Great Dragon Research Articles

B Flach! B Flach!

B Flach! B Flach!

Time and space, Satan (Devil, Ancient Serpent, Deceiver, and Accuser), and Michael in Revelation

Understanding the theme of atonement as articulated in The Apocalypse (Revelation) requires cognizance of time and space, particularly when John describes the battle between Michael and the Great Dragon (alias Devil, Satan, Deceiver, and Accuser). After providing a summary investigation of these related biblical characters, this article emphasizes how the simultaneity of the events described in the heavenly and earthly visions of Rev 12:5–10 expresses the means of victory won by Jesus on the cross. The way in which the male Child wins the ultimate victory over evil is the same as the means of the Child’s ascendency to the throne—His death. The Dragon’s defeat by Michael in heavenly combat is one-and-the-same as the Satan’s defeat by the earthly self-sacrifice of the Child.

Narrating a Fantasmatic Unity: On the Contemporary Sinophone Discourse of China’s Civilizational Subjectivity

A powerful discourse centered on China’s civilizational subjectivity has emerged in the Sinophone intellectual world since the early 2000s. Among many promoters of this intellectual trend, Gan Yang, together with his slogan of the “fusion of three traditions,” is indeed most influential. This study employs Lacanian psychoanalytic technics to tackle Gan Yang’s thesis, treating the latter not just an object for textual analysis, but more deeply (and fruitfully), that for psychoanalysis. The findings of the study reveal the presence of a fantasmatic structure framing and guaranteeing Gan’s (sharply inconsistent) vision of China’s civilizational subjectivity. Such fantasmatic formation can be referred to as the “Great Dragon fantasy”—a fantasy about China’s civilizational unity and glory.

“The Wreck of the Deutschland” and the Birth of the Poet: Literary Form, Performative Utterance, and Hopkins’s “Gift of Tears”

dost thou touch me afresh? Over feel thy finger and find thee. Gerard Manley Hopkins (1) last thing one discovers composing work is what put first. Blaise Pascal (2) must tell you, writes Hopkins Robert Bridges 1878, I am sorry you never read Deutschland again. (3) Bridges's resistance his friend's dense and difficult poem had been immediate, intense, and enduring: following his first encounter with it 1877, he assures Hopkins that he would for any money read [the] poem again (CW, 1: 282). Even when he eventually brings it into print more than forty years later, Bridges characterizes ode as a great dragon folded gate of Hopkins's work--a phrase that has since become something of critical commonplace. (4) And not without reason: Hopkins admits his frustrated friend that his poem needs study and is and allows, with telling litotes, that he was over-desirous that meaning of all should be quite clear (CW, 1: 295). Nearly century of divergent commentary on poem has confirmed Hopkins's understatement while validating Bridges's experience--described his notes ode--of being shamefully worsted by dragon in brave frontal assault (p. 106n). Some scholars have taken Bridges's advice (which is modeled on Hopkins's own advice him) to circumvent [the poem] and attack [it] later rear both literal and figurative senses. That is, some readings of The Wreck approach it not only from oblique points of entry, but from unconventional critical perspectives. (5) In 1960s, for example, Elisabeth Schneider suggested that miracle is represented ode, arguing that its obscure twenty-eighth stanza contains involuted account of divine vision granted five drowned nuns that poem commemorates. (6) Revisiting issue some twenty years later his Martin D'Arcy Lectures, Norman H. MacKenzie gave voice current critical consensus that poem contains no such vision--nor miracle of any kind. (7) Yet, as Lesley Higgins put it recent reappraisal, Schneider still persuaded two generations of Hopkins critics read [Stanza 28] miraculously. (8) Bridges's advice (and Schneider's example) notwithstanding, most critics have preferred engage with more obvious themes of ode, exploring its theodicean theology, its biographical resonances, and its peculiar literary form. This last topic is one of most frequently addressed issues Hopkins scholarship, and many commentaries have considered relation of poem's two uneven parts great detail. To take recent example, Imogen Forbes-Macphail has explored mathematical ratios of unevenly divided ode, drawing on calculus clarify its bifurcated form: the two halves of she argues, held an integral/differential relationship with each other, with Part First displaying nature abstract and Part Second describing] God's presence manifested or 'integrated' into real world. (9) Dennis Sobolov, for his part, takes rather different critical approach, reading Hopkins's oeuvre through lens of semiotic phenomenology, yet his conclusion is not dissimilar: strategic division between abstraction and integration that Forbes-Macphail finds form of poem, Sobolov sees within poet himself. His engagement with The Wreck thus forms final chapter of Split World of Gerard Manley Hopkins because, on Sobolov's reading, it showcases symptomatic gap that runs throughout all of Hopkins's work between faith he professed and his own lived experience. (10) Like suggestion that Bridges offers his note The Wreck, these antinomies--between theory and practice, between faith and experience--have their origin Hopkins, too. His letters and journals are replete with worries about wasting time on poetry, and his early concerns about incompatibility of verse writing with his religious life led period of elected silence during which he abandoned poetic composition altogether. …

