When it comes to fantastic beasts, the one, the only, the genuine original, is the dragon. Dragons are fantasy. So much so that one of the most popular examples of all, Anne McCaffrey’s Dragons of Pern, despite its origins in good old-fashioned spacefaring science fiction, not only carries the label of fantasy, it’s inspired numerous younger authors.
Dragons are everywhere. Just about everyone has a version. Many are based on the Western dragon: scaled, winged, breathes fire. Some incline toward the Eastern variety: sinuous, often wingless, allied with air and water. They’re magical, mystical, and immensely powerful.
They are ancient. Apep/Apophis of Egypt, Tiamat of Mesopotamia, Typhon and the Hydra of the Greeks, the dragon that guarded the Golden Fleece, were all some form of serpent monster, often with multiple heads—the Greeks especially had a fondness for that. The dragons of China go back millennia, and have been allied with and symbolic of imperial power since the first emperor.
In the West, dragons have generally been agents of evil. They bring death and destruction, and it’s heroes’ duty and destiny to destroy them. Marduk casts down Tiamat and saves the world. St. George, like Perseus before him, slays the dragon and saves the maiden.
In the East by contrast, dragons are wise and benevolent. They are protectors of the land, bringers of rain, with power over the wind and the sea. Their presence brings good luck.
Modern fantasy has embraced the full range of draconic possibilities. Smaug is far from the only dragon in Tolkien’s legendarium. As terrible as he is, he’s the last and least of an ancient and evil lineage.
He comes out of the Western medieval and far northern tradition: the winged Wyrm who amasses a hoard of treasure and defends it against all comers. Tolkien knew, none better, the dragon that Beowulf fought in the Anglo-Saxon epic.
Anne McCaffrey by contrast took up a challenge issued by John W. Campbell and a built a science-fictional world in which a lost Terran colony genetically engineered small native fire-breathing lizards into giant fire-breathing dragons. Her dragons are a terror to the livestock they live on and the alien Thread they were created to burn out of the sky. To humans they’re allies and defenders, and their riders are telepathically bonded to them.
Tolkien’s style of dragon is rather limited in what it can do in a story. It’s a monster. Heroes have to kill it. McCaffrey’s dragons are much more fun in fan terms, and a much better fantasy. Dragonslayer is a rather one-note occupation, but dragonrider offers endless opportunity for romance and adventure.
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Another, more complex variety of dragon lives on the edges of Le Guin’s Earthsea. These great creatures are far from benevolent. They have their own reasons for being. They’re perilous for humans who encounter them, either voluntarily or otherwise. Their wisdom is deep but deadly; it’s beyond dangerous to speak with them. They’re wild in the truest sense. They can never be tamed.
More recent dragons have populated games and anime as well as written works. The Great Old One of role-playing games puts the beast right up in lights: Dungeons and Dragons, it calls itself.
So where does it all come from? The primordial serpent very likely was born out of a fundamental human fear. Snakes are deadly predators, and they can grow huge. I don’t know of any in the Eastern Hemisphere that ever reached the dimensions of the great pythons and anacondas of the Americas, but the east has its fair share of venomous snakes. Add to these the crocodiles of Africa and Asia, and there’s ample reptilian terror to feed myth and legend.
And maybe some of the legend rises out of the earth, in dinosaur fossils. China has a plenitude of them. There would be proof if anyone needed it, of gigantic serpentine creatures that lived and died in the Middle Kingdom.
Air and water, clouds and wind, give shape to Eastern dragons. The drift of cloud across a mountain range, the eye of the moon through a cloud or a fall of rain, the swirl of mist across the ocean, can seem almost sentient, if you angle your eyes just so. That’s where magic is. That’s where you’ll find your dragon.
Judith Tarr is a lifelong horse person. She supports her habit by writing works of fantasy and science fiction as well as historical novels, many of which have been published as ebooks. She’s written a primer for writers who want to write about horses: Writing Horses: The Fine Art of Getting It Right. She lives near Tucson, Arizona with a herd of Lipizzans, a clowder of cats, and a blue-eyed dog.
