Dragons!
You know the ones.
Big, scaly, fire-breathing, sometimes not any of those things.
But let's be real, dragons aren't so easily defined.
And that's what makes them so special.
Dragon comes from the greek drakon (δράκων), meaning "dragon".
No, but literally it means "one who stares".
But despite the greek etymology of the word, dragons aren't localized to any one region
or mythos.
In fact, they're damn near universal.
There's a popular theory that the universality of dragon lore was partially encouraged by
the fact that you can find dinosaur bones basically everywhere, and "huge scary bird-lizard"
is as good an explanation as any, I guess.
And… not really… fully inaccurate?
…Huh.
So before we get into their uses in modern media, let's run down some prominent historical
dragons.
(Isn't this fun?
You get a trope talk and a myths video for the price of one!)
Chronologically, we can probably pin down the first known dragons in human history as
tiamat and abzu from Mesopotamian mythology.
Abzu and Tiamat are primordial deities and lovers, representing fresh and saltwater respectively,
and when Abzu is killed by the new generation of gods, Tiamat is enraged and gives birth
to the first dragons.
Abzu and Tiamat aren't really physically described - they're both primordial gods who got killed
and repurposed into forming the actual earth - but Tiamat is occasionally represented as
a giant serpent, and her draconic offspring are described as hybrids between serpents,
lions and birds, so pretty textbook dragons.
We can also pin down a couple early dragon-like monsters in The Tanakh with behemoth and leviathan
- two apocalyptic monsters, again, vaguely described, but representing primordial chaos
on land and in the sea respectively.
The Leviathan is directly derived from Lotan, a massive sea serpent from Ugarit mythology
that was defeated by a storm god.
And keep an eye on that theme - we'll come back to it.
Meanwhile, Behemoth seems to have influenced Bahamut, which in some Arabian mythologies
is an occasionally-winged enormous sea monster and/or fish that carries the world.
Egypt gives us the noteworthy serpents Apophis and Orouboros - Apophis, as we've discussed
before, is the giant spikey serpent that tries to eat Ra every night, while the Orouboros
is an unnamed piece of popular iconography found in some funerary texts that alchemists
got way into later.
The norse give us Jormungandr, another enormous god-eating serpent - and another one famously
defeated by a storm god, in this case Thor.
This is a motif across basically all indo-european mythologies and even some beyond that, so
we're gonna be seeing a lot of it.
But this also isn't the only dragon around here - the Nidhogg is a dragon that gnaws
at the roots of Yggdrasil, and in the Volsunga saga we find Fafnir, one of the most iconic
folkloric dragons - a dwarf transformed into a dragon through his own greed and also maybe
that giant pile of cursed gold he stole.
Hinduism gives us Vritra, a draconic personification of drought and arch-enemy of the storm god
Indra - yet another storm-god-vs-giant-snake-more-at-11 scenario.
In Mesoamerica, the most well-known dragon is the deity Quetzalcoatl, a flying feathered
serpent that pops up in basically every precolonial civilization in the region.
He's not the only dragon, though - Xiuhcoatl is a small "fire serpent" wielded as a weapon
by Huitzilopochtli the sun god.
If you've ever seen a picture where it looks like he's holding a curved, spiked club?
It's actually a fun-size dragon.
And a bit further south in the Inca empire is the Amaru, a two-headed serpent that lives
at the bottom of bodies of water.
Australia gives us the Rainbow Serpent, a common figure in most Australian Aboriginal
cultures - always a giant many-colored serpent and usually associated with water or rain.
While this is an important and recurrent figure, it was also kinda latched onto by European
anthropologists who really liked the idea of a centrally important sky deity and glossed
over (a) every other important figure and (b) the fact that the rainbow serpent is not
one pan-Australian deity, and is portrayed very differently by many different aboriginal
cultures - some places it's a creator spirit but elsewhere it's a bit more of a classic
monster, it's more of a motif than a singular central god.
Anyway, Greece gives us a metric buttload of dragons of all shapes and sizes, starting
with the classic Hydra, a many-headed venomous swamp-monster.
Ladon is the dragon that guards the garden of the hesperides, and an unnamed dragon fills
a similar role guarding the golden fleece.