The Dragon Nests: China’s Energy Engagement of the Middle East

China is the largest consumer of energy, the leading exporter of manufactured goods and possesses the second largest economy in the world. The great dragon’s current economic activity extends to all corners of the world, including the hydrocarbon-rich Middle East. Since becoming a net importer of oil in 1993, China’s engagement of the Middle East has focused heavily on energy acquisition as the country urgently needs reliable sources of oil and natural gas to continue its unprecedented economic rise. For now, Middle Eastern countries seem amenable to the nesting dragon, whose increasing energy consumption, rapidly expanding economy, lack of colonial history and a policy of ‘offend no one’, its vast cash reserves and a willingness to pay premium prices for energy sources render it a highly appealing partner, capable of balancing the hegemonic policies and unipolar presence of the US. This article provides a summary of China’s expanding energy relations with seven major energy producing states of the Middle East, namely Saudi Arabia, Iran, Iraq, Kuwait, Oman, UAE and Qatar, and assesses the political implications of China’s burgeoning relationship with the region.

Ezekiel 29:3 and Its Ancient Near Eastern Context

Abstract The chief aim of this essay is to posit a well-known Mesopotamian royal and divine epithet, ušumgallu “great dragon,” as the source behind Ezekiel’s enigmatic description of Pharaoh in 29.3, hattannīn haggādôl, “the great dragon.” This relationship sheds new light and meaning on an old problem: why does Ezekiel refer to Pharaoh as a dragon? Rather than viewing this prophetic expression as a pejorative, the cognate evidence argues for the converse by rooting it in an enduring tradition of regal titles. Replicating Akkadian ušumgallu (Sumerian UŠUM.GAL) as efficiently as possible and drawing upon Israelite cosmological history (viz. Gen. 1.21a), Ezekiel feigned including Pharaoh within a venerable, long line of Mesopotamian kings and deities to receive this title. Instead, and as is characteristic of Ezekiel’s rhetoric, he upended the putative associations of the “great dragon,” thereby exposing its true subordinate position under the hegemony of YHWH.

