Dragonfield Summary
Jane Yolen

Dragonfield Summary

Yolen's dragon stories are among her best, and she experiments with different ways of looking at dragons. In "Dragonfield," collected in Here There Be Dragons, she presents a fairly traditional European-style dragon, full of fire and fury, with the principal interest of the story focused on how people react to a dragon suddenly appearing in their otherwise placid community.

Yolen says that, "I wanted to write a story in which the hero knows himself not to be a hero, and the audience knows him not to be a hero, and yet he is a hero despite it all." This antihero is Lancot, a great muscular, handsome man who is terrified of dragons and most other dangerous things.

Yolen combines this interest in a hero who is afraid rather than heroic with her lifelong interest in kites. Her father was a champion kite maker and set a record for...

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