So recently I recorded some analysis of children's stories once again.

I had done this years ago with Pinocchio and the Lion King.

That was part and parcel of the lectures that I did at Harvard and at the University of Toronto.

More recently I recorded an analysis of Snow White, the Grimm's Brother version, and also of Hansel and Gretel.

I'm going to continue that today with a more recent book, a much more recent book called There's No Such Thing as a Dragon, The Story and Pictures by Jack Kent.

I used to read this to my Maps of Meaning class often as the first lecture,

because it touches on themes that are very relevant to a narrative understanding of the world.

A description of the structure through which we see the world is a story.

And the motifs in stories represent cardinal elements of all of the environments that we encounter.

And I'll try to make that clear today in the discussion of there's no such thing as a dragon. I want to show you a dragon that I have

in my office here. This is a sculpture from Mexico, which I got several years ago, um, um, it's a circle, basically, and it has a, the head of a bird, kind of a monstrous bird,

and it has wings like a dragon or like a bird, and it has a snake wrapped around the bird's neck,

but it's an analog of a dragon.

There's a book that I found very useful in my analysis of such things

called An Instinct for Dragons by a man named David E. Jones,

and David Jones offers essentially an evolutionary explanation for the concept of dragon.

He described a dragon as a tree, cat, snake bird, like an amalgam of the features of tree, cat, snake bird.

And those, and of course, there's the element of fire as well.

And so those are all elements of predator, you might say.

The kind of predators that have been preying on us or our evolutionary ancestors for millions of years.

We had tree-dwelling ancestors 60 million years ago.

And so the dragon is an amalgam of the motifs of predator. That's a good way of thinking about it, or of danger. And the dragon battle is a narrative condensation of the drama of human beings. The fact that we have to

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