First Came Margaret the Dragon ( Sept 2 2000 )
About three quarters of the way into the original DoH
story there is a scene where a new dragon comes across an aging wyrm called
"Margaret the Dragon". It is this character that binds DoH to the public
story universe the Matter of Britain, which contain the tales of King Arthur,
one of Mark Twain's stories and other stories dealing with Camelot, the
Round Table, etc.
Margaret was officially born on midnight, Sept 02 2000 when a sleepless daytrader started scribbling down in a journal a transformation chronology based on a 1980's children's illustrated book "The Loathsome Dragon". The children's book was based on a 18th century ballad penned by an eccentric preacher by the name of Robert Lambe. Robert Lambe had "discovered" a 500 year old manuscript which meant The Laidley Worm o' Spindleston Haughs suddenly became a honest-to-god genuine Arthurian ballad.
The source ballad was supposedly written by Duncan Frasier in 1270 AD, which would have placed it around the time Sir Gawain tales were popular in the border regions.
So the links for the evolution of DoH might go like this
Dragons of Histh > Margaret the Dragon > children's book
> Robert Lambe > Duncan Frasier > Sir Gawain and the Green Knight > Matter
of Britain
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After Margaret the Dragon came Maegrethe
The Margaret the Dragon "story" was essentially 24 pages
dealing with the size of the dragon, its running speed, the tf timeline,
the issues the new dragon would face in order to survive (hibernate vs
migrate, impact on local economy of the beast) and was an assembly/owners
technical manual rather than prose.
However it all had to start somewhere and "Margaret the Dragon" led to about 3 or 4 other manuals.
Eventually the elements gelled into a tale of Histh, a mere mortal pit viper that was granted omnipotence and had a massive grudge on her scaly shoulders against the human race.
She'd been a innocent newborn snake one day in a nest of pit vipers which had come under the attention of the -Powers-.
The Powers were not too pleased when one day around 5000 BC an Egyptian worker came along and stoned the nest of vermin to death.
Only the young snake Histh had survived, but was bloodied and dying.
So the -Powers- adopted her and a barely sentient reptile was granted omnipotence.
Which would lead to Maegrethe and the Master Dragon Builder.
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The theory was that Histh slowly learned to change her shape. She had many forms over the millenia, and had slowly worked up her IQ to the level of a dog by the middle ages. Which meant she had a habit of misunderstanding requests, and often goofed.
It was well known by the middle ages that to bathe in the blood of Histh would give you the form and powers of Histh.
Since Histh herself had become many different beings over the ages bathing in her "blood" could turn a wizard or witch into a newborn pit viper, a monstrous black serpent, a mouse, a cougar and anything in between.
Which lead to all those wild animal problems they had in the middle ages.
It just so happened that the stepmother of Princess Margaret needed to get rid of her pesky stepdaughter. She obtained a potion guaranteed to turn the recipient into a nasty monster snake. So after years as a wild beast snake, Margaret was returned to her human shape, but was a changed woman and left the castle to become a witch. What she did was explore the secrets behind her transformation into a monster. Though everyone knew what the potion would do to you no one knew why it did it.
And Margaret figured it out. The potion was a synthetic version of a certain snake deity's blood when Histh had taken on the shape of a montrous wild beast snake. So that meant if Margaret could synthesize Histh's blood in her current form (a magnificent black dragoness with flashing red eyes) Margaret could have her cake and eat it too.
Which is how she became Maegrethe, a smart black-scaled dragoness who is the Priestess of the Mousetrap Goddess. (Which was in a pre-DoH story).
The Master Dragon Builder got saddled with one of Histh's goofs. He'd been travelling through the woods when he came upon a gathering of dragoness', with the center one being a black scaled beast with flashing red eyes (Histh as Diana in the Actaeon tale).
He promptly hid, sculpted a image of Histh and doomed himself by that action.
The Master Dragon Builder and Maegrethe kick DoH into
life
(Those early stories were being typed out in the late
months of 2000 inside the cabin of a Lake Erie sailboat, the Clara Ann.)
