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The Ellesmere dragons

Abstract In addition to the famed pilgrim portraits, the Ellesmere Canterbury Tales includes two small marginal dragons: one at the opening of the General Prologue and one on the first page of the Clerk’s Prologue. Drawing on recent marginalia scholarship, this essay makes the case for taking these images seriously and sees them as symbols of the marvelous that draw attention to the marvelous elements in the poem. While no dragons directly appear to the tale narrators or characters, several allusions demonstrate that dragons signify in a range of medieval discourses (proverbial, literary, scientific, and religious) and that these diverse representations depend on a common understanding of dragons as marvelous creatures. The marginal dragons visually invoke the same associations. The first points with one wing toward the narratives to come, encouraging readers to look for marvels of all kinds. The second holds in its tail a rectangular object that might be a treasure or a book, reminding readers of the elasticity of the medieval concept of the marvelous. Taken together, the dragons suggest that we might read the Canterbury Tales as a collection of marvels; that generic context draws attention not only to the marvels themselves but also to the ways in which the poem manipulates the borders between fiction and reality, between texts structured in parallel and those structured by a narrative arc, and between the roles of writer and eyewitness.