that rouses the people of a state to take up arms against each other.
The incident is derived from the old classic legend of the founding of Thebes by Kadmos. Arriving on the site of the future city, he proposed to make a sacrifice to the protecting goddess Athene, but on sending his men to a not far distant fountain for water, they were attacked and slain by a terrible dragon. Kadmos thereupon went himself and slew the monster, and at the command of Athene sowed its teeth in the ground, from whence immediately sprang a host of armed giants. These on the instant all turned their arms against each other, and that too with such fury that all were presently slain save five. Kadmos invoked the aid of these giants in the building of the new city, and from these five the noblest families of Thebes hereafter traced their lineage. The myth has been the cause of much perplexity to scholars and antiquaries, but it has been fairly generally accepted that the slaying of the dragon after it had destroyed many of the followers of Kadmos indicates the final reduction of some great natural obstacle, after some few or more had been first vanquished by it. We may imagine such an obstacle to colonisation as a river hastily rising and sweeping all before it in its headlong flood, or an aguish and fever-breeding morass. The springing-up of the armed men from the soil has been construed as signifying that the Thebans in after times regarded themselves as the original inhabitants of the country—no mere interlopers, but sons of the soil from time immemorial; while their conflicts amongst themselves, as their city rose to fame, have been too frequently reflected time after time elsewhere to need any very special exposition.