Marco Polo Visits the Land of The Lost
Marco Polo was a Venetian merchant of the 13th century, who was made famous forever by Rustichello da Pisa’s recollections of the stories Polo had told him while they were imprisoned together in Genoa.
Da Pisa was a romance writer by vocation, and Marco Polo’s life and stories were the stuff of a best-selling romance; his dealings had taken him from one end of the Silk Road to the other, into the heart of eastern cultures that were virtually unknown to the western medieval world.
Among other revelations, the ‘Descriptions of The World‘ by Rustichello da Pisa, published today under the titles ‘The Book of the Marvels of the World’ or ‘The Travels of Marco Polo’, seems to relate Marco Polo’s first-hand knowledge the existence of the flightless Chinese dragon.
Not ‘drakon’ in the classical Greek or Roman sense, which modern commentators are (nearly) unanimimous in agreeing simply means ‘gigantantic fucking snake’, but ‘dragon’ in the modern sense- that is, in the sense of a gigantic snake with legs:
'Leaving the city of yachi, and traveling ten days into a westerly direction, you reach the province of Carajan (modern Yunnan on the edge of Burma) which is also the name of its chief city... Here are seen huge serpents, ten paces in length, and ten spans in the girt of the body. At the forepart, near the head, they have two short legs, having three claws like those of a tiger, with eyes larger than a four-penny loaf and very glaring. The jaws are wide enough to swallow a man, the teeth are large and sharp, and their whole appearance is so formidable, that neither man, nor any kind of animal, can approach them without terror.
In ‘The Saga of The Volsungs’, a 13th century Icelandic prose masterpiece, we encounter an animal that matches the description furnished to us by Rustichello Da Pisa.
After Sigurd the Volsung hero has dealt the killing blow to the dragon Fafnir, Fafrnir says:
"Who urged you on this deed, and why did you let yourself be persuaded? Have you not heard that all people are afraid of me and my helm of terror? Boy with the sharp eyes, you had a keen father."
Many have accepted the alligators of the China’s Yangtze River as the most likely candidate for Marco Polo’s flightless dragon.
This explanation is both logical and compelling.
But alligators spend most of their time in the water.
Meanwhile, Marco Polo’s flightless dragon lives in caverns. Living in caverns is what dragons are famous for. And the way Marco Polo tells it, the animal he’s talking about makes a big production out of going down to the water at all:
Others are met with of a smaller size, beig eight, six, or five paces long; and the following method is used for taking them.
In the day-time, by reason of the great heat, they lurk in caverns, from whence, at night, they issue to seek their food, and whatever beast they meet with and can lay hold of, whether tiger, wolf , or any other, they devour; after which they drag themselves toward some lake, spring of water, or river, in order to drink.
By their motion in this way along the shore, and their vast weight, they make a deep impression, as if a heavy beam had been drawn along the sand.
Maybe Marco Polo never saw the creature himself, and got the story wrong. Alligators do spend some of their time on land, and they certainly drag their bellies on the ground.
But I would think that if Marco Polo’s flightless dragon were as mundane as the alligator, he would just say that. Alligators and crocodiles had been known to European merchants since ancient times by way of Egypt.
Furthermore, you would think the Chinese themselves would have said it-
I had always wondered how the regrettably fake but definitely awesome dragon would land in between a rabbit and a snake in a circle of otherwise yawn-inducing animals. It’s like saying, ‘everyone is whack except you, dear dragon, oh divine seed of heaven’.
The only reasonable conclusions that can be drawn from this disparity are either:
A) The Dragon of the Chinese Zodiac is based on an animal that actually existed, or
B) Whoever invented the Chinese Zodiac was born under the sign of the Dragon.
Marco Polo, by way of his cellmate Rustichello da Pisa, continues:
“those whose employment it is to hunt them observe the track by which they are most frequently accustomed to go, and fix into the ground several pieces of wood, armed with sharp iron spikes, which they cover with the sand in such a manner as not to be perceptible.
When therefore the animals make their way towards the places they usually haunt, they are wounded by these instruments, and speedily killed.
Driving hidden spikes into the dragon’s soft underbelly sounds similar to the way Norse-Germanic hero Sigurd slays Fafnir in ‘The Saga of The Volsungs’:
Regin said; Dig a ditch and sit in it, and then, when the serpent crawls to the water, pierce him in the heart and thus cause his death. You will win great renown for such a deed.
