Entering the cathedral of Kraców, you can't help noticing, that high on the left-hand side, are huge bones, bound by rusty chains.
These, in legend, are the remains of the local dragon, Smok Wawelski (pictured below). The exact details vary a bit, but a long time ago this dragon lived in a cave lower down on the rock than the modern cathedral (and still accessible to visitors).
The dragon terrorized and ravaged the land thereabout, because dragons do ("fish gotta swim, birds gotta fly, dragons gotta terrorize and ravage"). However, as happens often with mega-fauna, open conflict with the interests of humans led to it being slain.
"Smok
Wawelski" sounds like the dragon's personal name (usually not mentioned
in dragon-lore). But Smok is just old Polish for dragon or snake (like "worm" in Anglo-Saxon),
and the second part comes from the location, Wawel being the rock on
which the cathedral was founded, post-dragon. So this was just the Wawel
dragon.
"Smok" might be the origin — and it's controversial — of the word schmuch (and many variant spellings), which means "a contemptible person", according to the Oxford English Dictionary. The origin is the Yiddish word for penis (I never knew that before!), and it's a taboo word in that language. The possible connection is with snake. The OED records the slang term "trouser snake" to mean, well, penis.
Many scholars don't agree with this derivation. No-one will never know the etymology for sure: unless there is a continuous documentary record of a word's use we can never be certain where it came from: and in fact the origin of a word can follow two or more parallel strands. Given the taboo associations it's even more hard to trace.
The bones?
Coffins in the crypt hold those of Jagiellonian kings. Bones on the wall belonged to Pleistocene whales.
And I wonder where the name "Smaug" came from.
Credit: wikimedia
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My favourite story published under Tolkien's name, is Farmer Giles of Ham. The dragon in that story is called Chrysophylax. But my favourite character was the dog, which 'only' spoke Dog Latin.
As for the bones in the cathedral, that they were found in the dragon's cave and that they appear to be from Pleistocene whales just shows how long the dragon (or a family of dragons) had been living in that cave. Perhaps in dragonlore there was an ancient tale of the dragon who fought and defeated a great leviathan to win the claw of a dragon maiden and he presented the bones of the whale to the dragon maiden's father? Or perhaps the dragon was on a great quest above the land and below the waves and the bones were a trophy?
Perhaps the dragon was a natural history boffin, hence its seeming ravaging of the countryside to carry out its research.
With hindsight, all those knights wandering about slaying those great beasts did us a great disservice.
Apparently the world will end when the ancient whale bones fall off the wall of the cathedral. Funny that. The first end-of-the-world prediction I heard was when I was little and said "When we have killed the last of the whales, we'll know it is the start of the end for nature - Save the Whale!". Perhaps that eco-message goes back quite a few centuries?