William Blake's The Great Red Dragon and the Woman Clothed With the Sun

William Blake's The Great Red Dragon and the Woman Clothed With the Sun

Good(s) Sonnets: Hopkins's Moral Materiality

Good(s) Sonnets:Hopkins's Moral Materiality Betsy Winakur Tontiplaphol Hopkins Quarterly, 38.1-2, published by agreement of the editors in conjunction with Victorian Poetry, 49, no.2, as sharing the common theme, “Prosody.” Hopkins can be a rough read. When he destroyed much of his juvenilia, "The Wreck of the Deutschland" became ground zero in any inquiry into the broader arc of his career, and that piece, characterized by Bridges as "a great dragon folded in the gate" to Hopkins's poetic domain, affords a problematic—or, as Bridges puts it, "forbid[ding]"—starting point. It's difficult, even opaque; like the shipwrecked nuns whom the poem takes as its subject, "Wreck" readers are tasked with finding succor in a tempest, with seeing "sweet heaven" in a veritable linguistic storm (l. 168). In response to Bridges's concerns about the readability of "The Wreck," Hopkins chides, "I was not over-desirous that the meaning of all should be quite clear, at least unmistakeable [sic]….Why, sometimes one enjoys and admires the very lines one cannot understand."1 Hopkins's apparent taste for obscurity is linked to his abiding love for an inscrutable Christian God, whose "mystery," he writes in "The Wreck," "must be instressed, stressed; / For I greet him the days I meet him, and bless when I understand" (ll. 39-40). To read his work, the popular wisdom goes,2 is to embrace mystery in its various guises—difficulty, opacity, impenetrability—at the levels of both theme and form. But to gloss Hopkins as solely or even primarily a difficult poet is to cede to Bridges's dragon even as we fight it; only "sometimes"—not always—does Hopkins recommend the pleasures of opacity, and to expect or even privilege difficulty in his work is to overshoot its entrances. In other words, to classify pieces more comprehensible than "The Wreck" as anomalous or, worse, frivolous is to deny Hopkins's affiliation with the practicality and expediency central to the Victorian mythos, and in doing so, we avoid the shock of the shipwreck by missing the boat. It's telling, for instance, that readers have said so little about "Cockle's [End Page 73] Antibilious Pills," a simple poem but one of the few published3 during Hopkins's own lifetime: 'When you ask for Cockle's Pills,Beware of spurious imitations.'Yes, when you ask for every ill'sCure, when you ask for Cockle's Pills,Some hollow counterfeit that killsWould fain mock that which heals the nations.Oh, when you ask for Cockle's PillsBeware of heartless imitations. The juxtapositions at the heart of "Pills" represent, albeit comically, conventional theological tensions not at all unlike those explored in "The Wreck": singularity versus multiplicity, truth versus falsehood, life versus death. Rather than pursue obscurity, however, Hopkins writes with relative minimalism, toying with the language of advertisement in a way that indicates interest in and familiarity with the ever-practical arts of retail. "[E]very ill's / Cure," Cockle's Pills are saving, even Christ-like, but they're shelved with devilish "counterfeit[s]." Unlike "heartless"—that is, cruel or even evil—"imitations," Cockle's Pills are a good good, the moral alternative to a "hollow" fix, and "Pills" is a seemingly silly piece that offers real insight into Hopkins's more serious work. "Pills" was inspired, quite simply, by a thing for sale, and although critics concur that "'[t] hing' … is a big word in Hopkins,"4 I want to suggest that good is a term perhaps even more central to his idiosyncratic project—a term that speaks to a core simplicity in a way that a critical vocabulary dominated by words such as tension, pressure, and stress cannot. Good simultaneously (if punningly) gets at the rich materiality of Hopkins's often thing-packed poems and the abstract moral vision that underwrites them; good can denote either philosophical virtue or marketable commodity, and despite his justifiable association in the literary-critical imagination with Catholic probity and the ethical beauty of the natural world, Hopkins typically eschews the word goodness in favor of the noun good. The builder who shapes "walls," Hopkins writes, has "made...

Catching‐up through staged development and innovation

PurposeThe purpose of this paper is to provide a conceptual framework of staged development that examines strategies of domestic companies, government policies, and impacts of foreign multinational companies (MNCs) at different periods of catch‐up of latecomers.Design/methodology/approachA multi‐case approach is employed to examine four domestic telecom‐equipment companies that have significant impact on China's telecom‐equipment industry. They are: Huawei Technology Corporation (Huawei), Shenzhen Zhongxin Technology Corporation (ZTE), Datang Telecom Technology Corporation, Ltd (Datang), and Great Dragon Information Technology (GDT).FindingsThis paper identifies four distinct stages of the catching‐up process, featuring different institutional environment, government involvement, and the ensuing actions of foreign MNCs and domestic companies. During the initial stage, China's government decision of directly leapfrogging to the most advanced switch equipment had a profound impact, because it led to both heavy reliance on foreign MNCs and the pursuance of switch research and development (R&D) by domestic research institutes and new technology companies. The dominance of foreign MNCs is challenged during the growth stage, because several domestic companies ascended and gained the capability to produce large‐scale, stored program controls and the government directly leveraged support in R&D, marketing, and finance. Although many uncompetitive domestic companies failed during the filtration stage, the management training received from foreign MNCs and newly available financing options provided necessary resources for some domestic companies to survive and expand. Domestic leaders globalized their marketing, production, and R&D functions and to become MNCs themselves in the globalization stage, thus finalizing the catching‐up.Social implicationsThe Chinese experiences shed light on late‐industrialization for other developing economies by suggesting that to catch‐up in high‐tech industries, government can become involved strategically to form a competitive and efficient market environment for innovation.Originality/valueThe paper proposes a new conceptual framework to analyze catching‐up of domestic companies as latecomers. This framework can be used to study catching‐up in other sectors in late‐industrializing countries.

