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Notes
1. Morton Bloomfield, Essays and Explorations: Studies in Ideas, Language and
Literature (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1970), pp. 106-7.
2. More so, iconographically. See R.S. Loomis and Laura Hibbard Loomis,
Arthurian Legends in Medieval Art (London: Oxford University Press, 1938), p. 31.
Arthur in a legend of St. Efflam (Legendary of Tréguier, c. 1400) is unable to dispose of a
dragon which the saint dismisses through prayer. See also the reproductions in the back of the
book (nos. 349 and 387) for two very different (Flemish and English) illustrations of the White
and Red Dragon scene.
3. "duo vermes duo dracones sunt; vermis rufus draco tuus est, et stagnum figura
hujus mundi est. At ille albus draco, illius gentis quae occupavit gentes et regiones plurimas in
Brittannia ..." (Nennius, Historia Britonum, ed. Joseph Stevenson (London:
Sumptibus
Societatis, 1838), chaps. 40-42, p. 33).
4. Geoffrey of Monmouth, Historia regum Britanniae, Latin ed., ed. Acton
Griscom, trans, from Welsh Ms. Robert Ellis Jones (London: Longmans, Green, 1929), vi, 17-viii,
1.
5. Arthurian Chronicles Represented by Wace and Layamon, ed. and trans.
Ernest Rhys (London: J. M. Dent, 1928), p. 16.
6. "þa comen ut þas tweie draken: / & muchel dunen makeden. /
fuhten grimliche: / dun i þere dich. / ne ifaeh nauere na cniht:page
74
nan ladluker fiht. / flu3en of heore muðe: / fures leome" (Layamon's Brut
or Chronicles of Britain, ed. Frederick Madden [London: Society of Antiquaries, 1847], II,
244-45).
7. Geoffrey, viii, 14-17.
8. Wace, pp. 31-32; "Com of þan steore, / a leome swiðe sturne / at
þeos leome ende: / wes a drake hende / of þes draken muðe / leomen come
inoh3e" (Layamon, II, 325).
9. Geoffrey, x, 2; Wace, p. 80; in Layamon, III, 15, the interpretation is abbreviated. No
giant or Roman emperor is mentioned. A line is missing from Ms. Cotton Calig. A ix.
10. King Arthur's Death: Stanzaic Morte Arthur and Alliterative Morte Arthure,
ed. Larry D. Benson (Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill, 1974), 11. 760-74. Cf. Arthur's dream of
dragons before battle with Mordred in the Stanzaic Morte Arthure, 11. 3181ff.
11. Eugéne Vinaver, "Sir Thomas Malory," in R. S. Loomis, ed., Arthurian
Literature in the Middle Ages: A Collaborative History (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1959), p.
550.
12. The Works of Sir Thomas Malory, ed. Eugéne Vinaver, 2nd ed.
(Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1947; rpt. Oxford University Press, 1971, 1977), I, 19. All subsequent
quotations of Malory will be from this edition.page 75
13. This serpent iconographically is a winged dragon. See Loomis, Arthurian
Legends, no. 283 for combat, no. 328 for vision of the New and Old Law.