Inspiring A Writer—The Mordiford Dragon
When a myth comes along and hands you your heroine, who am I to argue? Meet the Mordiford Dragon.
Most of the time when one is slogging through the research process in hopes of getting the right information for a story, one ends up doing some head thumping. Ok, maybe quite a bit of it. Like discovering that, although I desperately wanted my characters to put something into a spray bottle (atomizer) the necessary technology had been invented about thirty years after the time of the story making it effectively impossible. *headthump*
Following some protected head thumping, one turns back to the research, hoping to find some way to work around the lack of necessary technology. Sometimes one comes up with some really creative ideas … and sometimes one ends up deep in the research rabbit hole, in a dark dead end ditching that plot idea and searching for another.
Very rarely—all right, almost never—does one just happen into a magical piece of information that totally makes a story go from pretty good, to just plain “oh-my-gosh-this-is-freaking-awesome!” One of those moments came when I discovered the Mordiford Dragon.
Until that point, nearly all the dragon myths I’d read fell into the category of “dragon terrorizes town, man kills dragon” variety. But this one was totally different, if for no other reason, a woman and a dragon were at the forefront of the story. That alone riveted my attention, but wait, my friends, it gets better! In young Maud of Mordiford, I found the inspiration for Elizabeth Bennet, a woman whose sympathy for and understanding of dragonkind goes far and away beyond anything England has ever known.
The story of Maud and the Mordiford dragon (a wyvern actually, not the more typical ‘worm’—hmm, that doesn’t remind you of anything, does it?) is set in the Herefordshire village of Mordiford. Young Maud is terribly lonely and misunderstood by her parents. She desperately wants a pet, but her parents do not agree. So she spends a lot of time out wandering in the woods alone.
One day, Maud finds a green baby wyvern while on her morning walk. She takes the baby back to her home as a pet and feeds it milk, comforting it by stoking its claws and cuddling it. (Cuddling a dragon, not killing it! Yes, this had to be only the myth around featuring such a thing! Yeah, writers really do get excited by pretty weird things. But I digress…)
As the creature grows older, it starts dining on the Mordiford villagers, but refuses to injure his friend Maud. Despite her best efforts, she is unable to convince the creature to restrain himself. Not surprisingly, the villagers insist this is intolerable and find a nobleman (or condemned convict, depending on the version of the tale) to dispatch the beast.
Maud was described as ‘insane with rage’ over the death of her wyvern. A painting of the creature hung in the village church until 1811 when the vicar ordered it destroyed as a ‘sign of the devil’.
So many inspirations in this tale! Herefordshire/Hertfordshire, Mordiford/Meryton, ok, not the same, but it did make me do a double take for sure. A girl who is misunderstood by her parents and loved a baby dragon; who rescues dragons and cuddles with them; a grumpy wyvern that others cannot seem to get along with. Certainly such a woman would fit into a world where dragons and men lived together under the Pendragon Accords, and might even be a force to be reckoned with there. What better inspiration from which to draw Elizabeth Bennet.
It isn’t difficult to imagine a woman who loves dragons being well versed in their stories and telling them herself, perhaps even being very aware of line between the myth and reality within those stories. That little thought informed one of my favorite scenes in Longbourn: Dragon Entail, and will visit that next week to wrap up this little look into the odd headspace of a writer!
So what was the last time you found inspiration somewhere and what came of it? Tell me in the comments!
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Many years ago, I was the organist at Mordiford Church. In the Middle Ages, I was told, a picture of the dragon was painted on the west wall of the church. The creature was said to live in or near the River Lugg under Mordiford Bridge. Because the place where the Lugg joins the much larger River Wye is close by, the area was prone to violent floods after heavy rain. Any destruction and loss of life was then blamed on the dragon.
That’s amazing, William!
After weathering the floods from Harvey last year, I can well see why such things would be attributed to a dragon!
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