Here Be Allegories

If you have an adequate map and the name of your destination written down you should be able to make your way there even if you can neither speak nor read the local language.  This has always been my belief and it has never let me down, except once.  On one occasion I was in Moscow, my destination was written down and I had in my hand the finest street map that the combined resources of Intourist (yes, this was in the days of the Soviet Union) could provide.  Unfortunately in an effort to be helpful the map had been printed in English while all the important signs were written in Cyrillic (which I know is an alphabet rather than a language but that didn't help much either) which made correlating the one to the other virtually impossible.  As a result I wound up in a not particularly nice part of Moscow (which in those days was most of it) and almost missed my tour of the Kremlin.

I've always been a bit of a sucker for maps even if some of my favourites have large blank bits marked "here be dragons" on them.  Map making must have been easier back in those days; a collection of houses, one main street, a church and maybe a castle and then just plaster the rest of the page with dragon warnings.  Let's face it nobody is going to sue a mapmaker because they didn't get eaten by a dragon and if a seventy five foot long, flying, fire breathing reptile does tear them limb from limb at least they can't say they weren't warned.  In fact I can't help wondering if the entire "here be dragons" business doesn't stem from laziness or ignorance after all but from a simple desire to avoid lawsuits from bereaved relatives of their customers.  "Here be dragons" probably served as a sort of generic warning.  If you trotted into dragon territory and were beaten to death by a pack of crazed bandits at least the mapmaker could point out that he said the area was dangerous.

Of course its entirely possible that the dragons were merely a euphemism from the start.  It was cheaper and quicker to write "here be dragons" rather than "here be bandits, thieves, wolves, tax collectors, plague carriers, disbanded mercenaries, inhospitable villagers, press gangs, evil cultists and the very real possibility that you will wander helplessly through a hostile landscape until you die of hunger or exposure because you have trusted your life to a rather inferior map".  Compared with that collection the dragons sound positively hospitable.

The only real problem I can see is if somebody actually wanted to find a dragon.  One can imagine St George, armour agleam, sword by side riding hopefully off into the wilderness clutching a brand new map in one mailed fist only to return a couple of months later dejected after a fruitless (and dragonless) search through the wilderness.  One can almost hear the weary cartographer explain;
"Look, its just an allegory all right.  Something, incidentally, you might like to explore yourself.  Slaying a dragon was only meant to be an allegory for your personal struggles against sin.  That's something you can do in your own lounge room.  I can sell you a map of that if you like."