作者: raiderho@smth.edu.cn
標題: DRAGONS silverharpe(轉寄)
時間: Fri May 7 08:16:40 2004
DRAGONS
Songs and stories indicate that dragons existed
before any other living creature. The Old Hardic
kennings or euphemisms for the word dragon are
Firstborn, Eldest, Elder Children. (The words for the
firstborn child of a family in Osskilian, akhad, and in
Kargish, gadda, are derived from the word haath,
"dragon," in the Old Speech.)
Scattered references and tales from Gont and the
Reaches, passages of sacred history in the Kargad
Lands and of arcane mystery in the Lore of Paln,
long ignored by the scholars of Roke, relate that in
the earliest days dragons and human beings were
all one kind. Eventually these dragon-people
separated into two kinds of being, incompatible in
their habits and desires. Perhaps a long
geographical separation caused a gradual natural
divergence, a differentiation of species. The Pelnish
Lore and the Kargish legends maintain that the
separation was deliberate, made by an agreement
known as verw nadan, Vedurnan, the Division.
These legends are best preserved in Hur-at-Hur,
the easternmost of the Kargad Lands, where
dragons have degenerated into animals without
high intelligence. Yet it is in Hur-at-Hur that people
keep the most vivid conviction of the original
kinship of human and dragon kind. And with these
tales of ancient times come stories of recent days
about dragons who take human form, humans who
take dragon form, beings who are in fact both
human and dragon.
However the Division came about, from the
beginning of historical time human beings have
lived in the main Archipelago and the Kargad Lands
east of it, while the dragons kept to the
westernmost isles-and beyond. People have
puzzled at their choosing the empty sea for their
domain, since dragons are "creatures of wind and
fire," who drown if plunged under the sea. But they
have no need to touch down either on water or on
earth; they live on the wing, aloft in air, sunlight,
starlight. The only use a dragon has for the ground
is some kind of rocky place where it can lay its eggs
and rear the drakelets. The small, barren islets of
the farthest West Reach suffice for this.
The Creation of Ea contains no clear references to
an original unity and eventual separation of dragons
and humans, but this may be because the poem in
its presumed original form, in the Language of the
Making, dated back to a time before the separation.
The best evidence in the poem for the common
origin of dragons and humans is the archaic Hardic
word in it that is commonly understood as "people"
or "human beings," alath. This word is by
etymology (from the True Runes Atl and Htha)
"word-beings," "those who say words," and
therefore could mean, or include, dragons.
Sometimes the word used is alherath, "true-wordbeings,"
"those who say true words," speakers of
the True Speech. This could mean human wizards,
or dragons, or both. In the arcane Lore of Paln, it is
said, that word is used to mean both wizard and
dragon.
Dragons are born knowing the True Speech, or, as
Ged put it, "the dragon and the speech of the
dragon are one." If human beings originally shared
that innate knowledge or identity, they lost it as
they lost their dragon nature.