"The great Dragon rifeth vp with a straight ftalke": A Possible Model for the Unicorn's Tree

Previous articleNext article No Access"The great Dragon rifeth vp with a straight ftalke": A Possible Model for the Unicorn's TreeE. CHARLES NELSONE. CHARLES NELSON Search for more articles by this author PDFPDF PLUS Add to favoritesDownload CitationTrack CitationsPermissionsReprints Share onFacebookTwitterLinkedInRedditEmail SectionsMoreDetailsFiguresReferencesCited by Metropolitan Museum Journal Volume 452010 Sponsored by the Metropolitan Museum of Art Article DOIhttps://doi.org/10.1086/met.45.41558054 Views: 12Total views on this site Copyright © 2010 The Metropolitan Museum of ArtPDF download Crossref reports no articles citing this article.

An Artist at Odds with Himself and His World

An Artist at Odds with Himself and His World Henry Hart (bio) Gerard Manley Hopkins: A Life by Paul Mariani (Viking, 2008. 496 pages. $34.95) Having begun his scholarly career with A Commentary on the Complete Poems of Gerard Manley Hopkins and having recently published the memoir Thirty Days: On Retreat with the Exercises of St. Ignatius, Paul Mariani is well suited to write a biography of Hopkins. Although other biographies of the Victorian poet exist, Mariani's familiarity with St. Ignatius of Loyola's Spiritual Exercises gives him a unique perspective since it was this book that guided much of Hopkins's religious career and many of his finest poems. The fact that the subjects of Mariani's last three biographies—Hart Crane, Robert Lowell, and John Berryman—were deeply influenced by Hopkins also makes Mariani especially well qualified to write about the poet's life and legacy. To distinguish his biography from preceding ones, Mariani took a chance by composing it as a journal. For the most part his colloquial style, constant use of the present tense, and numerous quotations from Hopkins's journals give the impression that he—Mariani—is a fellow traveler, a kind of latter-day Boswell recording what his subject is drinking, worrying about, looking at, writing, and reading on particular days. The narrative structure provides a sense of immediacy and intimacy that more formal biographies sometimes lack. As Michael Dirda has pointed out in Book World, Mariani does a good job of tracing the upheavals in Hopkins's spiritual and artistic life, but "also includes the kind of human details that vivify a biography." Mariani begins his story in medias res—on July 18, 1866—when Hopkins will soon turn twenty-two and make his momentous conversion from the Anglican faith of his parents to the Roman Catholicism of his mentor, John Henry Newman. Mariani backtracks to discuss the impulses behind this conversion, returns to Hopkins's birth date (July 28, 1844) for a discussion of his family and upbringing, then jumps forward to August 28, 1866, for a fuller account of the conflicts engendered by his conversion. What emerges from Mariani's narrative is a portrait of an artist at odds with himself, his parents, his poetic contemporaries, his country, and even his fellow Jesuits, whose religious order he joined in 1868. Like many of the modernists who followed him, Hopkins was a baffling mix of revolutionary and reactionary attitudes. His first act of rebellion was against his parents' religious principles. According to his father, this rebellion was devastating: "His determination to join the Church of Rome," his father wrote an Oxford minister, was a "blow . . . so deadly & great that we have not yet recovered from the first shock of it." His second most significant rebellion was poetic. Although as a poet he employed traditional stanzaic and rhyming patterns and wrote about traditional Victorian subjects such as God and nature, his idiosyncratic syntax and obscure diction were calculated to disorient the audience of the day. Perhaps realizing the effect his poems [End Page lxxiii] would have on Victorian readers, he was shy about circulating them. In the end he showed them to only three or four people. His closest friend, the future poet laureate of England, Robert Bridges, confirmed his fears of an unsympathetic audience when he mocked his most ambitious experiment, "The Wreck of the Deutschland." Bridges vowed never to read the poem again, no matter how much money he was paid. Years after Hopkins died, Bridges decided to publish the poems Hopkins had sent him in manuscript, but he continued to lampoon "The Wreck of the Deutschland" as "a great dragon folded in the gate to forbid all entrance" to Hopkins's oeuvre. The fact that Hopkins remained loyal to his insulting friend says something about his own divisions and self-loathing. It was almost as if he internalized his conservative critics and partly agreed with them. Contemptuous of the poems he wrote before becoming a Jesuit, he burned them, vowed to write no more, and, when he could not help writing more and when a periodical (The Month) rejected "The Wreck of the Deutschland" and "The Loss of...

