“Merely a Fabulous Animal”
TR, Mythological Creatures, and Wyrmspan 🐉
As an avowed lover of Wingspan, produced by Stonemaier Games, which I’ve mentioned in a previous Missing Pieces issue, I was delighted to try out their newest game, Wyrmspan, which is all about dragons, pictured on the hero image—if you’re visiting Missing Pieces from the web (Wyrmspan photo credit: Tim Chuon). And it got me thinking about dragons and other mythological creatures.
Since National Unicorn Day is on April 9, I thought it would only be fitting to devote an issue of Missing Pieces to Theodore Roosevelt and mythological creatures. Sadly, I didn’t find as much as I was hoping to find in the Theodore Roosevelt Digital Library about mythological creatures. I’m guessing this is because if TR mentioned a mythological creature in a letter it was always in passing and therefore not worthy of a subject heading which can be searched.
But we do know from the digital library that he read fairy tales—and enjoyed them. As an example, TR included Hans Christian Andersen, Norse Folk Tales, and Grimm’s Fairy Tales on a list of books he had read after becoming president in 1901 until November 1903, according to a letter to Columbia University president, Nicholas Murray Butler. In another letter to his sister-in-law, Emily Carow, TR even compared the German ambassador to Andersen’s “little toy soldier.”
His wife Edith similarly marked these fairy tales as family favorites in response to a children’s librarian. The Roosevelt family also particularly enjoyed children’s author, Juliana Horatia Ewing, who wrote among other books, Old-Fashioned Fairy Tales. Thus, there’s no question in my mind that TR thought about mythological creatures.
TR and his family also made various references to fairies in their correspondence. TR called his granddaughter Edith Derby “a fairy princess” and his youngest son Quentin left a bunch of flowers when he was a boy at “Mademoiselle’s plate” telling her they were “from the fairies.”
Source: Illustration from The Firelight Fairy Tales by Henry Beston
TR’s eldest son Ted even wrote the forward to a book of fairy tales, The Firelight Fairy Tales by Henry Beston, in the 1920s. Ted noted he especially liked the tale entitled “The Lost Half-Hour,” which interestingly enough features a dragon—though Ted didn’t make note of that in his forward. Instead, he wrote, “[T]he lost half hour is unquestionably an accurate historical account, simply from imagination, what a lost temper looks like.”
Fairies weren’t the only mythological creatures TR and his family were interested in, though. When Quentin was eight years old, he dictated a poem about goblins to his mother. The poem is eight stanzas long, and it recounts a dream that Quentin had.
While Quentin wrote about goblins, TR’s daughter Ethel read about them to her children in fairy tales and stories like The Princess and the Goblin by George MacDonald, a book that inspired J.R.R. Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings.
As interesting as fairies and goblins are, by far the most interesting item in the digital library regarding mythological creatures was about unicorns. On February 6, 1911, Mary Doyle, a student at a normal college in New York, wrote to TR asking if he knew what kind of animal a unicorn was. She added, “As you have been in Africa I thought you would know.”
TR didn’t reply himself, but his secretary did, noting that “a Unicorn is merely a fabulous animal” and providing a definition of unicorn from the Century Dictionary.
Source: Of the unicorne. The historie of foure-footed beastes by Edward Topsell (London: W. Laggard, 1607). Library of Congress.
While the digital library did include this reference to unicorns, I sadly didn’t find anything about dragons—which had originally inspired this month’s Missing Pieces issue. But I did discover a most entertaining story about a young TR—dragon related!—who was invited by the sexton into a local Presbyterian church when I was reading The Ideals of Roosevelt by Edward H. Cotton earlier this week. TR declined the sexton saying, “I know what you’ve got in there.”
When TR told the story to his mother Mittie later that afternoon, she was curious why he didn’t accept. TR explained he didn’t want the “zeal” to jump out at him and stated he thought it was “some big animal, a dragon, or maybe an alligator,” based on Scripture mentioned during the previous week’s sermon: “For the zeal of thy house hath eaten me up” (Psalm 69:9).
In addition to this entertaining anecdote, I also had the opportunity to learn more about the inspiration behind a focus on dragons for Wyrmspan from Jamey Stegmaier, board game designer and president of Stonemaier Games. When I asked him about the choice to make a game about dragons, he pointed me to the company’s January 4 design diary.
The team knew they wanted to add to the wider world of Wingspan but wanted to do more than just “reskin Wingspan with a different animal.” They discussed both dinosaurs and dragons, ultimately settling on the latter. As Jamey noted in an email to me, “Just like birds, most mythological dragons are winged creatures that lay eggs, so we thought they would be a natural fit for a game inspired by Wingspan’s core mechanisms.”
Wyrmspan photo credit: Tim Chuon
Even though there aren’t many references in the digital library to mythological creatures, I feel confident that TR had a fondness for them. It’s now going to be my goal to see if I can find a letter where TR talks about dragons. But in the meantime, I plan to keep playing Wyrmspan and reading stories with dragons in them—and I’d invite you to do the same!
Fantasy is one of the most popular book genres. In fact, it won last month’s poll about favorite book genre. It’s fun to escape into different worlds and discover creatures that don’t exist in our own, “merely fabulous animals” to use the wording of TR’s secretary.
Choosing a favorite mythological creature was hard. Unicorn 🦄 won this time with dragons 🐉 being a very close second, but I could have easily checked a box labeled “all the above.” And I like Wyrmspan much, much better than Wingspan.
The unfortunate thing is that dragons in recent tales have taken on more human characteristics. Not that this is bad, per se (ex: Smaug), but TR did not like animals being anthropomorphized. I wonder how he would feel about this being done to dragons, since they are mythological creatures?