Dragons

Medieval-themed fantasy often includes dragons (mine does).  But where did the dragons come from?  The fact that western Europe, India, and China all have dragons in their folklore has made some speculate that dinosaurs somehow survived in hiding until a few centuries ago, coming out just often enough to be seen and join the folklore.  This is of course wildly improbable, but it's fun to imagine.

But let's look at what dragons are supposed to look like.  They are now usually portrayed as having four legs plus wings, as in the above image from 1890.  (Does this mean they are a form of insect?  I'll say No.)  This makes them quite different from Chinese dragons, which while long and snaky and (usually) four-legged do not have wings.  They do however tend to have big floppy ears.  The image below shows the Chinese flag from the Qing dynasty (c. 1900).  Chinese dragons are not nearly as ferocious as western ones, but you still wouldn't want to tangle with one.

Medieval dragons in the west might have neither wings nor legs.  They were indeed often called Worms.  Twelfth- and thirteenth-century images of Saint George or Saint Michael overcoming a dragon (such as seen below) usually showed a long, scaly creature closer to a snake than anything else.  Our modern word dragon indeed comes from Latin draco, meaning a huge serpent or sea-serpent.

By the late Middle Ages distinctions were sometimes made between dragons, which had four legs, and wyverns, which had only two (plus wings), but really they were all dragons the whole time.  They became common in heraldry, and kings and armies adopted them as symbols of courage and might (as in stories of Arthur Pendragon).  For that matter, Roman legions had often used dragon-heads on their standards.

In medieval Norse culture, a common man's name was Orm, meaning literally worm (related to our modern English word) but really meaning dragon.  The Vikings put dragon-heads on their ships.  (You may recall that in The Hobbit Tolkien had Smaug called a worm as well as a dragon.)

Dragons appeared in occasional medieval stories, most notably in Beowulf, where the hero went out as an old king to defeat one and save his people, which he did but died in the process.  Siegfried/Sigurd, in both the Norse Saga of the Volsungs and the German Nibelungenlied, got his start by killing a dragon, who had originally been a human before greed for gold turned him into a dragon.

Dragons, you will notice, are bad in these accounts, deserving to be killed.  George RR Martin has kept the ferocity of medieval dragons in his Song of Ice and Fire (inspiration for "Game of Thrones"), even though they can be befriended.  But medieval dragons could take other forms as well.

One medieval monk said that he had seen a dragon (the only account we have of someone saying he really had seen one, rather than telling a story that included one).  His doesn't match any of the stories.  He described it as what we would think of as a blimp, hundreds of yards long, legless, floating in the air.  He was understandably surprised and observed it for an hour or more.  For him, its principal issue was as a sign or portent, and he had to figure out what it portended.  He ended up deciding it was like Leviathan in the Bible.  Leviathan, principally known from the Book of Job as a huge, horrible monster did breathe fire (as do modern depictions of dragons), though the monk's floating dragon did not.

© C. Dale Brittain 2019

For more on medieval literature, see my ebook, Positively Medieval:  Life and Society in the Middle Ages.