Helios's chariot is sometimes pulled by winged serpents, Ketos is the sea monster that threatens
Andromeda until Perseus kills it, and Python is a cthonic serpent formerly in charge of
Delphi who's killed by Apollo so he can claim the oracle there.
Typhon's dragon status is a bit debatable, but he does follow the dragon-vs-storm-god-ultimate-smackdown
format when he's defeated by Zeus, so I'll say he counts.
Fun fact, there's also an Armenian deity, Vahagn the Dragon-Slayer, who is also a thunder
god.
It's seriously everywhere.
I don't know why.
As mentioned way back when I did Mwindo, Kirimu is a seven-headed dragon in the folklore of
the African Great Lakes region, in the rare position of being blood-brothers with the
storm god instead of nemeses.
In western europe, both four-legged winged dragons and Wyverns - two-legged, two-winged
dragons - are very popular in heraldry, especially in Wales, where a dragon is on the flag.
And there are quite a lot of ballads about dragons causing problems for a region before
being killed by a passing knight or saint.
Some of these were also metaphors for christianity triumphing over paganism.
And of course this region also gives us the unnamed dragon from Beowulf, which keeps the
traditional venomous quality while also adding fire-breath, a trait that has since become
iconic.
Meanwhile, China kinda has the dragon market cornered.
They're incredibly common symbols representing strength, power, divinity, fortune - basically
all good things.
They're also very commonly seen as deities of bodies of water.
There's evidence that dragons were prominent symbols in the area as early as the neolithic.
Chinese dragons, like many others, appear as combinations of several other animal traits,
but with Chinese dragons it's actually very specific - stag antlers, horse, camel or crocodile
head, demon or rabbit eyes, snake neck, clam, frog or tortoise intestines, carp scales,
eagle claws, tiger paws and cow ears.
Prominent dragons in Chinese mythology include Longshen, the Dragon King; Ao Guang, the Azure
dragon of the East China Sea; Ao Qin, the Vermillion dragon of the South China Sea and
the essence of summer; Ao Shun, the Black dragon of Lake Baikal and the essence of winter;
and Ao Run, the White dragon of Quinghai Lake and the essence of autumn, who you may remember
from their cameos in Journey to the West.
There's also Huanlong, the draconic form of the Yellow Emperor, the center of the cosmos,
the element Earth and the Chinese quintessence.
Chinese dragons are basically all divine and fundamentally good, which is quite a change
from the Indo-European model of "general monster".
And Japan sorta has two trypes of dragons - one kind, the Ryu, is very similar to chinese
dragons, typically water-based, divine and occasionally wish-granting.
And then on the other hand there's things like Ikuchi, a sea-serpent yokai that sinks
ships; and Yamata-no-Orochi, an eight-headed snake killed by - wait for it - Susano-o the
storm god.
Boom.
Now that's a pretty solid rundown of the major folkloric dragons - obviously there are more,
but I'm trying to do a video here, and this gives us plenty to work with.
Now one might be tempted to try and do some kind of taxonomical breakdown of categories
of dragon based on morphology and stuff - numbers of legs, wings, preferred habitat, etc.
But while that could be fun, there's… not really a point here.
Dragons aren't a real animal that evolved - you can't arrange them on a cladogram to
try and figure out when exactly fire-breath developed and if it was before or after ground-based
dragons split off from the sea serpent line or whatever.
We're looking at these guys from a STORY perspective, so instead of trying to categorize by legs
or wings or scales, let's start breaking them down by what role they play in a story and
what qualities inform that.
Let's start big.
Thanks to Tiamat, Abzu, Bahamut, Behemoth, Leviathan, Typhon, Jormungandr and Apophis,
the concept of an apocalyptically enormous dragon is pretty well-precedented.
Apocalyptic dragons tend not to feature directly in a story except as a super final boss, and
are more likely to be in the background lore as some kind of ultimate enemy or former threat
defeated by a god or something.
Unless it's a kaiju movie, in which case full steam ahead on the dragon apocalypse.
Apocalyptic dragons are also often evil gods or god-scale threats, and it's also not unheard
of for dragons to be framed as explicitly demonic - this probably has roots in the western-european
"dragon as metaphor for paganism" thing.
But dragons aren't always evil.