After Histh saw the lousy sculpture that had been made of her she cursed the unlucky artist to become a lifesize sculpture of her divine magnificent form.
So a 32 foot tall black stone statue of a dragon with rubied eyes suddenly appeared in the forest somewhere in medieval Europe.
Eventually however Histh relented and allowed him to take on his human shape during the day and her appearance once the Sun dipped below the horizon.
And he became the Master Dragon Builder, less favoured associate of Histh and her dragons.
The Dragons of Histh story universe is born December 2000
The action started when the Master Dragon Builder picked
up supplies in a little town originally sited in Texas and later relocated
to a imaginary hamlet in Norfolk County,Ontario called Cultus Creek.
Being under that ancient curse, he had to get back to the caverns before the Sun fell and he got awfully big and heavy.
Meanwhile Maegrethe was in the caverns, getting ready for a draconic ceremony and get together.
Whilst bricked up Tunnel 17 spoke mutely of a event that had torn apart the draconic family years earlier.
DoH was a metaphor, an allegory of real world events
After Ida had transformed into a montrous beast she obliterated
the dragon family. However that left a story universe of blood and corpses,
with no anchor, just walking wounded dragons.
The solution was to dredge up the real world past and use it as the anchor for the future of this story universe. Hence family reunions became dragon feasts, the migration of the Dutch to Canada after WW2 became the Great Dragon Migration in DoH, WW2 became DoH's Great Massacre and family soccer games became draconic soccer matches.
And that is how DoH was born in December 2000-January 2001
The Technology of DoH
The cavern dwelling giant winged lizards ( for such they
were )
were essentially modern humans forced in giant reptillian
bodies without vocal cords.Thus they were still aware of modern technology
but most of them made do with stone age and bronze age technology.
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DoH Take 1 Take 2 and Take 3( The Trinity )
The amusing thing is that
though he showed up as a raging she beast and a aging industrialist (Robertson, inventor of the Robertson square head screw) in the original DoH story
and as the suffering father of the afflicted princess in other authors stories and ballads
the real life Ida probably never even met the other real life characters and events the scottish laidly worm tale is based on.
Ida came to the area around 540 AD as a angle invader and the civil war that brought Child Wind and his draconic sister together happened about 4 decades later. And he'd have been the aging old geezer enemy of the brother and sister in real life. They didn't call him Ida the FlameBearer for nothing.
However after the effort of banging off a 100000 word story universe (including a guest appearance by the Relic novel's kothoga) it was time to try something different. Hence in March/April 2001 a misunderstanding of Robert Lambes rhyming verse aabb quatrain? led to the Ballad of Flamebringer using a aabccb sextrain style partially in order to find a more economical way to get out the idea then 100000 word elephants (by the way the pre-DoH stories are about another 100000 words).
The ballad was assembled in pieces so that a verse that might appear near the end of the ballad was being assembled at the same time the first verse was being constructed.
It was only when vast blocks of verse already existed that "filler" material was created t create a unified plot.
The new notion being played with was one where chunks of verse could be pushed around on the plot line thus creating several different ballads all from the same source verse
Hence if "*" is considered the filler and 1...3..5 is the main action/plot verse the Ballad of Flamebringer could look like
1*2*3*4*5*6*7 as originally concieved but be rebuilt to look like
*14*3*2*5*6*7 or any other number of combinations
It was a prefab ballad, or a modular ballad.
The REAL Foundation Story ( Take 3 )
Parts of Ballad of Flamebringer have a rhythm, a beat
to the words. Which is great but very difficult to maintain for any length
of time when you're trying to build such a complex structure. Hence the
part where Flamebringer first meets the Drake by the Lake up to the verse
where he asks her to stay does have a cadence, a beat to it but most of
the ballad didn't.
Basically banging off a 250000 word chunk of prose would have been a piece of mental cake compared to getting all the verses in a 25000 word ballad to bounce just properly.
Which led to DoH universe take 3 where the poem was simplified back to a quatrain style and drawings were included with each chunk of verse (old link http://www.senac.com/forums/8777 ).
