Once in the nursery, it was probably only a matter of time before the dragon and the child became friends.
Martin Arnold, The Dragon: Fear and Power
I.
Originally called Hitokage (‘fire lizard’) in Japanese, Charmander’s western names all reference the legendary salamander: Salameche (IE ‘salamander” + “wick’) in French and Glumanda (‘glow/ember’ + ‘salamander’) in German. (It remains Charmander in Italian and Spanish, while its Chinese name literally means ‘little flame dragon.’)
How did the real-world amphibian, presumably as vulnerable to fire as any other animal, become a legendary creature completely invulnerable to fire? (“Of these two characters,” Borges writes in The Book of Imaginary Beings, “the better known is the imaginary.”) T.H. White proposes one explanation in a footnote to his bestiary translation: real-life salamanders’ tendency to hibernate in logs of dead wood, which would presumably lead to a dramatic appearance from the flame when said logs were thrown onto a fire.
D.C.A. Hillman concurs in an article for Pharmacy in History and notes that the species of salamander likely encountered in the Classical world —Europe’s fire salamander or Salamandra salamandra — secretes a poison that irritates the skin, causing a burning sensation. This was the raw material for a legendary creature that has survived, in one form or another, for almost 2,500 years. I’m currently reading the French filmmaker Jean Renoir’s biography and, in an early chapter, Renoir reflects on his early childhood imagination. “Many times I saw a green lizard in the humid garden. Multiplied a hundred times, this innocent little reptile became a very presentable crocodile in my dreams” (my translation). The innocent salamander, multiplied by the human imagination, became a presentable (and quite dangerous) pseudo-dragon.
A consideration of the imaginary salamander must take into account the omnipresence of fire in the pre-modern, pre-electric world. Fire, as the only source of light and heat, must have had a supernatural aura far removed from our nostalgic crackling, fireside Christmas coziness. In Greek myth, after all, civilization itself began when the titan Prometheus stole fire from the gods and gave it to humanity. And, of course, fire posed much more of a danger in a time of primarily wooden houses, before flame retardant materials, building codes and firefighters with high-press hoses. My readers in the London area, for instance, likely know that St. Paul’s Cathedral was built on the site of an older cathedral that burned down in the Great Fire of 1666; the predecessors of Canterbury Cathedral, Hereford Cathedral, Newcastle Cathedral, Southwark Cathedral (a victim of London’s Great Fire of 1212) and York Minster all met similar fates, to say nothing of countless smaller churches, homes, farms, workshops and other buildings throughout England and the rest of world. In this context, an animal apparently able to walk through fire unharmed would have truly inspired awe.
The legendary salamander dates back to ancient Greece. Aristotle mentions the creature in two proto-zoological works, History of Animals and Generation of Animals, describing it as a creature who lives in fire the way other animals live in water, the sky, or the earth. Nicander of Colophon (c.2nd century B.C.) mentions Salamanders in his poems Theriaka, on venomous animals, and Alexipharmaka, on antidotes for poisons. In the former he describes the creature as “a treacherous beast, ever hateful, which even, making its way through an unquenchable flame, darts out untasting (of the fire) and without pain” (translated by Ella Faye Wallace). Nicander also calls the salamander “the sorceress’s lizard” and identifies it as an ingredient in witches’ potions, an association that lasted for many centuries; Shakespeare’s Weird Sisters add “eye of newt” to their witches’ brew in Macbeth. Nicander’s cure for salamander poisoning? Honey or boiled mountain tortoise.
The Roman military leader and polymath Pliny the Elder (c.23-79) — now probably best known for his death during the eruption of Mount Vesuvius — described salamanders in his pioneering encyclopedia Natural History. Pliny attributes the creature’s invulnerability to fire to a body so cold that it immediately extinguishes fire, and goes even further than Nicander’s “treacherous beast, ever hateful” by describing it as the world’s single most venomous animal. If a salamander climbs a tree, for instance, the tree’s fruit and even its wood become fatally poisonous. Pliny proposes a number of remedies for salamander poisoning, including milk, tortoise broth infused with nettle, Spanish fly, and a combination of frog and sea turtle meat.
