W is for Wyvern

        My theme for this year’s April A-Z Blog Challenge is fantastical creatures, celebrating my upcoming book, On the Virtues of Beasts of the Realms of Imagination.  Please check out my Kickstarter Campaign to find out more.

        As mentioned before, I’m not trying to make an encyclopedia in which I merely accurately report the research on these myths and legends.  I’m trying to start with the research, but then imagine the next step.  If these creatures really existed, how might they actually behave?  How might people interact with them?

“The wyvern dwells primarily in Europe, and is frequently employed in heraldry, where it poses fiercely on coats of arms.  There it is thought to bring fortune in battle to those who bear its symbol, but what of the wyvern's own fortune?  Though wyverns have rampaged over the countryside and posed on coats of arms for centuries, it is not inevitable that they do so always and forever.  I myself in my travels once encountered on a rocky tor a restless wyvern who had left his shield to seek his own fortune, hoping to discover what new possibilities the world might hold for him.

        This wyvern teaches us the power of envisioning new possibilities, for it is easy to assume that the way things are is the only possible way for them to be, and difficult to break free of the assumption that the world cannot be changed or improved.  Let us be reminded by the adventuresome wyvern that we need not remain enslaved to things as they are, for the way things are is not inevitable, and we can, with imagination, seek for freedom in new ways of seeing and living in the world.”

        If you could pick any creature for your own personal symbol, what would you pick and why?

        The alphabet of mythical creatures doesn’t stop there.  You have to click the link to read 

the entire post about Mythical Creatures of the Letter W.

[Picture: Freedom, rubber block print by AEGN, 2017.]