While I can understand your comment on the limitations of the “dragonslayer” story, there can be interesting variations on the theme. My favorite remains the 1981 film called “Dragonslayer” where a young wizard experiences danger and opposition as he hunts the dragon, Vermithrax Pejorative. An atypical Disney film that is very good.
One correction: anacondas are native to the Western Hemisphere (South America), but pythons are native to the Eastern Hemisphere (Africa, Asia, and Australia). There is an invasive population of pythons in the Florida Everglades, but the species is Asian (the Burmese python).
Tolkien’s Smaug was one of the first dragons I encountered as a child, but it was Le Guin’s depiction of dragons (specifically Orm Embar and Kalessin in The Farthest Shore) that first fascinated me. I would not mind learning more about earlier dragon legends, both in the West and in the East.
I’m very fond of Elizabeth Bear’s (and others?) dragons and the connection with radiation and nuclear contamination. They emit ionizing radiation which makes anything that’s near them as dangerous as they are.
@2 Thanks for the correction. Summer heat fried my brain cells. Burmese python, of course!
@3 Oooo, good pointer. I’m collecting recent dragon works. Will add those.
My mother always called my father’s fantasy books “dragon books”.
In earlier cultures snakes shedding their skin were a symbol of rebirth. Later religions invented dragon slayers to explain how the newer gods won against the old snake goddesses (like Apollo stealing the Pythia’s oracle). Tiamat is another old dragon goddess who was killed by younger gods.
@@.-@ I’m contemplating how a lot of Bear’s work with the artifacts and aftermath of dragons rather than with dragons themselves. Even in her most recent series which has a dragon as an actual character, they’re most present in most of the story through their effect on objects such as the dragon glass that glows with radiation.
I’m not widely read enough to know if this is an actual subgenre–like what happens to the world or the dragonslayer after the dragon happens. Might be a good subject for an article: the absence of dragons rather than dragons themselves.
The reticulate python (found in southeast Asia) is the longest snake on record. Burmese pythons got pretty big as well. So Asians would have been familiar with big big snakes.
The Feathered Serpent (Kukulcan, Quetzalcoatl) never seems to get a look in when dragons are under discussion. He fostered the arts of civilization among the Mesoamerican peoples, but he was definitely pretty dragonish.
“Tolkien’s style of dragon is rather limited in what it can do in a story. It’s a monster. ” There are a lot of things I would call Glaurung, but limited isn’t one of them. Actually, monster is not very accurate either. While Morgoth and then Sauron are far away enemies for the most part, Glaurung is responsible for MUCH, if not MOST of the action in Turin’s story. He is far more than a monster, and while very capable of using brute force, he also can be subtle and clever and seems to enjoy using those tools just as much as the use of claw and breath.
In a happy coincidence, I’m rereading Jo Walton’s Tooth and Claw. I’d forgotten how good it is, all those very Victorian dragons being at once so completely proper and so completely monstrous.
Dragons are monsters. Monsters are people. Therefore, people are dragons? Works for me.
If you’re defining dragons broadly enough to include hydras, then not all Eastern dragons are benevolent or wise, either. Yamata-no-Orochi was a monster that ate people until it was lured in and slain. Not something you would expect to find carrying on a conversation with Qinglong/Seiryu or their kin.
Naomi Novik’s Temeraire series has several kinds of dragons from different parts of the world (the main character is from a Chinese egg hatched and raised in the West), mostly the “people” kind although some dragon-like creatures are more ambiguous.
One of the longest-running fantasy video games, World of Warcraft, is even now turning to dragons to reinvigorate itself, with the Dragonflight expansion expected by the end of this year. (There have been dragons in it all along, but they’re going to have a more central role than they have in many years.)
The Flight of Dragons by Peter Dickinson considers the characteristics of dragons as described in many stories from a scientific perspective. The science of dragons in Marie Brennan’s Memoirs of Lady Trent is quite different.