Now thanks to Chinese dragons, Quetzalcoatl, Tiamat, Abzu, Bahamut and the Rainbow Serpent,
one suprisingly common draconic trait in modern media is divinity.
Many dragons are either gods, godlike, or just generally magical and positive-thinking.
Divine dragons usually fill a support role rather than being the focus of the story - providing
guidance, wisdom, magic, or whatever.
Being much more magical than the typical monster dragon, these dudes can sometimes end up being
a bit more of a dragon ex machina than anything else, popping out when the story needs some
added coolness and then going away again.
Related to the divine dragon and drawing on the same roots is the dragon shifter, a dragon
who can turn human, or at least humanoid.
Chinese dragons could sometimes take human form, and Quetzalcoatl has one too, so there's
precedent here among the more intelligent, less malevolent mythological dragons.
This concept was kinda solidified by dungeons and dragons, where all dragons gain the ability
to take a humanoid form - and this is, in fact, how half-dragons happen.
Beyond DND you can sometimes get characters who are descended from dragons and have sparse
draconic traits for this reason.
Also sometimes if your big bad needs an upgrade before the final battle, they'll turn into
a dragon.
Just happens sometimes.
Actually related to that is the draconic curse variant, which originates specifically from
Fafnir, a dwarf who gradually transformed into a dragon.
There's actually a few other sources for this kinda thing, including the Norwegian tale
of Prince Lindwyrm, a prince who was born a dragon because his mother didn't listen
to a witch, and was only fixed by a brave young peasant girl who did listen to a witch
- but anyway, mostly the source is Fafnir.
In this version, a transformation into a dragon is a curse, often as a punishment for greed
or hubris something.
This shows up in one of the later Narnia books as a direct homage to Fafnir.
Also in some lamer cases it's not a physical transformation, but a character might start
acting more draconic because of some cursed gold or whatever.
Sorry, hobbit movies, just cuz your "dragon sickness" plotline has roots in classic scandinavian
folklore doesn't mean it isn't stupid.
Anyway, on a related note, dragons often like hoarding stuff.
Fafnir and his giant golden hoard is a major source for this one, as is Beowulf's dragon,
which was provoked by the theft of part of its hoard - but Greek mythology also has its
fair share of dragons protecting magical artifacts or locations, so there's lots of precedent
for this one.
It's probably the most cliched dragon trope these days - dragons just love them some gold.
In the cases of more intelligent dragons, this can be something of an amusing character
quirk, but in more antagonistic and monstrous cases, it's likely to be their driving motivation
- either protecting their hoard or seeking out more stuff to put in it.
Some modern media plays with the idea of dragons hoarding specific things depending on their
individual personality, like first edition comic books or really shiny rocks.
Amusingly, while dragon hoards used to be very common in western european folklore,
they became less popular macguffins as the region got more into chivalry - because gold
is a much less noble reward than rescuing a princess.
And on that note, some dragons are way into sacrificial young ladies.
Between all those western european folktales of knights rescuing princesses, the Japanese
folktale of Susano'o killing the Orochi to save a girl from being sacrificed to it, and
the iconic Greek myth of Perseus rescuing Andromeda from Ketos, it seems that dragons
really like endangering young ladies.
This is another pretty cliched one, and between that and the additionally maligned cliche
of "sexy lamp damsel in distress" most writers only bring it up to subvert it these days
- the dragon's just misunderstood, the girl is actually the villain, the girl is doing
the rescuing, the girl is the dragon, the girl is dating the dragon, it can get pretty
weird.
Now a lot of modern dragons actually get written as "not bad, just misunderstood".
After all, if you're looking to subvert a cliche, "dragon as bad guy" is a pretty well-trodden
one.
How this manifests kinda depends on how smart the dragon is - or, rather, if it can communicate
with humans.
If the dragon can talk, and is basically just a big scaley person, then one conversation
with the protagonists is usually sufficient to reveal that it's actually a decent sort.
But if the dragon's more animalistic, what usually happens is it turns out they're basically
cats.
Cats aren't malevolent, but they can be a bit antisocial and hard to read if you don't
really know your way around them, and if you scale that up about five hundred times and
give it fire breath, you can get some pretty serious collateral damage from misidentifying
something as a scratching post, and humans might conclude that they are actually malicious
when they're really just misunderstood and potentially adorable.