In this ballad Ida, Margaret and Child Wind were sent into retirement and the obvious inspiration was the original DoH story.
We're back to the Long Pont/Lake Erie region, the local family is back in the plot and there aren't too many medieval hints in the poem. The main advances to the DoH story universe was that there were about 100 drawings (a picture is worth a thousand words) which made this the first serious attempt to make DoH a multimedia presentation.
However web page providers are unreliable and only the archived text version of this DoH variant still survives.
The Lost Picture Ballad (May-June 2001)
The lost picture ballad,the third and final part of the
DoH story universe " Trinity" deserves a special subsection all its own.
The actual work consisted of about 120 pages of paper drawings with simple
rhyming verse scribbled on the back.
The verse was added onto a Senac forum,the pictures were uploaded to a YellowSpot.com(?) secondary site and links were set up so that as the forum thread was clicked on,the picture connected to that rhyme was displayed.
It was a early serious attempt at a multimedia presentation.
If we wanted to look for the source story/universe which contained
the characteristics you'd need to create a identification key for a DoH work,this would be the one.
Naturally it no longer exists in its original version.The source
paper drawing books vanished and the http://www.archive.org site only has most of the http://www.senac.com/forums/8744 verse archived with none of the pictures
That said, "Harethes Stuff" had these characteristics which make
it a typical DoH work
-Histh is given a nod by being referred to as a species of dragon
" a Histh water drake"
-a Histh water drake has a lifecycle mirroring that of Histh's own
origins as a snake and evolving into a bigger dragon
Thus a DoH work's setting is NOT fixed in stone,but is varied to suit the purpose of the work.However some passing reference is made to Histh,Cultus Creek or some other item in a existing DoH work.
-" Harethe's Stuff" was not produce for the furry or tf internet
community but at other communities.Though its drawings were crude consideration was given that similar drawings might be use to produce travel brochures,antilittering material and other community minded messages
Which was a very major concept advance for the DoH universe since it suggested a DoH work could have a purpose and target audience other than the internet community
-it was a multimedia presentation
Which meant Doh works could show up as pictures,animations,travel guides,audio tapes,sculptures,flower arrangements etc
However DoH went dormant for the summer of 2001 and the
glimpses of it that were seen at the tsa-talk mailing list was actually
that of a dormant " flash in the pan" story universe which were common
enough
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From Alliterative Poems to RPG's to Animation
So Margaret the Dragon came from The Spindleston Worm
which came from Sir Gawain and the Green Knight which came from the Champion
Owain. Working in the other direction in trying to determine the evoution
of DoH,one can also perhaps determine the universes philosophy and try
to build a identification key for a DoH story.
So starting with
a)Margaret the Dragon ( September 2 2000 )
This could also have been described as a RPG story.The Master Dragon Builder actually made his first appearance in it as the GamesMaster.He had to turn a princess into a dragon,but he also had to take consideration of the dragons impact on the local scene and vice versa. Hence the final product of the tf took into account history,physics geography,thermal conductivity of stone ,theology in order to determine what Margarets draconic IQ would be,her mass,length,mating ritual,etc.
Many of the characters found in the later stories were concieved in Margaret the Dragon.
b)The preDoH universe ( October -December 2000 )
This was a collection of works whose most important contribution was
-to move from a RPG tecno style to a dramatic story format
-to introduce the character of Histh
c)The Trinity(the DoH universe actually was 3 story universes)
-The Dragons of Histh ( Dec 2000-Jan 2001 )
a 100000 word story which brought all the earlier characters
together as the Tribe of Histh in the New World Note however that at the
end " They all lived happily ever after" and this part of the DoH universe
has lain dormant since its completion on January 2001.
Its only lasting contribution to future stories was the
hamlet of Cultus Creek as well as the names of some of its characters appearing
in stories and pictures that came after Jan 2001. ( The steamer KSL Mary
King in a DoH Port Burwell picture is a
direct reference to the character Mary King in " The Laidly
Worm
of Long Point )
-The Ballad of FlameBringer (March/April 2001 )
which introduced the concepts of trying to economically
convey the DoH universe,introduced landscape pictures,and presented DoH
as something other than prose
Rather important concepts as the vast majority of works
in the DoH universe ARE in a format OTHER than a text story.
