Dragon

In 1981 Charles Evans-Gunther, a librarian from Flint in north-east Wales, was drawn to the front cover of the May issue of Military Modelling magazine which showed a soldier on horseback with the strapline ‘Arthur: Fact or Fiction’. He wrote a letter to the magazine about the Arthurian period and in a subsequent issue a reader suggested it would be good if there was an Arthurian society:

“And I thought that’s a good idea. I didn’t know there was one, The International Arthurian Society … and Pendragon had been going for 15 years, but I didn’t know anything about it. So, a few people contacted me as I had put my address on there and by 1982 Dragon had been given birth and lasted until 1993, that’s when I ran out of steam.” [Interview with the editor in 2024]

Dragon: The Newsletter of the Dragon Society ran for 40 issues, initially monthly and then quarterly, before ending in 1993. It contains a wealth of material of Arthurian interest as well as matters concerning ‘Dark Age Britain’ much of it by the editor himself, and also articles by well known Arthurian writers such as Chris Barber, P. K Johnstone and Geoffrey Ashe. The review pages cover Arthurian titles not found in academic journals and contemporary controversies such as the Enfield cross and the the theories of Alan Wilson and Baram Blackett are dealt with in depth. Although the membership was never large it did include such Arthurian writers as Leslie Alcock, Christopher Gidlow, Helen Hollick, Bedwyr Lewis Jones, Rosemary Sutcliff and Roger Simpson.

By the kind permission of the editor, all of the issues are accessible below as searchable PDF files. The content is made freely available in the spirit in which it was originally contributed.