Pliny’s account of the salamander formed the basis of bestiary descriptions more than a millennium later. Thus the 12th century bestiary translated by T.H. White tells us that “of all poisonous creatures its strength is the greatest, for, although others may kill things one at a time, the Salamander kills most at one blow.” After repeating Pliny’s description of salamanders poisoning trees, the text ends with the creature’s elemental invulnerability:
This animal is the only one which puts the flames out, fire-fighting. Indeed, it lives in the middle of the blaze without being hurt and without being burnt — and not only because the fire does not consume it, but because it actually puts out the fire itself.
Bestiary artists drew salamanders in several different ways, some closer to nature than others. In a 13th century French bestiary, for example, it resembles a pale, mint-green actual salamander lurking amidst writing flames. Another 13th century bestiary, now at the Getty Center, shows a very different salamander, as seen above, a hairy dark-gray dog-headed creature with multicolored feathered wings, standing on top of a smoldering wood fire. Its tongue hangs out, like a panting dog’s on a hot day.
Like many of its counterparts, the salamander escaped the confines of the bestiary. The French king Francois I (1494-1547) chose the salamander as his personal symbol; hundreds of salamanders, many crowned, decorate his castles at Chambord and Fontainebleau. Following the “salamander king,” it appears on dozens of French coats of arms, including that of Le Havre. Hieronymus Bosch painted a giant salamander in the central panel of The Garden of Earthly Delights (c.1504). (Look in the upper left corner, next to the strange, precarious pink structure.)
Alchemists, drawing on Aristotle, used the salamander to symbolize fire, with gnomes symbolizing earth, nymphs symbolizing water and sylphs symbolizing air. (“No one any longer believes in sylphs,” Borges writes, “but the word is used as a trivial compliment applied to a slender young woman.” I’ve never heard the word used that way or indeed in any way except in the world of Pokémon, where the Silph Co. manufactures Poké Balls and the Silph Scope, which lets the player see ghosts.) In the Netherlands, alchemy’s eventual descendant pharmacy inherited the salamander, which appeared on signs outside pharmacies in place of today’s mortar and pestle or “Rx.”
As a salamander that grows into a true dragon, Charmander has at least one ancestor in English folklore: the Mordiford Wyvern, a local legend in Mordiford, Herefordshire. In the legend, a local girl raises a baby dragon despite her family’s reasonable misgivings, hiding it in the woods and feeding it milk. As it grows, the dragon’s diet switches from milk to livestock to local villagers, beginning a reign of terror only ended by a dragon-slayer named Garston. This tale had a long legacy in Mordiford, whose local noble family, the Garstons, had a wyvern (winged, two-legged dragon) on their crest. A painting of a wyvern hung in the parish church until a 19th clergyman century destroyed what he saw as a Satanic image. Well into the 19th century, Martin Arnold writes in The Dragon: Fear and Power, “it is said that the Rector of Mordiford came across two old women who, apparently believing that they had found baby dragons, were attempting to drown two newts in the church font.” In the local area,
newts were widely regarded as dangerous creatures, for if anyone swallowed their spawn by drinking pond water, it was cautioned, newts would hatch, breed inside the stomach and devour all that is ingested, so bringing about a deeply unpleasant death.
Perhaps the strangest outgrowth of salamander lore occurs in accounts of “salamander wool,” which, according to traveler’s tales — such as those about the legendary African king Prester John — could be woven into fireproof clothing. As White and Borges note, so-called salamander wool was actually asbestos, a substance almost as toxic as the salamander’s legendary poison.
Salamanders (the legendary kind) have had an extensive career in popular culture, one far too long for me to fully summarize here. Players of Dungeons and Dragons, World of Warcraft and other RPGs, for instance, have likely encountered them on dungeon crawls, while players of Magic: The Gathering can add no fewer than 13 salamander-related cards to their deck. In Ray Bradbury’s Fahrenheit 451 (1953), firemen — who start fires instead of stopping them — wear salamander symbols on their uniforms and call their vehicles salamanders.