The Social History of Satan, Part Three: John of Patmos and Ignatius of Antioch: Contrasting Visions of “God's People”

At the climactic moment of the cosmic drama in the book of Revelation, the seer tells how two great portents appeared in heaven, the first a woman “clothed with the sun”(12:1). Asin a dream, the scene changes, and he sees her pregnant, “crying out in the agony of giving birth,” being menaced by a “great red dragon with seven heads and ten horns, and seven crowns on each of its heads” (12:3); thus the seer pictures Israel in danger, confronting her enemies, the foreign oppressors.

Spenser’s Dragon and the Law

This essay claims that the dragon curbing the liberty of the citizens of Eden in Book I of Spenser’s The Faerie Queene is the last in a series of representations of the Law of God. Such a depiction of the Law, I argue, can be traced to Martin Luther’s theology, and to his Lectures on Galatians in particular, where he claims that the Law is the principal weapon of “that ‘great dragon, the ancient serpent, the devil, the deceiver of the whole world, who accuses our brethren day and night before God’ (Rev. 12:9–10).”1 Research for this essay was funded in part by the 2003 NEH Summer Seminar on Literature of the English Reformation at Ohio State University.

Toward a Pragmatic Poetics: The Convergence of Form, Act, and Ontology in Hopkins' "The Leaden Echo and the Golden Echo"

I WOULD LIKE TO BEGIN BY RECONSIDERING A WELL-KNOWN DISAGREEMENT between F. R. Leavis and Robert Bridges concerning poetry of Gerard Manley Hopkins. In 1918, Bridges published first edition of Poems of Hopkins and appended Preface to Notes where he denounced Hopkins' unusual mannerism and style. According to Bridges, Hopkins' poetry problematic because it both extravagant and obscure. He accuses poems of occasional affectation in metaphor, of human feeling, and exaggerated Marianism and deplores the naked encounter of sensualism and asceticism in Golden Echo as well as Hopkins' efforts to force emotion into theological or sectarian channels. In Bridges' opinion, such poetic tactics constitute rude shocks of purely artistic wantonness. They do not contribute to an overall poetic purpose, but make for and Obscurity, aberrations in Bridges' mind that not part of [the poet's] intention since Hopkins is serious and always ha s something to say. Elsewhere, Bridges expresses his perplexity over the mixture of passages of extreme delicacy and exquisite diction with passages where in jungle of rough root-words, emphasis seems to oust euphony (Preface, p. 99). Bridges' theory of poetics implied here, but it also abundantly clear. Poetry must be part of continuous literary decorum (p. 96). It must follow poetics of intelligibility, striking balance between all extremes. Affectation and perversion must be cast out and replaced with genuineness and normality. Oddity and obscurity must give way to familiarity and clarity. Coherence must be favored over paradox. In short, poetry must follow official rules of convention, semantics, and common-sense. Bridges comments on of Deutschland in similar vein: The labour spent on this metrical experiment must have served to establish poet's prosody and perhaps his diction: therefore poem stands logically as well as chronologically in front of his book, like dragon folded in gate to forbid all entrance, and confident in his strength from past success. This editor advises reader to circumvent him and attack him later in rear; for he himself shamefully worsted in brave frontal more easily perhaps because both and were to (Preface, p. 114) While stating that poem experimental and, therefore, premature in Hopkins' poetic development, Bridges does not tell us what makes poem great dragon folded in gate. He says that he was himself shamefully worsted in brave frontal assault, but he does not tell us how or why. Nor does he explain what caused subject and treatment of poem to be distasteful to him. It clear, however, that, for Bridges, poem something to be overcome rather than enjoyed. In associating Wreck with forbidding dragon, Bridges prepares reader for very specific experience of poem. We are not only led to anticipate grave semantic difficulties, but are encouraged to negotiate these difficulties through type of interpretive assault. For Bridges, Wreck threatens to devour readers who make frontal assault because it catches them off their hermeneutic guard; it discovers them as helpless prey, drifting within a galaxy of signifiers rather than a structure of signifids. (2) Subsequently, poem must be read only after it has been vanquished by readerly invasion from rear. Perhaps most significant of Bridges' comments in terms of their relation to his theory of poetics his discussion of Hopkins' various grammatical deviations: Here ... another source of poet's obscurity; that in aiming at condensation he neglects need that there for care in placing of words that are grammatically ambiguous. …