My favorite take on dragons is Jack Vance’s The Dragon Masters the 1963 Hugo Award winning novella pitting genetically-engineered “dragons” bred and controlled by humans against genetically-engineered-humans bred and controlled by “dragons.”
Another interesting take on dragons that comes to mind are those in Diane Duane’s Middle Kingdoms series. Duane’s dragons represent a different mix of fantasy and science fiction tropes: they are enormous, magical creatures inhabiting a fantasy world, but they arrived in that world as refugees from another solar system, having once had the ability to cross interstellar space.
Lab experiment: Take a clutch of new-hatched chickens. With zero experience of the outer world. Draw the shape of a falcon in flight across their sky. The chicks will panic. Draw the same shape, flying backwards. The chicks ignore it.
Somewhere in their mental pattern is information about the dangers of that shape, moving that way. Given the stupidity of chickens, that’s an unexpected mental feature. It must be in their genes. Centuries of natural selection eliminated birds whose last sight was a plunging raptor. Favored birds who escaped beak and talons.
One theory about dragons posits a similar inborn memory: The three classes of predator arboreal primates needed to fear were: The Snake, the Cat, and the Bird. The dragon combines features of all three. It is an archetypal super-predator. Not different in kind than the falcon shape that chicks automatically react to.
Millions of years of surviving such predators have loaded the primate/human mind with a set of warning signs. Serpent + Leopard + Falcon = Danger! The storybook features of the Western dragon has such power because it matches our primate survival archetype.
> And maybe some of the legend rises out of the earth, in dinosaur fossils.
Doubtful. There are cases of fossils attributed to dragons and other mythological creatures, like Blue Ben, but it was most likey a supplement for an existing myth, not the cause of its appearing. Generally, I think that trying to link mythology to reality is not always a good choice. A snake doesn’t need to be giant to spark an imagination. Reptiles were always associated with earth and water and thus they had a chtonic symbolism.
As some of the others have mentioned having a draconic villain is not necessarily one-sided. recently I have been writing a story where one of the main antagonists is a dragon who allied themself with the other villains of the story. the dragon will be a powerful force on the battlefield but is also highly intelligent so anyone trying to enter their lair will encounter a myriad of deadly traps. If anyone has advice on how to write this kind of story I would be willing to listen.
I’m a fan of the book Seraphina by Rachel Hartman. It’s about a girl who finds out that she’s half dragon half human and seeks out others like her. This is during a time when there is growing political tension between the dragons and humans. It’s really good. I’d recommend it to anyone who’s a fan of different kinds of dragon lore.
I’ve read all the McAfree books loved them all. Can’t wait for a movie version. Your right it’s a lot better to ride AND COMMUNICATE with them. Throw in Fighting Thread and they are far more interesting.
@14: this has been debated for some time; many researchers have not been able to reproduce the original results, and some have found that the different reactions seem to come from habituation rather than hard wiring. See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hawk/goose_effect.
I would like to mention the wonderful short story “Chinese Puzzle” by John Wyndham, in which Welsh & Chinese traditions & politics clash beautifully. Dragonical shenanigans ensue…
I was a kid, but I could’ve sworn that Fujur was an interesting fella.
Peace out!
I just finished reading the excellent Priory of the Orange Tree by Samantha Shannon. This book does a great job of highlighting this Western vs Eastern look at dragons.
Michael Swanwick’s “Iron Dragons” are my favorite of the re-imaginings out there. Great trilogy. Melanchthon is a true dragon in almost every sense..
“Tolkien’s style of dragon is rather limited in what it can do in a story. It’s a monster. ”
This is rather a pointless comment. It’s not entirely true, but even if it were it’s irrelevant–you couldn’t write The Hobbit with a McCaffrey dragon in it. Much like you couldn’t write the Pern cycle and have it feature urbane, civilized Thread. Tolkien was writing a story with a classic dragon that needed to have a classic dragon in it. What it did in the story was what he needed it to do in the story. And it did that stuff very well.