"Dragon as cat" is an extremely popular interpretation, and as a side benefit, it can make dragons
cute.
Win-win.
Now this last one is actually kinda new.
There's no folkloric precedent for it as far as I can tell, and instead it can be traced
back to Anne McCafferey's Dragonriders of Pern, which first came out in 1967.
True to the name, this book features dragons as noble steeds for the first time basically
ever.
The dragons in this series form unique, lifelong psychic bonds with their chosen rider so they
can work together as a single unit - and if one member dies, the other one usually doesn't
survive either.
This concept was later… "borrowed" wholesale by Eragon, which is probably a little more
familiar to most of you guys.
Dragon as Noble Steed has since become a very popular concept - because let's be real, dragons
kick ass, and therefore riding a dragon makes you kick ass.
Amusingly, the concept of bad guys riding dragons is actually a bit older - Tolkien
had his ringwraiths riding "fell beasts", which he wouldn't define as dragons (because
he had very specific opinions about what constituted a real dragon) but were nevertheless large
scary winged animals.
So all these traits are pretty cool and overall create a lot of possibilities for dragons
in fiction.
But it does kind of beg a question…
why dragons?
This is a LOT of ground for one trope to cover.
Dragons can be everything from divine to satanic, animalistic to brilliant, personable to completely
alien, and anywhere on the moral spectrum.
We can't even pin down a physical definition of what a dragon really is.
Now Tolkien had some pretty interesting thoughts on what defined a real dragon.
According to Tolkien, there were only two - our old friends Fafnir and the Beowulf dragon.
These guys were more than just big scaley monsters; they meant something in their stories.
Fafnir is an object lesson on the dangers of greed, while the Beowulf dragon kinda smacks
of the inevitability of age and mortality.
To Tolkien, a dragon had to be essential to "both the machinery and the ideas" of the
story - "essential to the machinery" meaning "important to the plot," while the rarer trait
was being in line with the THEMES of the story.
And you can kinda tell this in how he wrote HIS dragon - Smaug is definitely plot-relevant,
but his pride and deadly greed are also theme-relevant, since those are the traits that end up leading
to Thorin's downfall.
This is a good angle, and it's very useful for the purposes of literary analysis.
But I'm gonna respectfully disagree with the idea that these are the only dragons that
matter.
I think the fact that dragons can fill so many roles is much more interesting than the
fact that only a few of them are actually structurally essential.
Let's ask, why is the dragon the iconic fantasy creature?
Why is it "dungeons and dragons", not "basements and basilisks" or "mineshafts and manticores”?
"Gorges and griffons."
"Treasures and Tarasques."
Sorry, I'll stop.
Why are dragons so special?
Well, there's a few reasons!
Some of them we've already discussed - since draconic folklore is present worldwide, dragons
aren't restricted to any one specific region or culture, whereas critters like phoenixes,
unicorns or griffons are rather more localized and less universally recognized.
We might wonder why exactly dragons are so widespread, and to that, I'd say - we're asking
the question backwards.
It's because we categorize a lot of fundamentally different things as dragons.
Apophis and Jormungandr are just really big snakes.
Mesopotamian dragons have bird wings and lion bodies.
Hydra, Kirimu and Yamata-no-Orochi have way too many heads.
Chinese dragons are highly intelligent gods, while western european dragons are animalistic
monsters.
Some of them are venomous, some of them have toxic blood, and only a sparse handful of
them can actually fly.
So it's not "why are there so many dragons" - it's "why are we classifying all of these
things as dragons"?
And while this answer is circular, it's because "dragon" has never meant anything more specific
than that.
Language is really defined by how we use it, and "dragon" has historically meant so many
different things that it can't really have a rigid definition now.
Dragons are everywhere because "dragon" can mean… almost anything sufficiently snakey
and powerful that can't readily be categorized as anything else.
The most universally consistent traits of folkloric dragons are… "powerful" and "important".
They're never irrelevant, they're never harmless or even weak.
Even the nice ones are usually very destructive when angered.
Folkloric dragons are always powerful, and if they're not explicitly friendly, they are
ALWAYS a serious threat.