Nietzsche Contra Postmodernism

Is there today indeed enough pride, daring, courage, self-assurance, intellectual energy, responsibility,freedom of will so that in reality philosophy is now even possible on this earth?1 Apparently not, at least if one judges from the chorus of postmodernist and deconstructionist voices heard in our world today. It is not selfassurance, intellectual energy, and courage to think that greets our ears but a sometimes strained and sometimes shrill chorus of claims not merely to have overcome metaphysics, as Nietzsche had sought, but to have gone beyond and to have overcome philosophy itself. Where is one, once one has left behind the love of wisdom? What does this loud trumpeting signify? What do these brash pronouncements of the end of philosophy mean? Since Nietzsche is often regarded as an inspiration for or, if one dare say so, a source of such opinions, I thought it would be instructive to borrow his hammer and do a little philosophizing of my own, sound out a few idols. What do I hear? Not very delicate sounds, but then a hammer is a somewhat crude instrument. Which is not to say it is not entirely appropriate. If my ear is attuned aright, what do I hear? Inharmonious, illtempered wrangling, vengeance, spite, rancor, a chorus of no say-ers, renouncers of all values and despisers of all creators of value, refusers of all that life has offered and has to offer. so hard? the kitchen coal once said to the diamond. After all, are we not close relatives? Why so soft, O my brothers, thus I ask you. Are you not my brothers? Why so soft, so pliant, so yielding? Why is there so much denial, self-denial, in your hearts? So little destiny in your eyes?2 Indeed, why so hard, for we are brothers and sisters, we philosophers and you postmoderns, deconstructionists, and assorted fellow travelers. So hard because I hear emptiness, the resonance of the void, in the hollow ring that answers from my hammer blows. A chorus of raucous, discordant voices, voices of spirits out of tune with themselves, stealth priests whose loud chanting is cover for rejection of life. The priestly crafts are as enchanting and as toxic to the human spirit as ever they were. These clever priests mask their service to the void, to the ascetic ideal, in cloaks of illusion woven of discourses of freedom, play, otherness, and difference. Cross-dressers of the intellect, they, like those of other eras, set traps for unwary but venturesome spirits. How cunning of the ascetic ideal to mask itself, disguise itself once again, and appear in the guise of the free spirit. Clearly all this is very unclear. But then, to deconstruct deconstruction, even for the sake of the love of wisdom, does not necessarily entail enlightenment. Nietzsche's recurring insistence that all truth is perspectival, all seeing interpretive, all knowing interested, perspectival, and interpretive, is itself open to more than one reading. His thinking is complex, multilayered, and diverse. The result is that at times the various themes produce what is a difficult harmony at best. He vacillates between two ontologies and what the perspectival character of knowing means varies depending on which ontology is at the moment the interpretive stance. One ontology produces the reading that it is the human role to be the creator of values. It entails a self-assured, active confidence and self respect. The other leads to the ascetic ideal. They share the insistence that truths, values, convictions, are prisons, that one must be free not only of Eternal Truth but eternal truths and finally of truth itself. To see how vastly different in meaning the perspectival character of knowing can be, let us sound out two of Nietzsche's strongly drawn images, his Three Metamorphoses of the Spirit from Zarathustra and his image of lambs and birds of prey from The Genealogy of Morals. Herr Nietzsche, your hammer, please. In the Zarathustra image the spirit is imaged as camel, lion or child depending on the relation to the Great Dragon which symbolizes Truth, Value, Absolute Good. …

WILLIAM HENRY HOLMES

WILLIAM HENRY HOLMES

Dieudonné de Gozon and the Dragon of Rhodes

The story of the Rhodian knight Dieudonné de Gozon and the slaying of the great dragon of Malpasso is, largely owing to Schiller's adoption of the theme in a ballad, one of the best-known legends of its type. It is one of several instances in which an historical personage figures as the hero of this quite mythical adventure.Dieudonné de Gozon, a member of the Provençal langue, was the third Grand Master of the Knights of S. John at Rhodes, ruling from 1346 to 1353. He is represented as a simple knight at the time of his great adventure. As might be expected, no contemporary or nearly contemporary authority mentions the dragon-fight of de Gozon. But so early as Mandeville and Schiltberger we find anonymous Rhodian knights figuring as the heroes of current folk-tales of the chivalric type.