By Robin McKinley, 1984 (Spoilers Alert)
How I Met the Book
The Hero and the Crown was recommended to me by Google Analytics telling me about the top dragons in books. I have a bit of a love for all things lizardy, winged, and potentially fire breathing, so I had been reading up on some older books on dragons, thus Google influenced itself for my feed and told me about dragons.
That being said, I didn’t love it. I read it over a long time because of the style of writing. It took a long time for me to get to the meat and potatoes, the dragons, and the dragons that you first meet are underwhelming at best, so it took me even longer to get to Maur, our fabled, flying firebreather of lore.
Maur
W^5+H
Who
Maur is a black dragon illustrated on the cover of the book who is the mid-boss of the book. He’s a fire-breathing, death-dealing lizard with wings of supreme evil who has been re-awakened during the book’s timeframe which our young hero must go face as the famed Dragon-Slayer of her homeland.
What
Symbolically, Maur may represent the struggle to fit in for a young adult trying to fit in to society whether that is her own social standing among her peers, or that of the adults of the world. Maur is revived around the time when Aerin (young female hero of the book) is coming of age and has decided to throw off the yolk of being a first princess of the Kingdome who is shunned for coming form a witch and become a dragon slayer.
I say this may be symbolic because the book can be taken at face value, but the struggle can also be seen from perspective which the book lends to Aerin and how she overcomes.
Back to Maur, we’ll get into the symbology more in the future.
What/Who
What Maur is, and who Maur is are pretty tightly knit. We don’t find out much about Maur, his ideology, his mythology, or his lore aside from that he’s terrorized the lands before, went to sleep for a long time, and the north poked him awake so he went and attacked Aerin’s homeland. Later, we find out that Aerin’s homeland, who lost a famous crown that protected them, is enemies of the wizard who awoke Maur and sent him after them. He’s a symbol of depression, anxiety, bad tidings, etc., in the book which closer reflects a metaphor than a simile like in most books as he literally brings doom and gloom to the capital while his head is there. Oh, yeah, Aerin kills him.
I wouldn’t call it easy, but she definitely takes him down.
Where
Maur used to live in the northlands, but descended to the south to attack Aerin’s homeland because her uncle is a royal, magical pile of horse patties on a warm boggy day. He basically just has a stick in his unmentionables for no good reason and decides to take over Aerin’s homeland because he can since he stole their crown.
Why
Maur is one of the tools he sends after them in order to try to destroy their moral and demolish their forces so he can take over their lands.
Once he’s dead, Aerin’s folks (future husband and father), take the head home as a trophy and mount him on the wall which brings literal doom and gloom to the kingdom as mentioned earlier.
When
Maur’s attacks couldn’t happen at a better metaphorical time however as Aerin is becoming renowned for her dragon slaying since she made fire-proofing ointment and he didn’t attack sooner, so it all basically works out in the end. They almost kill her, but many people almost die trying to find their way in the world, so it still fits as a metaphor.
So that’s who, what, where, when, and why for Maur in the book, but How is a bit tricker to answer.
How
He’s metaphorically an example of this struggle because he badly injures Aerin and throws her into a reclusive trance in which she finds her true calling in life. He was sent down to the south by magic and that’s really all that’s said on the subject. His fire is hotter than Aerin’s fire-proof ointment can stand which is how he injures her, but he’s also a massive dragon, like rolling hills, mid United States size.
The thing is, it was hard to narrow in on his size in the actual writing.
“Aerin rolled herself in the still damp blanket and tried to sleep; but her dreams woke her, for she heard the dragon breathing, and it seemed to her that the earth beneath her thudded with the dragon’s heartbeat,” (p. 133) which seems to claim an enormous size to hear the breathing and feel the heartbeat from any sort of distance. This is almost immediately contradicted by calling what divided them “a knob of rock a little taller than Talat,” which, I mean, how?
Are we talking Badland’s Style knob of rock?
If so, why does she just have to “round it” and why is she able to just crawl back to her stuff?
If not, I have more questions. If not, why did Maur wait for her to attack him? Why did he just lay peacefully while she messed around with smearing goop all over an entire HORSE, a horse, her equipment, herself, etc. and not just, pick up his head and eat them?
Knob of rock, from the rest of the discriptors in the book brought this to mind:
So, it was at that point in the story when I began to wonder if this was another Majora’s Mask incident where the whole thing is about being a ghost and coming to terms with grief and or death. Honestly, I couldn’t get a run with it though because of what happens, so the next best thing is an argument about the societal pressure of fitting in. This theme has many, many threads directly through the text.
Back to Maur just for a little bit though.
So if Maur was big, he was big enough to breath on their necks all night, but small enough not to see them and eat them around a bit of a rock. If he wasn’t that big, then her feat is less impressive riding his nose up and stabbing him through the brain through the eye, now I will say, she’s a young woman in this story, I think 18ish, and she stabs him, wrist to shoulder, through the brain. That means we can proportion him out based on a knife-holding fist, with a knife, to the shoulder for how big his head is. If the average adult-ish female is going to have an arm length around 3 feet, plus a typical knife length being roughly between a half a foot-ish for a working wood knife? So roughly four feet from eye to brain.
