In Romanian folk belief the comet (and/or meteor) could be seen as a dragon. This may be significant, as the ancient Dacians with their draco resided in Romania and according to my theory Uther Pendragon likely belonged at the Dacian-garrisoned Roman fort at Birdoswald on Hadrian's Wall. We are all familiar with Uther's draco standard and Geoffrey of Monmouth's claim that it represented a comet.
From Pag. 628 ”Dictionar etnografic R-Z”, A. Antonescu:
"pe cer mai trec și Stele Călătoare (stele cu coadă sau comete), adică zmei și balauri, pe care Dumnezeu i-a pedepsit să rătăcească pe sus; când trec prin apropierea Pământului, încercând să-i vrăjească pe oameni; acești demoni se ciocnesc între ei, ori crapă de necaz că nu le-a reușit vraja; atunci se aude o pocnitură și cine se duce în acel loc găsește bucăți din trupul lor și picături din sângele lor, sub formă de pietre negre, bune de leac și de farmece; în magia populară, șapte stele ocupă un loc aparte, ele posedând câte o culoare a curcubeului și numindu-se Logostele"
”The traveling stars (comets) are not candles, but zmei and balauri, which God has punished by making them to go up through desert places, but they do not listen and try to approach the earth, to enchant people. They leave behind them luminous trails that roam through the sky."
Bibl.123 Olinescu Marcel, Romanian mythology, Bucharest 1944
Small Dictionary of peasant astronomy and meteorology, Vlad Manoliu, 1999
From Romanian Peasants' Beliefs In Stars & Sky, By Ion Ottescu
"Falling stars, candles that are extinguished while in flight leaving a brief trail of light, do not reach the Earth.
Thinking of fireballs [very bright “shooting stars” or meteors], the peasants add that there are other falling stars [comets?], which are round or long, and which can enter into men’s houses, or fall to the Earth, or even land on men. These are the flying balaurii (the Romanian dragons) or zmeii (balaurii in human form), which walk in the night to disfigure or kill lone men. This is because the zmeii are evil beings. Thus, these stars are also known as lost or travelling stars."
Other studies seem to indicate that meteors, too, could be perceived as dragons, and it is probable that that comets and meteors became confused in popular tradition. Here are some good discussions on meteors as dragons. Doubtless, with additional research, more such could be found.
We may thus have in the story of Uther's draco and its comet a relic of ancient Dacian belief. This is one of the wonders of folklore. Old traditions die hard, and pagan religious motifs can be preserved for centuries in that medium. Of course, such a connection between Uther's comet and the Romanian sky-monster cannot be proven in isolation. The possibly "coincidental" nature of the respective material must be honored and the parallel acknowledged as merely suggestive. That is, until we incorporate my other arguments in support of Arthur in the Irthing Valley and at Banna of the Dacians in particular.
Now, I have studied the configuration of the draco thoroughly. Best analysis is that for the Dacians it represented a fairly typical monstrous hybrid of wolf and serpent. The important thing is that it became identified as a draco by the Romans, and this identification, due to prolonged Roman influence, would have eventually been adopted by the Dacians themselves. Certainly, this would have been the case for the Dacians who served for centuries in the Roman army. And this is true regardless of what they originally may have called their monster. [Balaur is the modern term for dragon found in Romania, but that term itself is derivable from a very ancient root and it seems to have meant monster or dragon from very early on.*]
balaur (variant balaur, Aromanian bwl'ar) (n., masc.) 1. dragon, fabulous snake
According to Cohac (2.7) and Meyer (41), it derives from Serbian bla(v)or, blavur, itself from Albanian buljar "water snake". but this doesn't make sense. In fact, Romanian balaur is cognate with the Albanian buljar and Albanian bolle "big snake". All these forms seem to derive from PIE *bhel "to grow, to swell" (IEW, 120)...