As with Charmander, these neo-salamanders reflect the legendary creature’s invulnerability to and association with fire rather than its power of poison. They have control over fire instead of an ice-coldness that extinguishes fires and thus begin to overlap with the classic European dragon. Charmander reflects this modern, post-folkloric take on the salamander through its affinity with and control of fire, lack of venom (it cannot learn any poison-type moves by leveling up) and status as essentially a baby dragon. (When I first read T.H. White’s The Sword in the Stone, the little forest-dwelling dragons “which lived under stones and could hiss like a kettle” immediately resurfaced memories of Charmander.)
Unlike the humble toad, the legendary salamander seems not to have inspired Shakespeare’s imagination. While newts (presumably real-life amphibians) are referenced several times in his plays, the salamander appears only once, in Henry IV, Part 1, where Falstaff describes his drinking buddy Bardolph’s flushed red nose as “that salamander of yours” (act III, scene iii).
II.
Ash acquires a Charmander in the anime’s 11th episode, “Charmander — the Stray Pokémon.” This episode begins with Ash & friends encountering a lone Charmander waiting for a trainer who has in fact abandoned it. They rescue the Charmander from a potentially fatal rainstorm; Ash’s Pokedex informs him that “a Charmander dies if its flame ever goes out.” While the fire-type Charmander is of course weak to water-type attacks, this life-threatening vulnerability directly contradicts the Red and Blue Pokedex, which simply states that exposure to rain causes steam to rise from the creature’s tail. It also contradicts older salamander lore. The legendary salamander, as we have seen, is anything but vulnerable — its most enduring trait is its invulnerability to fire and the bestiary makes no mention of a vulnerability to water. Pliny himself wrote that the salamander “never comes out except during heavy showers and disappears the moment it becomes fine” (translated by Bostock and Riley.)
Unlike its mythological ancestor, the stray Charmander is badly injured by the rainfall and only survives after a night of intensive care in the local Pokémon Center’s version of an emergency room. Ash adopts the Pokémon, whose original abusive and neglectful trainer had left it alone in the woods in a callous attempt at toughening it up. (Charmander’s weakness, incidentally, reflects and dramatizes the fragility of the player’s Pokémon early in Red and Blue. The player receives a level 5 starter Pokémon with only a handful of hit points, a creature that needs to be carefully managed — and frequently healed at the Pokémon Center — in order to avoid a KO. A few encounters with wild Rattata or Pidgey or Spearow can quickly drain its hit points.)
Salamanders, having lost their venom somewhere on the long road from medieval folklore to post-Tolkien fantasy, lost even more of their gravitas en route to the Pokémon world. The legendary salamander was a pandemonic creature to be feared and wondered at; Ash’s Charmander is a little pet to be taken care of, cute, fragile. Charmander is a child-friendly version of the old legendary salamander with all the sharp edges rounded off. I began this post with Charmander’s base set card, illustrated by Mitsuhiro Arita, which shows it looking backwards, surprised, after accidentally lighting a tuft of grass on fire. It looks more like a young child curious about the accidental effects of its actions than Pliny’s horrifically toxic creature, “able to destroy whole nations at once” (translated by Bostock and Riley). Kagemaru Himeno’s illustration above is of an equally cute creature.
In The Dragon: Fear and Power, Martin Arnold attributes the popularity of the “nursery dragon” in children’s media to the child’s desire for independence, writing that “what all humans want is the power to take charge of their destinies. The nursery dragon is a fantastical conceit for how this fundamental need might be realized.” Taking this a bit further, I would suggest that the child’s combination of a lack of control, extreme vulnerability and growing need for independence makes the idea of a pet dragon — or salamander, or other Pokémon-ized mythical creature — with doglike loyalty an irresistible proposition, pandemonium itself brought under control. Pokémon co-creator Satoshi Tajiri stressed just this aspect of the series in a 1999 Time Magazine interview. When asked about Pokémon’s popularity and the role possibly played by the creatures’ “goofy-sounding names,” he responded as follows:
What’s more important is that the monsters are controllable by the players. It could be the monster within yourself, [representing] fear or anger, for example. And they are put in capsules. Plus, everybody can give them their own names.