Plus it explicitly states she had time to “half stood up and ran the length of the dragon’s head, flung herself down flat again, and plunged her knife into Maur’s right eye,” which means some serious distance. In my head that’s at least three steps to “run the length of the dragon’s head” rather than “fell into” since she’s basically up and down again to stretch her full height.
This whole thing is just to put into perspective that Maur’s size is variable depending on the section you read. He’s either huge or he’s not. If they are roughly proportioned like other living snout-nosed creatures which are not ant-eaters, then the muzzle and the skull won’t have that much of a difference proportionally. most dragons have heads that are roughly dog-shaped. Some are more slanted, so maybe more of a crocodile shaped head?
That makes the “How” of “how did she manage that?” a bit more questionable, but that’s what we’re given.
Symbology
Aerin is a young warrior who asks her father to let her join in marching off to war, and then we get way too many chapters of flashback for why she’s even considering asking.
She’s a witches daughter.
She’s an outcast from royalty.
She’s unable to do royal magic.
She’s an idiot who poisoned herself to prove a point.
She’s helplessly foolish when it comes to love and all things romance.
She’s a horse magician, well, really they all are. Talat, her loyal steed, has a bum leg and he can still trot under saddle. Hell, he can gallop, fight, pivot, and rear under saddle. I want their magic!
Usually if a horse has a leg injury it cannot survive without some serious medical treatment that’s cutting edge in our day and age and they’re pretending this is Knights and Kings times with apothecaries and no technology.
This is all the set up for her having the older royal prince who loves her madly to teach her in secret how to wield spears and swords and to give her a war horse upon which she can gallivant out and perform a feat of service for her king.
It is one way in which her younger self symbolically shows her craving of attention for her father and peers to praise and love her when she’s not perceived to receive that from society. In many ways, I have witnessed this struggle through the youth I have mentored and worked with. There is a stage where they don’t seem to notice the care and attention they’re getting and deem it based on some other aspect of cruelty rather than taking it from the perspective of others.
She gets the recognition for slaying dragons (little ones, like Cheetah-sized or smaller) for her people and then continues to seek more responsibility and respect through asking to go with her father on a dangerous event.
What ends up happening is that her father is a responsible adult who is short-sighted. He is approached, in front of her, by a messenger about Maur invading the lands, and then marches off!
He does the equivalent of coming into the house with a friend who is saying “Dude your dog just ran out of the house” and says “I’ll deal with it after work” then leaves the car with the keys in reach of a dog-loving child who just learned how to drive.
There is nothing stopping her, including her father, from going and fighting something she should never have taken on alone. In fact, he doesn’t even tell her not to go! This idiot knows she runs off to slay dragons and doesn’t say “Honey, wait for us to get back. Do not, I forbid you, do not, let me repeat that, do not go fight Maur.” he doesn’t even slightly say that.
The idiot says he’ll take care of it when he gets home but downplays the problem saying that the war is the bigger problem and the villagers can come live in the castle until he’s dealt with it. Come on man! Aerin is Obviously going to go! You just told her she can’t have an adventure that matters to the kingdom and then fed her one on a silver platter!
This is, for all symbolic purposes, the rebellion of youth. No, you can’t go drive the car, so they go drive the car. No, you can’t go to your friends house, so they sneak out. The problem is that there was no “no” in this case.
Maur could represent many things, but the thing I find the most fitting is the need to fit in with society. Fighting Maur is like finding music, anime, or movies that people like, playing football, using make-up, shopping at the right places, the self-imposed isolationists, the poets, the artists, the fancy shoes they’d die without, all culminating into the social pressure to fit in.
During the fight she loses her ability to work, she loses her hair she’s grown to the floor, she’s broken, defeated, and it reminds me of someone struggling with depression, or mental health or behavioral disorder. She has to grow a new identity after that.
After slaying Maur, she’s reminded of him through the mounting of his head which is displayed in the dining hall. It’s like the way people will say to a person struggling with an eating disorder “oh you’re so pretty and thin” after they’ve started to finally gain weight and recover, or during the depths of their spiral.
She’s taken away from that, falls in love with a teacher figure who shows her how to love herself and accept herself, and may also never have existed. That whole section of the book stinks of symbology so bad it made me question long and hard if it was because she was already dead.
If you’re curious about the symbology, I’d just skip to Part Two of the book and read from there however.
The Writing
The writing is a lot of showing and not telling. I think it is part of the pendulum of style which swayed our current preference towards showing given how telling it is.
The voice of the story is somewhere between points of view, not always in everyone’s head, but often not in one head at all. It also skips long periods of time in sentences, so grasping age and time is a challenge. Getting engaged is a challenge too because of that.
It isn’t my favorite style of writing and it was a challenge to get through. It kept pulling me out of the story due to the writing style.
I’d suggest previewing it before you commit. It also doesn’t really get good until after the first part is over, so you may want to skip it. That whole thing is just basically about how she’s outcast in one way or another.
Have you read it?
If you have ever read the book what are your thoughts?
Talking Literature with Andrea 