Thraco-Illyrian origin (see bala)
bala (n. fem.) wild animal, monster, Latin belua "beast", but the derivation is not clear. Instead, Cioranescu (620) believes that it is a contraction of boala "illness", but he is wrong about it. It is related to balaur and it derives from the same PIE *bhel-, bhle- "to grow, to swell"...
It is of Thraco-Dacian origin (see balaur).
Note 1: I just received this private communication from Andrei Dorian, an expert on Romanian sky lore:
"Now, mainly I would say that Ion Otescu's (or Ottescu's) vision is the most important just because he worked for 10 years with priests, teachers and peasants from Romanian villages to collect national traditions about the sky.
Personally, I think that, regarding the “travelling stars”, the Romanian peasants didn’t observe too much the difference between comets and fireballs (because they didn’t know that the comets appear in the void and the fireballs in the atmosphere, being children of comets), they rather supposed that the comets and the fireballs were dragons with different speeds, so travelling stars could be fireballs, too.
Anyway, over the next days I hope I’ll be able to look for my old notices about the comets in Romanian folklore."
Note 2: The following comes from meteor expert Alastair McBeath, who reads the Romanian sources differently. For him, only meteors are dragons, not comets. The confusion in the translated passages already offered came about because meteors themselves came in two different classifications.
"I can't really comment on whether the Antonescu translation is entirely right or wrong, as all translations involve a degree of interpretation based on their intended audience. It seems reasonably correct in this case however, at least so far as it goes, because, for example, it does not translate "zmei" as "kite", which is its common meaning in modern Romanian, as some automated sources might (e.g. a quick test of Google Translate does this).
It does though only translate much of the first half of the cited Romanian passage. This has important ramifications, because the remainder goes on to mention sounds being heard and black stones, "pietre negre", being found on the ground after the travelling star was seen, where the star-creature had supposedly fallen to the ground, the stones being interpreted as fragments of its body and/or drops of its blood in solidified form, which objects are said to have magical properties. This is a fairly typical folkloric/poetic version of a meteorite fall following the sighting of an especially bright meteor, an interpretation common in folklore from various parts of Europe. The objects found only exceptionally rarely turn out to have been genuine meteorites, though. Many earthly stones and other objects found lying on the surface (including man-made items, and types of algae and fungi) have been interpreted in popular belief as star-fallen, regardless of their true nature or origins, as you may be aware.
Antonescu seems to have conflated both versions of Ottescu's originally separate Travelling Stars (= "Ottescu's" meteors) and Tailed Stars (= "Ottescu's" comets). That might point to an unfamiliarity with the differences between meteors and comets (something the note regarding the later-found objects strongly supports, as in reality they could only have come from a meteor, not a comet), or it may indicate a more recent (i.e. post-Ottescu) change of opinion that the two cannot be separated in this manner as was the case in Ottescu's time (or at least as Ottescu himself believed was the case). I note the two cited sources for Antonescu's comments long postdate Ottescu, so when or why this may have happened is unclear without seeing both these additional sources as well. I suspect that one or more of the three later authors has simply created the conflation in error through unfamiliarity, much as I suggested in my previous e-mail.
In the case of the Ottescu translation, your added note "[viz. comets]", suggesting this is what was meant here by his use of the term translated as "other falling stars", is definitely an incorrect interpretation however, given I was one of the people involved with this translation back in 1998. Ottescu at this point was discussing meteors (the chapter's title translates as "The Sky, Stars and Falling Stars", for instance), and the paragraph in question refers specifically to types of especially bright meteors, fireballs (which are also those objects relatively more likely to partly reach the surface as meteorites subsequently), hence the bracketed translator's note earlier in the cited passage.
Popular confusion regarding the differences between a comet and a meteor means there will always be a degree of ambiguity as far as the terminology goes. Where it's possible to probe further and look at a detailed description of the dragon's activity in any given tale, such as that Antonescu item, it can become easier to identify the more probable origin regardless of what was claimed as the actual source object, though care is needed at times because folk-beliefs need not be realistically accurate, of course."