But if you go and actually read The Hobbit, and get to parts where Smaug is being described, there’s a surprising amount of satirical social commentary embedded. Notes of how dragons, tracking their hoard, rarely know a bad piece of craftsmanship from a good, although they generally have a shrewd idea of the current market value. Smaug may be a monster, but he could almost be considered a bourgeois monster–Tolkien’s dragons are monsters sure enough, but they also have a fairly specific moral value as embodiments of greed, greed which can be somewhat contagious. Smaug’s hoard, and the greed to possess it, is in some ways much more dangerous than Smaug himself as a purely physical threat.
For some reason, 2003 and 2004 saw a real spate of “dragon-lore” mockumentaries. IMHO, the best of these (and the cgi was absolutely goregous, especially for the time!) was the one narrated by Patrick Stewart, “Dragons: A Fantasy Made Real” (from imdb: https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0433367/ )
But even as a kid, dragons were always fascinating for the crowd I ran with (of course this was back in 1st and 2nd grade, but…) We’d play dragons, but no one was ever the knight who tried to slay us.
I just have one nit to pick. McCaffrey’s dragons are not fantasy. Unless all alien species found in science fiction are also fantasy. That was her genius, taking a creature out of fantasy and folklore and creating it in a science fiction setting.
I agree that Dragons are classic fantasy creatures but not all dragons are fantasy creatures.
I suppose if you are using fantasy as an all-encompassing term of which science fiction is subgenre it fits. Fun article!
If you are into the cryptozoology links, there’s a number of sightings around Korea, where people claim that they saw something resembling a dragon flying in the sky, but it did not match the classic anatomy of dragons in popular literature, but looked like a very big eagle with a long fanned tail, no feathers, just lizard’s scales, and it doesn’t have four legs, just the two atypical hawk talons, and two batwings. It might be an undiscovered dinosaur species that somehow survived the dinosaur extinction, and stayed mostly hidden in the southeastern Asian jungles. Curiously, this beast is called a Gryphon in books about mythical creatures dating to medieval times.
Also, if they are going to be making a lot of new movies and streaming series involving people riding giant flying dragons, why not build a robotic dragon that you could ride for real, instead of only a CGI special effect? If that thing catches on, we could eventually have ‘Dragoning’ races at the annual‘Burning Man’ festivals!
I also love “Tea with the Black Dragon”, by R.A MacAvoy — the primary character for most of the book is revealed to be a dragon.
It seems this article is incomplete without at least a mention of Pratchett’s Discworld dragons — both the swamp dragons (prone to explosion) and the “noble” dragons, who have all folded themselves into some other dimension.
@23 Yes, dragons seem to almost personify greed in Tolkein’s writing. Should we talk about the dragon in “Farmer Giles of Ham”?
Le Guin’s dragons get a deeper, richer interpretation in Tehanu and The Other Wind. (So do the wizards, that other staple trope of fantasy.) They are neither villains nor faithful companions, but not human, either. Except when they are. Sort of.
I had a paragraph I cut about the difference between science fiction and fantasy, but for the purposes of this conversation, I think the more interesting question is, do dragons have a fixed moral nature or are they “people” who can be good or bad? Pernese dragons don’t seem to go in for long-range planning and rely on humans for ethical decisions, and they are capable of choosing humans who are lazy, self-centered, or downright sociopathic. The human weyrwoman Kylara is blamed for actions that kill two queen dragons, even though the two dragons in question killed each other. Dragons in Pern don’t seem to have much moral agency. Paolini’s dragons also seem to go along with the decisions their riders make. Tolkein’s dragons (and orcs) don’t seem to have the ability to choose to be good, even though they can talk and reason — they are reduced to being symbols of evil. Dragons in McKinley’s The Hero and the Crown are usually dangerous animals — but if they are intelligent, they are pure evil and malignant to humans, even after dead. Temeraire and kin, on the other hand, argue with the humans and definitely have their own goals and plans. Le Guin’s dragons value different things than humans do, but can choose how to act on those values — that’s the point of the later books. Dragons in Wrede’s Far West books are simply dangerous animals, but in the Dealing with Dragons series, they are intelligent and have full moral agency. MacAvoy explores an intelligent non-human’s journey to becoming human in the backstory of Tea with the Black Dragon– dragons seem to have had the ability to make choices but Long has little experience of loss before becoming human. Barbara Hambly’s Dragonsbane presents a dragon with more agency and empathy than some of the human characters, and again blurs the line between humanity and dragons as one of the human characters is able to become a dragon.
