Introduction
Kallimachos and Chrysorroi describes mostly the love story between them. Kallimachos goes on a journey with his brothers to prove to their father who is most worthy of the throne. They encounter challenges, and Kallimachos is alone in a dragon’s castle. He slays the dragon in its slumber and saves Chrysorroi. They fall in love. They go through challenges together: Kallimachos dies, is revived by his brothers, and finds Chrysorroi in another nation; they reunite and convince the king to let them go. The end of the story is happy, though it is unclear which brother was chosen for the throne. The specific passage to be analyzed is the second passage on page 46. It describes Chrysorroi’s first words to Kallimachos. She is confused because he is simply standing there, speechless, shocked by her beauty. She proceeds to complain about her fortune and wonders if he is there to save her or if he is another trouble her fortune has sent after her. Then she urges him to hide because the ‘dragon’ is coming; if he stands there like an idiot, he will be killed.
The artifact of choice is a sword hilt from 1000-1024. It is made of metal and bronze(The Index of Medieval Art). The hilt is ‘lotus-shaped, with the fantastic bird(hamsa) on each side,’ and it is of ‘Byzantine’ style(“The Index of Medieval Art”). The blade was not preserved. In the story, Kallimachos fails to kill the dragon with his sword and only succeeds when he uses the dragon’s sword(48). This is crucial in terms of identifying the dragon as a monster.
The monster of choice is the ‘dragon’ in Kallimachos and Chrysorroi. The word dragon is in quotation marks due to the lack of description of its appearance. It is what the text refers to this creature as, but the readers do not know if this is an actual dragon since there are no descriptions of the typical dragon’s attributes, such as the colour of the scales, the size, or the abilities(ex. breathing fire). For this text, a monster can be defined as an imaginary creature with inhuman characteristics, such as an insatiable appetite, boundless strength, and killing and devouring humans.
The passage points out certain characteristics of the ‘dragon’ and defines it as monstrous. The artifact of choice relates to the weapon Kallimachos used to kill the dragon. Even though only the hilt was preserved, it still bears similarities to the sword used by Kallimachos to slay the dragon. The parallel that Kallimachos’ sword could not kill the dragon, similar to Beowulf using Grendel’s mother’s sword to defeat her, makes one thing clear. Monsters cannot be killed with ordinary weapons. The similarity between the sword used by Kallimachos to defeat the dragon and the artifact of choice is that they both have an intricate hilt. The dragon’s sword had a ‘magnificent ruby hilt’(48). The sword hilt from Serçe Limani is ‘lotus-shaped, with a fantastic bird, the Indian hamsa on each side’(Bass et al. 363-398). Other than the fact that the dragon’s sword belonged to an unearthly being, this difference in detail enabled Kallimachos to kill the dragon so easily when his original sword could not even scratch it.