Our book today is a delightful winner: The Penguin Book of Dragons, edited by Scott Bruce, who here completes his trilogy of terrific original anthologies, following The Penguin Book of the Undead and The Penguin Book of Hell. This latest book shares all the qualities of the earlier two: a refreshingly unconventional scope, a sharp editor’s eye, and an almost lock-solid guarantee of introducing readers to something they’ve never seen before (to put it mildly, this last can be elusive in dragon anthologies particularly).

“We live in the golden age of dragons,” Bruce writes in his Introduction, pointing to everything from movies like The 7th Voyage of Sinbad or Dragonslayer to The Hobbit (on page and screen), George R. R. Martin’s Song of Ice and Fire, and, charmingly, the continuing popularity of the role-playing game Dungeons & Dragons (the book is dedicated to Gary Gygax, here lovingly dubbed “emperor of the imagination”), and half a dozen other popular manifestations that currently rule the geek zeitgeist. 

Thanks to Bruce’s selections here, it’s easy to see that this zeitgeist is as old as humanity. The book presents excerpts from dragon-lore extending back to the ancient Greeks and Romans, extending forward through the early years of Christianity, the poetry of the Dark Ages (including, of course, Beowulf), selections from Geoffrey of Monmouth, Marco Polo, Edmund Spenser’s Faerie Queene, and Milton’s Paradise Lost. 

The literature of the East is also briefly sampled, with selections from the Rig Veda and the Shahnameh of Ferdowsi. Likewise a bit of the vast body of dragon-mentions in children’s literature is given through Kenneth Grahame and Edith Nesbit. 

One of the quickest and most interesting sections of the book features a couple of excerpts from American newspapers - first-hand accounts from astonished onlookers out West. “Toward the end of the nineteenth century, people living and working in remote corners of the western United States reported harrowing encounters with these large winged reptiles,” Bruce writes. “Local newspapers printed breathless accounts of these episodes for a few short decades before the encroachment of human settlements and the development of modern technologies drove the American dragon into the realm of myth and fantasy.” 

In a sense, this volume is one long record of that retreat. The more experienced and travelled a witness is, the smaller and more specific their witnessed beast turns out to be - and the larger and more impressive fictional dragons became. The most notable absence here is the most predictable: the book might open with a quick epigraph from Tolkien, but it contains no excerpted passage about Smaug, alas. Readers should concentrate instead on the bounty of shrewd pickings from history - and try not to pine too much for more volumes like this one from Bruce.