OK, I searched hear and I searched the archive and, surprisingly enough, I didn’t find the question that I’m about to ask. I’ve been wondering for a long time what is up with the occurences of dragons in both Oriental legend and medieval tales. This question was further agitated recently by someone else who asked this same question-and I thought I was the only one. Even before that I heard that the “serpent” in Genisis wasn’t necessarily your average sized snake, but that the Hebrew (or whatever language it originally was) word that was interpretted as “serpent” could have been anything as big as a dragon. This came from a credible source and corresponds with the dragon we see in Revelations. Are these two or three seemingly isolated sources somehow connected in a way that I don’t see (I see the Bible connection to medieval times), or is it all seemingly a coincidence? Also, can anyone else think of any other occurence of dragons in folklore or whatnot? All of this is very symbolic, it seems. It could also aid me in a project that I’ve been working on for a long time, so any help would be appreciated.
I dunno. For dragons to appear in all cultures, it must have a common occurance. Some say comets but my WAG would be fossilized bones. You find dinosaur fossils in europe, asia, middle east, north and south america, its not a far fetched idea that if a peasant or villager happens upon one that lies exposed that he would tell his village elder who would tell his tribal chief and higher on up with the details and speculation getting wilder and wilder as it passes from person to person.
Asian dragons are a completely different beast than European dragons. If you look past the superficial similarities you would see that.
I see no reason to presume a common origin for such different legends.
DrF’s probably right, but it’s worth noting that some South and Central American mythology mentions giant “feathered serpents.”
I heard Joseph Campbell point out something once vis dragons.
The are a mixture of air and earth.
Scaly and reptilian, like snakes, who must slither upon the Earth, but with wings like birds.
Then I thought of Quetzacoatl (sp) the winged serpent god of the Aztecs. Same thing.
Look at the flag of mexico. Same thing.
I’m not sure what it means, but it does make me think.
If I don’t miss my guess here, dragons in the west symbolize crisis.
The dragon is a beast which places the community in danger. That which is precious to the community is often symbolized by a damsel hostage of the dragon. All the paintings I’ve ever seen of “St. George and the Dragon” have the town in the background.
(Well, not all, but most)
I’ve also heard the interpretation that the dragon is the youth’s (hero’s?) mother. In order to enjoy normal relations with the woman who must ultimately be his, he must first liberate her/himself from his mother’s clutches.
Just some random thoughts…
None of this will resolve the question, but for whatever it is worth:
A few months back a British magazine (I believe it was Fortean Times) reported that police get reports of dragon sightings every year in the British Isles. This, of course, likely says more about some British people than it does about dragons.
I once read that the last “official” recording of the killing of a dragon was on the Isle of Rhodes in the late Middle Ages. The head of the Knights of Malta was said to have done one in with the help of two bull dogs, and a monument was erected at the site which included the motto “skill is the master of strength”.
Rock star Alice Cooper once remarked in an interview that a thing he found attractive about snakes is that the reaction of people to them is the same everywhere, regardless of nationality or culture. What’s more, the places which have people but do not have snakes are very few; I once read that they are limited to Hawaii, Iceland and Ireland. Perhaps this helps explain why cultures around the world have been prone to imagine monsters of serpent-like appearance.
This thread may be of interest: Where did the idea of dragons originate?
I’m going to support DrFidelius, holding that the imposition of a late medieval view of “dragon” (itself an amalgam of two different beasts) has been imposed on other cultures by the translation of their words into “dragon.”
The Greek drakon (winged, sometimes firebreathing) and the Norse wurm (wingless, venom-spitting) were both serpentine, but they were portrayed quite differently in their original literature. Hundreds of years later, the Western Europeans merged stories of each to create the “modern” dragon that we find in Kenneth Grahame, JRR Tolkien, Disney, and and other works. When the Northern Europeans made it to China and discovered a serpentine creature in legend, they translated its name as “dragon,” but there are rather more differences than similarities between the Chinese and Western “dragons.” On the other hand, when the Spaniards (with fewer dragon references in their literature) encountered Quetlzcoatl, they identified it as “feathered serpent” and did not identify it as a dragon. (Later folklorists have thrown Quetzlcoatl into the dragon bin, but they are looking for similarities.)
There may be a reason that many cultures have legendary large, serpentine creatures, but to call all of them “dragons” begs the question, as few cultures have the same creatures in mind.
(Others disagreed with that position when we discussed it in Why do dragons appear in cultures all over the world? and in Dragons in Norse, Chinese, and European mythologies. How?.)