After writing all this, I decided to see what TV Tropes had to say… yeah, just go read that: OurDragonsAreDifferent (not “scholarship,” and you may disagree with the dinosaur bone theory presented as fact….)
Fuchur is a dragon model you can ride in the Bavaria studios in Munich (with a bluescreen background).
Frau Mahlzahn in Jim Knopf is an evil dragon who transforms into a good golden dragon.
I was surprise that no-one (if I missed it in the comments, forgive my oversight) mentions the dragons in the world-building by Robin Hobb in the interlocking Fitz and the Fool and Rain Wilds stories. I enjoyed the alienness of the dragons and several volume a story arc which becomes about restoring dragons to the earth so that humans and dragons keep each other from overweaning arrogance. The careful reveal of the dragon lifecycle and the interaction with the already established magical forms of that world is well told. The hints of a previous civilisation in which dragons and humans managed to come to a mutually beneficial modus vivendi almost seem to require stories to be told in themselves.
Another callout for Tea with the Black Dragon. But Vermithrax remains my favourite, too. And there’s a short story somewhere about someone surgically correcting the chamber alignment in the heart of an in-vitro embryo crocodile…
@31 I believe that’s “The Day of the Dragon” by Guy Endore. Read it many years ago.
When I was young and foolish—you should pardon the tautology—I wrote a short story about an exterminator who was sent out to a farm. He was expecting rats, or termites.
The farmwife told him, “I’ve got a dragon in my back forty. He’s eating my apple trees. I want you to exterminate him for me.”
Fortunately for all concerned, I never got it published. Writing fiction is not my forte.
“Just about everyone has a version.” No kidding. I’ve read a lot of fantasy serieses, and almost all of them involve dragons of some kind(s) in some capacity. My greatest love will always be for the dragons in the Enchanted Forest Chronicles (Dealing with Dragons and its sequels), though in their culture and their diversity of personalities, they’re among the most human-like dragons I’ve read about.
Though he’s a far cry from a “typical fantasy” dragon, the existential-despair sees-through-time-and-space dragon of John Gardner’s Grendel left a big impression on me. Ever since Smaug I’ve had a weakness for chatty dragons.
The reason that dragonslayer storylines fall completely flat for me is that they’re just mythologised tribalism, they’re the essence of that corruptive taint we’ve come to call bioessentialism—the notion that there is inherent good & bad, inherent superiority & inferiority. It’s a very anti-intellectual position to hold, based upon primal and instinctive fear. And fear? Well, it hasn’t ever really been very intelligent. This tribalism has given rise to pathologies like the just-world fallacy in the modern day—the belief that if someone isn’t of your tribe and they’re being abused? They had it coming. Therefore, I can only find dragonslayer storylines to be simple. Devoid of complexity and nuance. A caveman in a tin can facing off against a big lizard because ug ugg, it um diff’runt and diff’runt is bad.
It’s far more interesting when nuance exists that allows dragons to be persons rather than weapons—which also allows everyone interacting with them to be persons, rather than weapons. This is very important. In a lot of fantasy fictions, the hero and villain alike will sacrifice personhood to be wielded by the author as weapons in the name of spectacle. And I could find nothing more tedious or dull than beings without agency competing because instinct says so. It’s dreary, tiresome, and it only appeals to the most base instincts of humanity.
