She could not remember a time when she had not known the story; she had grown up knowing it.

That’s the opening line of The Hero and the Crown, the 1984 fantasy novel by Robin McKinley. Funnily enough, I can’t remember the first time I read that line. I must have found the book somewhere; chances are high that it was in one of the sackloads I took home from the Winnipeg Public Library. I was somewhere between the ages of 10 and 13. At some point, I acquired my own paperback copy, which I read so many times over the following decades that at some point in my thirties, it fell to pieces in my hands, and I bought as exact a replacement as I could, but it didn’t quite smell the same.

I had been not-so-subtly nudging my kid toward reading Hero for a while, so when he saw it on the reading shelf at school a few months ago, he picked it up. He was 12, about the same age I was. Be cool, I told myself, but I couldn’t resist asking him, every so often, what part he was in. Had he met Luthe yet? What about Maur?

I can list off the many wonderful things about Hero: the mature approach to romantic love, the courageous old horse, the sense of deep history and stories we can’t quite glimpse at the edges of the pages, and most crucially, the voice of Aerin herself, the heroine. But it’s hard to articulate precisely why this book became one of the books of my heart. The Blue Sword, the other Damar novel (published earlier, but later in the chronology) is also a favourite, but Hero is something more than a favourite. It’s one of the books that made me a writer, that made me want to work with stories every day of my life. I re-read it every few years, even now.

This spring, Robin McKinley is being inducted as a Grand Master by the Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers Association, of which I’m a member. This brings me great joy.

And in a small personal way, it also brings me joy that my own novel coming out this spring, The Valkyrie, is, in some senses, the homage to The Hero and the Crown that has been bubbling up inside me all these decades. Readers who are familiar with McKinley’s novel will recognize some little nods to it (there is one on the first page, in fact). And in a deeper sense, The Valkyrie is indebted to both Hero and to the other dragon book I read at a young age: The Hobbit.

I was one of those Tolkien fans who wrote long passages in all the alphabets. I have read The Lord of the Rings dozens of times. It’s funny that despite the importance of Tolkien and McKinley to my life as a writer, I don’t tend to write secondary-world fantasy, at least not at novel length, at least not so far. I came back to our own world through theirs; reading for me has been like experiencing a portal fantasy in reverse. Dragons, for me, were Smaug and Maur. They still are. But they came from stories about our own history.

As I got a little older, I learned that Tolkien had been influenced by older stories, and that what he was reading as a kid was Andrew Lang’s Red Fairy Book, which had a bit called “The Story of Sigurd,” about a hero who kills the dragon Fafnir. Fafnir appears in many old stories from northern Europe. He’s an interesting figure: in many stories, he’s a shapeshifter, and he carries on long conversations and riddles with the people he encounters. Sometimes he’s called dreki (dragon) and sometimes ormr (worm); in The Valkyrie, I made Fafnir a lindworm, partly to honour some of the old serpent/worm creatures in stories that tend to have been eclipsed these days by fire-breathing, flying dragons, and partly because it is a less familiar creature and I didn’t want any reader expectations about dragons to get in the way. There are so many different kinds of dragons.

My Fafnir, though, is a particular kind of dragon/lindworm, in a lineage that goes back through Maur and Smaug (and then to Fafnir before that; it’s a circle.)

What had always appealed to, and terrified, me about both Smaug and, especially, Maur, was how dangerous it was to kill them. Not to fight them — well, that too — but to kill them. If you kill that sort of dragon, you enter into a relationship with it that is not like anything else, a lonely kinship, and you bear the burden of that the rest of your life. Sometimes the burden is externalized as a cursed hoard, but it’s deeper than that, I think: to kill an ancient, solitary dragon means understanding a dragon, which means understanding what it is to be old — not just in one’s own body but to come apparently late in the history of one’s world — and to be fundamentally alone. Even more creepy, to me, was that both Smaug and Maur, whether in reality or through illusions, seemed to be aware of their role, to accept that their purpose was to provide the people who came to kill them (or even to talk to them) with a kind of wisdom that would make them lonely for the rest of their lives. They sat around for centuries waiting for this to happen. Eating and hoarding was what they did to pass the time and show the world they needed to be killed, but that was too simple to be their only goal; they were intelligent, patient, knowledgable creatures, playing their part in a ritual they almost seemed to welcome. That is what scared me about them most of all.

There is never any question, from the point of view of the story or even of the dragon, that killing this sort of dragon is the heroic thing to do. They are evil, a blight on the world. But the hero has to pass through fire and conversation; they have to see themselves as they truly are, and accept their own fundamental impermanence before they can go listen to the now-hollow accolades of the people they’ve saved. Maria Dahvana Headley’s translation of Beowulf describes him as he faces the dragon:

The famous warrior was, for the first time, naked … loaded into a rattling cart and exiled to a dark country….

Whether symbolically or otherwise, both parties, the hero and the dragon, won’t make it out of the fight as they went in. Another piece from Maria Dahvana Headley’s Beowulf:

First, the dragon killed the king, then the king killed the dragon. Maybe a man’s mighty, maybe he’s known to all as a warrior, but death has his number.

Some story patterns get under my skin and this is, obviously, one of them. One of the reasons I loved The Hero and the Crown was that it explores not only how a woman kills a dragon when necessary, but how she changes herself into a dragonslayer, which requires seeing herself and her world in new ways.

Anyway, that’s the reason for the little nods to McKinley in The Valkyrie!