When I give talks in schools about Gods and Monsters: Mythological Poems, we always finish with the World Cup of Mythological Monsters. Imagine the sun beating down on the Colisseum’s earthen floor as our challengers emerge from their corners, to gasps from the crowd. How will the Minotaur fare away from his home turf of dark Labrinth? Is the retiring Yeti temperamentally suited to fierce combat? How effective is the Gorgon’s petrifying stare at a distance? It’s great fun and every time it goes a little differently. At one school, Team Grendel is especially vocal. At a library event, the Amarock, a terrifying Wolf from Inuit mythology, proves a fan favourite. But I think I’m going to have to mix it up because… the dragon always wins.

They’re often big, you see. Sometimes huge. (Not always, if you’ve met How To Train Your Dragon’s Nano Dragons, but often.) They have tough leathery scales, and fearsome teeth and claws, although sometimes their eyesight is poor after all that crouching on treasure in the darkness. They have wings, and they can breathe fire. As range weapons go, it’s hard to argue with. (Just ask the charred remains of that Sphinx it dispatched without breaking a sweat in Round Three.)

As a child, I was enchanted and pleasantly terrified by Roger Lancelyn Green’s Puffin Book of Dragons. From Sigurd and Lancelot to Beowulf, I quested with the dragon slayers, while always retaining a little sympathy for their majestic adversaries. What a joy it has been to ride out again in search of dragon poems for my most recent anthologies.

Within the pages of Gods and Monsters, I watched Pie Corbett’s Dragon Whistler, beautifully drawn by the amazing Chris Riddell, summon her scaly legions by night.

I walked deep into The Forest with A F Harrold, and when we brushed the sleeping dragon’s hide with our outstretched hands, we were marked forever. (Sometimes, we notice others with the same secret in their fingertips, and we

‘Say nothing, but nod,

say nothing, but smile,

say nothing, but know

you’re not alone

knowing

what you know.’)

I stood on the wind-whipped cliff to watch Laura Varnam’s Dead Dragon, Deep Dragon plunge like a comet into the ocean. I listened, yawning, to Andrew Lang recalling the lullaby of Orpheus, soothing the ‘King of Gods and men’ to sleep. I longed, like Marianne Moore, to be a dragon myself, ‘of silkworm size or immense’.

Some figures that appeared in Gods and Monsters, a collection of mythological poems, could not perform an encore in Heroes and Villains: Legendary Poems. A legend is a story that has – or was thought to have – a grain of truth at its heart. People from many different cultures all over the world have sincerely believed in dragons, the stories perhaps inspired when fossils were discovered in the earth. Brian Moses wonders whether The Dragons Are Hiding:

‘Yet recently there were rumours again:

The whisper of wing-beats in darkness,

distant thunder from mountains,

a tumult beneath a waterfall, where roaring

could easily be disguised.’

Well, good, I say, and so say all the children who cheer the dragon to victory in the World Cup of Mythological Monsters. They are the most fearsome and the finest of the beasts in which we never quite stop half-believing.

Gods and Monsters: Mythological Poems and Heroes and Villains: Legendary Poems gather classic and contemporary poems for an audience of 8+. Both are illustrated by Chris Riddell.

More information on school events with me here.

This article originally appeared on the Children’s Poetry Summit blog.