-The Lost Picture Ballad (May/June 2001)
of which more has been said elsewhere
d)The Empty Well stories { July-December 2001)
Generally stories set in other universes,not canon in
them but canon ubder DoH rules.
"Sylith and Her Mommy" in ListTransformed
"Reboot" in Bill Kiefflers BurnhamWoods universe
-In the sequential art piece " Reboot" submitted to
a Bill Kieffler contest Cultus Creek appeared for the
first time in picture.It was a village that had been knocked to the ground
by economic forces beyond its control.It had been dying for decades and
only the final blow of having its name wiped off the maps forced its citizens
to react and rally.
e) The Archive ( 2002 )
By 2002 artwork had advanced sufficiently that a project
to tell real life family history was possible.
The target audience were the unborn generation,the format
was
the inked pencil shaded drawing and the universe chosen
to
communicate with artistic licence on history was DoH
DoH became a archive,with its characters being reworked
in order to describe about 200 years of history in about a thousand drawings
By the end of 2002 the project was completed,the drawing
pads stored and DoH played its part as an archival tool to aid future generations
f) The Port Burwell mere dragons ( 2003 )
By 2003 it was time for DoH to enter the fictional world
again." mere dragon" came from Dicksons "Dragon and the George" novels.
The old DoH story from the winter of 2000/2001 was the
inspiration for the setting and the characters from The Archive provided
the images.
The dragons of Histh were no longer a stone age tribe
of giant
lizards crouching in underground caves,but were proud
land owners,fisherman,steamboat captainsWitnesses and participants to human
events.
For the second time Cultus Creek appeared in pictures,and
it was a pleasant agricultural village that was going places.
g) The Arts Group filler material ( first half 2004 )
h) The Animations ( second half 2004)
The Long Woods A Cultus Creek Christmas
- Its 1812 and an americanzed Upper Canada finds itself
torn
apart by civil war as USa and Britain do battle. The frontier
village of Cultus Creek and the mere dragons of Histh find themselves on
the frontline
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Getting A Return From DoH
That first began to change in the first half of 2004 when
a community arts organization needed some documentation that it was actually
into local culture and art.
The Port Burwell mre dragon drawings were not of a totally
imaginary story universe,but had sprinklings of local culture, architecture,geography,history
in them.
Thus with reworked web pages,new titles and a " local
art" feel to them they were presented to community art groups which knew
nothing of DoH or the furry/tf internet community as stop gap filler material.
So for the first time the dragons of Histh were making
a material contribution in the real world
In the second half of 2004an opportunity arose to produce
community videos.It was quickly determined that producing animation using
a real communitys identity and citizens presented the risk of litigation.
Thus a safer approach seemed to be to employ a fictional
town with fictional characters.
-besides eliminating the risk of litigation such a video
could be hawked at any real community's grants council
since it was a " generic" video
Which led to the creation of 2 10to15 minute animations
featuring Cultus Creek from DoH
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Civil War in the DoH Universe
In one tale where Merlin tells Vortigern how the battling
red and white dragons are causing the foundations of Vortigerns new building
to constant fall down,he is referring to the effect of civil war on the
nation.
In the latest DoH work,the animation The Long Woods the
time and setting referred to are 1812 Upper Canada,where Ontario was going
through a mini civil war.
The Port Burwell mere dragons would have experienced this,since
many a settler in the region had a American relative or whose family had
fled from the American colonies during the Revolution,which itself was
another civil war.
The Ballad of Flamebringer touched on the theme of a battle
between father and son.
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last edited 2005-09-11 18:40:59 by LoathsomeDragon
By the end of 2003 there was a vast amount of DoH works
but there hadn't been much of a material return.
In the source Arthurian tales there is a state of civil
war between King Arthur and his son Mordred.