The following two pages from the comic book Vouivre: Thunder of Fury helpfully summarize the tales of this particular dragon:
The dragon is described as fond of bathing in her private cave and capable of assuming human form. This invites comparison to another French dragon, Melusine. Melusine became a dragon once a week and at this time bathed alone in her private quarters. A Book of Creatures calls the vouivres her spiritual descendants stripped of human form, with later accounts conflating the two to give the vouivre her womanly qualities where originally she lacked such attributes entirely.
Various regions of France and neighboring countries put their own spins on the myth. Traits include appearing as animals or balls of fire, greedily guarding treasure, dependence on magic gems (compare draconite from other folklore), and so forth. Your typical weird folklore stuff.
Modern sources put further spins on the monster:
- When she was imported to the video game Megami Tensei, the vouivre appeared as a demon with features of both woman and dragon. Indeed, the left half of her body appears human but the right half appears monstrous!
- When she was imported to the tabletop game Pathfinder, perhaps influenced by Megami Tensei, the vouivre became a bizarre creature resembling an amphisbaena with one end of the body appearing as a lovely woman. One wonders what was going through the writer's head, but I find it delightfully weird!
I like all these ideas so much. If I wanted to have the monster appear in all these forms, then I would use a simple explanation: the viperess' is a shape changer. Her power is flawed, however, and always reveals some obvious hint of her true nature. For example, the right or lower half of her body still appearing as a dragon, or she is followed by an entourage of vipers, or even that she sheds her dragon skin to bathe and is at the mercy of whoever steals it (echoing tales of the mermaid wife).
Research links
- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Guivre
- https://www.blackdrago.com/species/vouivre.htm
- http://www.blackdrago.com/fame/melusine.htm
- https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/vouivre
- https://abookofcreatures.com/2015/12/11/vouivre/
- https://www.wordnik.com/words/viperess
- https://www.pitt.edu/~dash/type4080.html
No comments:
Post a Comment