This is why I feel that even Wings of Fire, a series meant for younger readers, has more nuance in how it handles dragons than any tale one could pick throughout human history revolving around a dragon and their slayer. It really is an appeal to comfort—the unknown is feared by the mind not erudite enough to wish to explore it and realise that all diversity has its own merits. I mean, in nature, diversity is required for survival. Genetic diversity is paramount. In that particular case, tribalism is dull as it becomes an existential threat—not just via war, but also inbreeding as tribes weave narratives of demons and villains to control their own versus the horrific other. And that really is very tiresome indeed. The core tenet of function within a tribe is obedience—it is the person giving up personhood to become a weapon. So, a dragonslayer story can never truly be aught more than the clashing of weapons.
Oh, there are those whom I’m sure would navel-gaze with some nihilistic twaddle about the sanctity of tribalism but it certainly hasn’t served anyone well thus far. In fact, the further we go as an advanced species, the more clear it becomes that tribalism is a vestigial factor of a primal entity that we ought to have left behind in favour of the next step in our evolution, not in lieu of it instead in favour of the comfort of an idealised simpler world. A very dangerous world of pathos, poor health, unending war and fear.
A civilised age should tell more civilised stories. And while tribalism might excite the primal brain and provide those sought after dopamine hits with its spectacle, there can never be any depth, or girth, or meat to it beyond mere illusion. I’m more inclined, these days, to read about persons and more interesting problems rather than weapons whose “solutions” can all be found in bloody violence and the biases therein. This sacrifice of personhood to become an obedient weapon is something that any story with a tribal bent must embody, reducing everyone to one-dimensional caricatures with only a faux simile of complexity. Tribalism is a clever trick, in a way, as it engages all the right neuroreceptors to have one see worth where there is none. Where there never was.
This is why some cling to tribalism, and bioessentialism, and stories of spectacle and mindless weapons of spectacle sans agency. It’s comforting and it makes their brain feel good, but that isn’t a valid excuse to engage in something so abhorrently evil that could only ever be an existential threat. I mean, different wars with different until all that’s left is a mountain of bones with a throne of skulls at its peak. The lone survivor claims their final right, takes their place, and asks “Was it all worth it?” In a tribal setting, the only “winner” is entropy.
Give me something nuanced and interesting, please. I’m done with tribal stories, which means I’m done with dragonslayers. But I’m certainly not done with dragons, because written well they can be truly fascinating creatures. Perhaps the most interesting fiction has to offer.
@36 For a post all about anti-tribalism, the contempt in that post for anyone who might have a different position kind of oozes tribalism.
There are a lot of things there that strike me as unsound. First, either the discussion of tribalism is not meant to have anything to do with actual, you know, tribes, or it ignores what tribes tended to actually be like–specifically, a lot less regimented than modern societies. The notion that “The core tenet of function within a tribe is obedience—it is the person giving up personhood to become a weapon” is amazingly ahistorical. That’s a relatively modern thing. Hunter-gatherers were pretty lousy at making people obey, and generally didn’t try nearly as hard as even the most democratic present-day nation-state. Relations of production gave people a lot more autonomy.
Now it might be that you don’t really mean “tribes” and “tribalism” when you’re talking about “tribes” and “tribalism”, you just mean a sort of abstraction of popular prejudices about tribes and tribalism that has become a convenient shorthand for certain kinds of modern attitudes. But anyone talking that lazily is hardly in a position for the level of denunciation in that post. And for that matter, those modern attitudes are generally not about “the unknown”–to the contrary, they are generally about traditional, well known external “enemies”, or about internal traditional scapegoats.
Another point: We are not in fact living in a “civilized age”. Pretty violent one, really.
Finally, while those of us who don’t want to value xenophobia might not want to emphasize the fact, and while it’s often misused by modern leaders for their selfish gain, the truth is that the unknown often is actually dangerous. It’s not some kind of ridiculous fallacy that was never a thing and nobody should ever write about. Ask the inhabitants of the Americas from 1492-present day; the unknown arrived on their shores, and they got genocided and those that remained got all their stuff and land stolen.
I’ll belatedly second the recommendation of Rachel Hartman’s Seraphina by Tsis @17. Very interesting take on dragons and interesting world in general. There was a sequel, Shadow Scale, with at least one related novel in that universe published since.