Explicit mention of the dragon clawing it’s way to the water in both stories isn’t enough to drive the identity between the them home, but wait-
There’s more.
The Flightless Dragon Fafnir
The crows, as soon as they percieve them to be dead, set up their scream; and this serves as a signal to the hunters, who advance to the spot, and proceed to separate the skin from the flesh, taking care immediately to secure the gall, which is most highly esteemed in medicine.
In cases of the bite of a mad dog, a pennyweight of it, dissolved in wine, is administered. It is also useful in accelerating parturition, when the labor pains of women have come on. A small quantity of it being applied to carnbuncles, pustules, or other eruptions on the body, they are presently dispersed; and it is efficacious in many other complaints. The flesh also of the animal is sold at a dear rate, being thought to have a higher flavor than other kinds of meat, and by all persons it is esteemed a delicacy."
Sigurd gains the power to understand the speech of birds when he tastes the juice of the roasted dragon’s heart, while the hunters in Marco Polo’s story approach the dragon’s corpse after hearing the signal of carrion birds.
Sigurd becomes nearly indestructible after eating the dragon’s heart, while the flesh and blood of Marco Polo’s flightless dragon are treated as both a medicine and a delicacy.
There are five points of near-absolute identity between these two stories, and they were both written down in the same century.
Let’s run through the permutations:
This could betray the Nordic origins of the Venetian merchant’s tall tale;
The wide-ranging Venetians were certainly acquainted with the roving Norse. Why should we assume they were not also acquainted with their excellent stories? The Nordic court poets, or Skaalds, enjoyed an international reputation.
The Age of the Vikings ends at about the same juncture that the Age of the Venetians begins; around 1000 AD, or within three centuries of Marco Polo’s career.
This could betray the eastern origins of the Norse legend of Fafnir.
Pliny the elder briefly mentions blonde-haired and blue-eyed traders who speak in harsh voices occupying the western shores of what is now China:
The envoys also inform us... that beyond the Himalayas are the Chinese, who are known to them through trading. Rachias' father had travelled to China; when they arrived on the coast, the Chinese always hurried to the beach to meet them.
The people themselves, so the envoy explained, are above average height, have golden-colored hair, blue eyes and harsh voices, although no conversation was had with them.
Pliny is the definition of an unreliable narrator. Remember his yarn about the moon-ritual of the Elephants?
Still, there are the Tarim mummies to consider.
And the contemporary blue-eyed populations in Zhelaizhai village, north of the Gobi Desert.
Was the legend of the flightless dragon brought north to Scandinavia by Chinese immigrants? Were some of the Nordic bloodlines technically Chinese in origin? Holy shit.
There remains the possibility that all of this means nothing. It’s rubbish, bunk, a chasing after the wind.
But as the birds in Volsung Saga famously quipped,
When I see a wolves ears, I suspect a wolf.
Is Varanus Priscus the Fafnir We're Looking For?
Here’s what I think:
Archaic life-forms survived in small pockets, and their legends travelled much further than the creatures did.
If you can’t accept dinosaur survival, what about Varanus Priscus, who’s youngest fossil dates to 50,000 years ago?
It’s a gigantic Komodo dragon. Decidedly less thrilling than a Tyranosaurus Rex or a goddamn fucking dragon.
Consider that our ancestors lived and died by their senses. Maybe they weren’t making this shit up.
Some aboriginal tribes, like the Tasmanian Palawa, maintain an oral history which scholars estimate goes back at least 12,000 years. The Palawa tell stories about stars which are no longer in the sky- stars that changed position because of the effects of polar precesion, a phenomenon that institutes its changes over a span of time that is too large for most people to fathom.
Our recorded history is only constitutes about 5,000 years; the Great Year of a full Polar Precesion is 25,700 years.
It’s me, I’m people. I have a hard time comprehending 25,700 years.
Varanus Priscus fossils have only been found in Australia. Tasmania used to be connected to Australia.
But what would an Australian/Tasmanian tribal memory be doing roaming around 13th-century mainland China? And how would this have found it’s way into a carefully preserved Norse/Germanic myth-cycle of demonstrably Frankish origin which describes events as early as the reign of Attila the hun?
Are we looking at vernacular evidence of a Land of the Lost scenario?
