I recently realized that my 4-year-old son didn’t realize that dragons are bad. Over the past while, he has taken a liking to reading parts of the Hobbit. Instead of reading from beginning to end, he chooses the part we’re going to read by looking at the maps or drawings in the book, asking about different things he sees, and then requesting to read a part of the book about the item that caught his interest.From early on, he was intrigued by the dragons he saw on the maps (Thror’s map, etc.) So we’ve spent a good deal of time reading about the dragon. We first read the chapter where Bilbo enters the mountain for the first time and chats with Smaug the dragon. So far so good. My son asked to repeat this chapter various times, since he enjoyed it and he likes the illustration at the beginning of the chapter (a water painting by Tolkien himself.)
After a while I convinced him that we could read another part about the same dragon. So, I read the part in which Smaug flies out to the lake town, destroys it, and is finally killed by the archer Bard, crashing down on top of the town itself into the lake.
At this point, my son perked up, looked at me and eagerly asked, “What happened to the
dragon?”“Well, he died,” I explained. “The archer shot him with an arrow, and he fell into the lake.”
“Why?” he asked. I saw a sad expression on his face and tears started gathering in his eyes. He was sad that the dragon had died. I realized at this point that he didn’t know the dragon was evil. So I explained that the dragon was destroying the town and killing people, so the archer had to shoot him to save the town. He thought about it, but still looked doubtful and sad.
After putting the book away I thought about it, and remembered why he was sad about the death of the dragon. The only dragon he had known of so far was the dragon in Shrek, who was a standard fairy tale dragon guarding a trapped princess to start, but turned out to be a sensitive being who falls in love with Donkey. In the end, she helps save the day and is clearly one of the protagonists and heroes of the story.
Shrek is slightly different from the trash stories about vampires and werewolves that so many people like now (and have really nothing to do with vampires or werewolves); Shrek is a light-hearted spoof; it takes knowledge of standard fairy tales for granted and turns the stories on their heads. It’s not a story to be taken seriously, but it has it’s humour about it, for those who know the fairy tales. However, there’s one major problem with the idea; children don’t know the original fairy tales any more. My generation, for the most most part, does. We at least saw the Disney versions of fairy tales (as deficient as they are), and the watered down children’s books that are based on illustrations rather than narrative, even if we never got anything better. At least we have some idea of how they work. However, my generation of parents isn’t giving fairy tales to their children – not even the watered down versions. Children think Shrek is funny, but they don’t understand that it’s making fun of another genre of stories. It’s a genre they don’t know. They don’t know that the dragon is a spoof on fairy tale dragons who kill heroes; the king she kills is unmanly wimp, and a mean one at that.
Shrek isn’t really important, but it was the cause of my son’s fair tale confusion; he got the spoof without getting the original, and simply thought that’s how dragons were. The next day he asked for the same passage of the Hobbit again. This time, I especially pointed out that this was a different kind of dragon from the one in Shrek, a bad one. He listened carefully.
“That dragon was breaking houses, right?” he asked. “He was bad, right?” He wasn’t sad this time, and seemed to understand what was happening somewhat. Since then, we’ve read this chapter a few times, and re-read the previous one, placing some special emphasis on the greedy nature of the dragon as well (I point out the big pile of gold he sleeps on and that it was stolen.)
My son learned that dragons are bad just on time; shortly afterwards a friend gave us an icon of St. George killing the dragon. Examining the icon, he pointed out to me, “This dragon is bad, like the one in The Hobbit. He’s not a good one like in Shrek. That’s why St. George is killing it.”
The icon and St. George are, of course, far more important than the fairy tales, yet The Hobbit helped give him some sort of understanding of what was going on.
The icon has a special meaning (in a double sense) for my son.
