Curled atop a great mound of treasure, a dragon stirs. Laboriously, it raises its great head, flicks open a baleful eye and stares straight into the face of a small, awestruck boy. But the dragon has become bored of children. It musters a sleepy roar and settles back to sleep. Far away, a startled Yeti frowns in befuddlement. A Cyclops tucking into a deer haunch chews on, oblivious both to its monstrous neighbours and to its own remarkable resemblance to an oversized Kinder Egg toy.  




This animatronic monster menagerie is part of the ‘Myths and Monsters’ exhibition at London’s Horniman Museum. On the walls around the creatures are panels setting out their stories and the possible real-life animals that inspired them. The various theories are bolstered by photographs or remains: a narwhal tusk for the unicorn, for example, and an ancient Siberian rhino skull complete with gigantic horn. The hall is washed in that sickly greeny-orange glow used by childrens’ attractions everywhere to create an air of mystery, and the exhibits are arranged into hubs rather than linearly to accommodate the distractable younger visitor. This arrangement has the side effect of creating a network of thoroughfares, around which charge over-excited small children bearing aloft plastic shields and fluffy dinosaurs. Remarkably, however, the exhibition works for cryptozoologists of all ages, from instilling a sense of wonder in the very young to providing stories from myth and legend for the more advanced, all balanced out – for those old enough to stand still and read all the panels – with a hefty dose of reason.

“DRAAAGONNN!!! DRAAAGONNN!!! DRAAAGONNN!”

While the bewildered Yeti has oodles of charm, and the pretty white unicorn enchants a scattering of little girls, of all the magical creatures corralled together here the dragon is indubitably the star of the show. Rising above the din every few minutes comes the cry: “I want to look at the dragon again!” Sleeves are tugged and parents dragged back to the circle of kids stood rapt and slack-jawed. It is undeniably a fine beast, sides rising and falling gently as it sleeps, claw giving the occasional wiggle, and clearly matches up to the real-life dragon of children’s imaginations at an age when the boundaries between dead and alive and real and made up are still muddled. Whilst the boldest yell or try to make the dragon do stuff, most just sink into the confusion:



“What’s that Dad?” [points to skull in case]

“That is a dinosaur skull”

“Is it dead?”

“Yes, it’s dead.”

“...”

“...”

“Is the dragon dead?”



Like the ancient peoples who first formed these legends, myth and reality become blurred for the children as they attempt to make sense of the world by building on their own patchy knowledge. This teetering invention brims with fantastical possibilities, later hopefully to translate into an open-minded and wondering attitude vis-à-vis Creation. Young imaginations are further encouraged by books, toys, crayons and a heap of fairy-tale costumes.



Some of the animatronic creatures are less exciting. The exhibition was first put together for the Natural History Museum in 1998, and in places age is beginning to tell. The Cyclops is embarrassing, all cheap plastic and fake blood, and would look more at home in a dusty joke shop. Worse, stuck in a box by the exit in the shadow of the Yeti, is a pathetic and tacky little Gray. It’s an afterthought, intended to show how we still mythologise the unknown; but in this company, with no backstory provided, it seems out of place and underwhelming.





“ ‘Stories of b... bizarre an’ mistrious creatures...’ ”

Those too old to be seen to be impressed by the dragon and friends stand with noses pressed to panels, spelling out tales of the marvellous. While some of the myths and legends are as familiar as a much-loved teddy, others will be new or long-forgotten even to grown-up monster fans, who might be surprised to find themselves engrossed in the story of Odysseus sneaking out of the Cyclops’s cave hidden under a sheep, or that of the Yeti’s habit, according to certain Tibetan monks, of stunning large prey with magic stones carried around under its armpits, explaining why it walks in such an ungainly manner.





“You can’t touch it, it might be real. Dragon! Wake up!”

There comes a time, of course, when childish make-believe butts up against adult reason, and ‘Myths and Monsters’ is careful to counterbalance its fantasies with history and science. So we get broad socio-historical explanations of why mythical beings assumed the shapes they did – the differences between the wise and gentle dragon of the East, for example, and the Christian West’s saint-bothering embodiment of Evil – as well as possibly apocryphal accounts of mistaken identities and garbled travellers’ tales: the unicorn can only be caught, so the legend goes, by tricking it into laying its head in the lap of a virgin, a tip said to originate in an ancient hunting technique whereby a trained female monkey would be taken into the forest to ‘seduce’ a rhino and get it to lie down, rendering it easy pickings. Natural history is represented by the obvious dinosaur fossils and life-size komodo dragon, as well as exhibits like Jurassic oysters or “devil’s toenails”, and a Mastodon skull with its huge nasal opening, which any right-thinking human would conclude was the remains of a one-eyed giant. 



Fakes and hoaxes are skipped over, apart from the display of an impish Jenny Haniver, a grotesque species once fashioned by sailors out of the dried skin of skates, rays or guitarfish. It’s hard to imagine anyone being fooled by it, but in general the texts demonstrate how it once made perfect sense to believe in monsters. Indeed, sometimes science seems to be only now catching up – chimeras nowadays are organisms that contain genetically different tissue, like the half-goat, half-sheep geep, or cows given human genes that produce an ingredient of breast milk. The texts also stress that we’re far from being able to explain everything. Uncertainities are freely admitted; mysteries – the cadborosaurus, the mokele-mbembe – remain. “The origin of many popular mythical beasts has been traced back to real encounters with animals whose nature and form have been distorted and confused. Other legendary creatures continue to defy our attempts to discover what inspired these extraordinary tales.”





“Look look look!”

’Myths and Monsters’, then, creates a sense of amazement enriched, rather than deflated, by the juxtaposition of reason. From the kid bombing around pretending to be a fire-breathing dragon to the grandad who’s been monster hunting since before dragons were even invented, it’s captivating fortean entertainment for the whole family.




Myths and Monsters is a temporary exhibition at the Horniman Museum, 100 London Road, Forest Hill, London SE23 3PQ. It is open daily 10.30am to 5.30pm, until 5 September 2010. Tickets cost £5 for adults and £2.50 for children. For more details visit the museum’s website.