From a broader perspective, Charmander represents a kind of endpoint for the legendary salamander, a stage at which it has lost almost everything: its incredible venom; its “treacherous, ever hateful” character; its intense coldness that extinguishes fire; the appearance of and any link to real-life salamanders. Only the elemental essence of the creature has survived, only the lizard-like creature with a connection to fire. We have, to return to C.S. Lewis, just a trace or echo of something much older and stranger.
III.
In addition to the legendary salamander, Charmander also takes clear design inspiration from dinosaurs such as Allosaurus and Tyrannosaurus Rex, perhaps as a result of global ‘dinomania’ in the wake of Jurassic Park (1993). (One Pokémon Red and Blue side quest, where DNA in fossilized amber is used to “revive” a prehistoric Aerodactyl, seems like a direct homage to the film and/or Michael Crichton’s novel.) As a child I loved dinosaurs so much that I tried to read a book called a thesaurus in the hopes that, a la Tyrannosaurus or Stegosaurus, it would be about a species of dinosaur I had never heard of. (Needless to say, I was disappointed.) Therefore I always chose Charmander, the little dinosaur, as my starting Pokémon.
In “Clefairy Tale,” the third episode of Toshihiro Ono’s manga The Electric Tale of Pikachu, an encounter with young Ash Ketchum has Professor Oak reminiscing about his own beginning as a Pokémon trainer:
That first trip on my own was my first step to adulthood. I can still recall the exact hue of the clear blue sky on the day I began that first journey. I caught a Charmander on that trip. I named it Char. I took good care of it… raised it until it evolved into a Charizard.
Like Professor Oak, Charmander brings back childhood memories for me, perhaps more than any other Pokémon. While my previous post identified Charmander, Bulbasaur and Squirtle as heralds of adventure in the Pokémon world, they played the same role in the real world during my childhood, as heavily merchandised mascots of a pop culture phenomenon. Charmander in particular helped introduce the Pokémon world to my much younger self many years ago; a plastic Charmander was the very first Pokémon-related thing I ever owned, months before that magical Christmas morning when my brother and I unwrapped Game Boys and copies of Pokémon Red and Blue. Even writing this brings me back to that personal age of innocence, to the excitement and sheer joy my younger self felt while exploring a colorful, imaginary world for the first time.
Bibliography
Arnold, Martin. The Dragon: Fear and Power. Reaktion Books, 2018.
Borges, Jorge Luis. The Book of Imaginary Beings. Translated by Norman Thomas di Giovanni. 1974. Vintage, 2002.
Hillman, D.C.A. “The Salamander as a Drug in Nicander’s Writings.” Pharmacy in History vol.43 no.2/3, 2001.
Morrison, Elizabeth, ed. Book of Beasts: The Bestiary in the Medieval World. Getty Publications, 2019.
Ono, Toshihiro. Pokémon Graphic Novel, Volume 1: The Electric Tale Of Pikachu!. VIZ Media, 1999.
Pliny the Elder. The Natural History. Trans. John Bostock and H.T. Riley. Taylor and Francis, 1855.
Renoir, Jean. Ma Vie et Mes Films. 1974. Flammarion, 2005.
Wallace, Ella Faye. The Sorcerer’s Pharmacy. PhD dissertation. Rutgers University, 2018.
White, T.H. The Book of Beasts: Being a Translation from a Latin Bestiary of the 12th Century. 1954. Dover, 2010.
Back in school days, a friend of mine, Ofek (mentioned on my Shinji Ikari and I piece), rather dedicatedly created his own imaginary Pokédex in a notebook (a fanfic of sorts, I suppose). This series of yours makes me wonder what sort of mythologies he had drawn his inspiration from, so to speak.
Slowly catching up to this series, really high-quality articles right here!
It's not the main focus of these first posts, but it honestly never clicked for me why Silph was called like that, it was a small epiphany I had reading this.
Also, I don't know if you are aware, but I highly recommend these series of articles:
https://lavacutcontent.com/1996-creatures-pokedex-translation-1/
Its a collection of translations from an old official guidebook, that gives some additional lore to the Generation I Pokémon. There are some interesting stuff that never made it to the games that may be useful for your analysis, like people drinking Moltres' blood to achieve immortality.
But I haven't much to add beside congratulating for the great work. I'll read the rest as soon as I can!