This doesn't apply as universally to modern media, but you might've noticed it's always
a purposeful subversion to make a dragon harmless.
It surprises the audience, because the danger is supposed to be baked-in - so a cute tiny
dragon or a dragon that can't breathe fire is often played for comedy, because it's an
inherent contradiction to their original nature.
Dragons are made to be powerful.
It's the single consistent throughline in their mythical portrayal.
Compare a "dragon" to any other popular folkloric creature.
A griffon is a lion plus a bird.
A phoenix is a bird plus fire.
A kraken is a giant tentacle-y sea monster that attacks ships.
A manticore is a lion with a man's head and a scorpion's tail.
A chimera is lioness plus goat plus snake and also it breathes fire.
A unicorn is horse plus spike.
A mermaid is top half of woman plus bottom half fish.
A minotaur is head of bull plus body of man.
A centaur is top half of man plus full body of horse.
A satyr is top half of man plus goat legs and horns.
They're all clearly defined.
You can mess with the designs a bit, but fundamentally their formula is what makes them what they
are.
If you take away two of the centaur's legs, he's not a centaur anymore.
If you put wings on the unicorn, it's… an alicorn, I think, but it's definitely not
a unicorn anymore.
But a dragon?
Add as many horns as you want, put on more legs or take 'em away - it's still a dragon.
Where these other things are defined by their specificity, a dragon is defined by its lack
of definition.
We can subcategorize and classify all we want - but a sea serpent is still a dragon, and
so is a lindworm, and so is a wyvern, and so is an eight-headed snake that really likes
booze.
If it can't be classified as anything else, it can probably be a dragon.
A dragon isn't a specific kind of creature - it's a category, like… "fairy" or "demon",
with a few central characteristics and popular trends but no strict morphological definition.
This is why I never see the point in people arguing dragon taxonomy.
It's way too late to be worrying about that now!
We've already been calling all these things dragons for thousands of years!
Anyway, this built-in versatility, plus the inherent power behind the trope, is a big
part of why dragons are so popular.
And because of that, they're really… weighty.
A dragon in your story isn't just a dragon - it's got the full weight of thousands of
years of power-based tropes behind it.
An ultimate enemy, a divine protector, a monster to slay, a curse to dispell, a treasure to
win, a village to save - there's always something in the implications that makes them automatically
important.
Dragons are the iconic fantasy creature because they represent the full spectrum of what you
can do with fantasy.
Magic, curses, good vs evil, treasure, battle, heroic rescues, riding a motherf**king dragon
because hell yeah.
Dragons aren't rigidly defined, which means they have near-limitless potential, which
makes them the perfect symbol of a genre built on exploring the unrealistic and the fantastical.
Dragons are awesome because… dragons have always been awesome.
In the most literal sense - awe-inspiring.
Like I said, their defining characteristic is power.
If you make a dragon, you're echoing sources from all over the world and every period of
history reiterating that.
It's trope-subversive just to make a dragon small and cute, because it's so built-in that
they have to be huge and dangerous.
And even if the dragon is dealing with a bunch of OTHER similarly huge and dangerous things,
its dragon-ness alone will elevate it and make it stand out from the crowd.
I've seen some people suggest that dragons are cool because they're the ultimate fusion
of every primal threat hard-coded into humanity - venomous snakes, big cats, predatory birds,
and also fire.
I get this argument, and dragons are definitely equipped to be the ultimate apex predator,
but I think that's actually selling them kinda short.
Dragons are really cool because they don't…
HAVE to be any of those things to be a dragon.
While the modern image of a stereotypical dragon is a scaly fire-breathing winged quadruped
with one head, two eyes, some horns and assorted spikes, if you wanna call your primordial
multi-headed sea-serpent or your feathered flying snake or your usually human-shaped
bad guy a dragon, nobody's gonna stop you.
And because of what it means to be a dragon, the audience will know to expect something
powerful and important no matter what shape it is.
And it's funny - even a character who's not PHYSICALLY a dragon in any way can get that
kind of reputation by being nicknamed after a dragon.
I ran a twitter poll asking about people's favorite dragons and one of the most common
answers was Uncle Iroh, the Dragon of the West.
And also, let's be real, the ultimate fusion of human primal fears would probably have
a lot more spiders involved.
So… yeah!