To try and get to the bottom of whether comets were seen as dragons, I've contacted Vladimir Manoliu at the Romanian Peasant Museum. He is a professional ethnologist and author of a book on astronomy and meteorology in Romanian popular belief. I will post his response here in full.
FINAL NOTE:
Antonescu, in his ethnographic dictionary of Romania, wrongly identified 'stele calatoare' or traveling stars with comets. Olinescu does not say these objects are comets, and all other sources treat of the traveling stars as meteors. Fireballs, in particular, i.e. meteors that land on earth and thus become meteorites, were particularly associated with dragons.
In Marcel Olinescu (Mitologie Romaneasca, 2004, p. 60), we have traveling stars as dragons.
When we get to Antonescu, we have the additional comment that traveling stars are comets:
"pe cer mai trec şi Stele Călătoare (stele cu coadă sau comete), adică zmei şi balauri"
Antonescu, Romulus -
Dicţionar de Simboluri şi Credinţe Tradiţionale Româneşti, 2009.
Ediţie digitală 2016
From Vlad Manoiu:
The first researcher who wrote about Romanian beliefs connected to comets and meteorites was Ion Otescu. In his book, "Credințele țăranului român despre cer și stele" / "Beliefs of the Romanian Peasant on sky and stars" (Tipografia Carol Gobl, Bucharest, 1907), he wrote that the falling stars (meteorites) are considered "balauri" or "zmei" (dragons). The comets, in old Romanian beliefs, are stars with a tail, or travelling stars, that are foretelling disasters, or are bad omen (Otescu, pp. 71-72).
The second study referring to the Romanian ethno-astronomy is made by Tudor Pamfile, in his paper "Cerul și podoabele lui după credințele poporului român" / "The sky and his ornaments according to Romanian beliefs" (Academia Română, editura Socec, Bucharest, 1915). Concerning the comets, there are called by him, according to the information he collected in the field: travelling stars, stars with tail, stars with crest, scholarly stars. The comets are supposed to fortell bad happenings: wars, plages (cholera, plague), droughts, famin, or even the end of the world (Pamfile, p. 179-181). Also in the beliefs he collected, the dragons (balauri) are supposed to be the falling (meteorites) stars, not the comets.
The Romanian beliefst that A.Antonescu is citing in his "Ethnographic dictionary" concerning the comets and the falling stars (meteorites), he is takind from the Marcel Olinescu's book "Mitologie Românească" / "Romanian mithology", published in 1944. Only in this belief the comets are explained as dragons (balauri). Actually, Olinescu is mixing the beliefs concerning the comets with the ones with the falling stars. Maybe this is the way he found the information, and cited as such.
In my book "Mic dictionar de astronomie si meteorologie taraneasca" / "Small dictionary of astronomy and peasant meteorology" (Editura Mentor, Bucharest, 1999) I cited what my predcessors have been writing, the way they are citing their sources.
I hope I could help you with this dilema,
kind regards,
Vlad Manoliu
MARTOR
(The Museum of the Romanian Peasant Anthropology Journal / Revue d'Anthropologie du Musée du Paysan Roumain)
Kiseleff Blvd. 3, Sector 1, Bucharest, Romania, 011341
UTHER'S STAR
If there is any truth to the comet story in Geoffrey of Monmouth, we may be talking about the comet of 442 A.D. This “star” appeared at and entered into Ursa Major, the Great Bear. See Cometography: 1800-1899, by Gary W. Kronk.
"442
A star which is called a comet shone for a long time - Marcellinus 442 + AI 442. Ho Peng-Yoke (1962, p.163) cites as follows: ‘10th November 442 “... a comet appeared at Thien Lao [Ursa Ma-jor] ... More than a hundred days later it disap-peared in the W.”’, making identification quite certain, but AI has clearly borrowed it from the chronicle of Marcellinus of Constantinople, see
Mommsen (1894, p.37-108)."
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