Has there been much speculation about when and where dragons entered into mythology? What sort of creatures could they have been based on? Was it just someone’s imagination that somehow struck with the population at the time and remained with later generations?
As universal as the dragon myth is, I have no doubt there were creatures upon which these myths originated and were eventually exaggerated into the monstrous, flying, fire-breathing serpents we hear about today.
Try this:
http://survive2012.com/dragon_myths_6.php
Be more specific. What type of dragon do you mean?
The Europen dragon is a different creature from the Chinese lung, and both are distinct from the Mesoamerican feathered serpents although all share some superficial features (mostly being large and reptilian).
Even in Europe there are different types of beasties considered to be dragons. The cold-water orm is not the same and does not share an origin with the firedrake, and wyverns are more like harpies than like leviathan.
“Dragons” have as many different sources as there are folks telling “dragon” stories.
This is a pretty popular question.
Most recently, it was tackled in the Where the hell did “dragons” come from? thread with six previous threads listed in the last two posts.
(New information is welcome, of course.)
Not having read all of the linked threads in the linked thread (heh), there’s evidence among the conspiratorially minded that dragons are the…
Oh man. I’m gonna get made fun of for even posting it. Never mind.
It’s always been my belief that a great many dragon myths were caused by the discovery of dinosaur fossils. This would explain a great deal.
Ditto with Kiz.
Since the dinosaurs were extinct long, long before people arrived on the scene, how do dinosaurs explain the dragons in mythologies? It is certainly possible that some storyteller somewhere actually saw a fossilized dinosaur skeleton and made up dragon-stories therefrom, but that would be local. The odds are that didn’t happen in such diverse locations as South America, Europe, and China.
Mythologies involve lots of creative monsters. Let’s look at many-headed monsters. In the Greek myths, for instance, you have three-headed dogs, nine-headed hydras, etc. Other mythologies certainly have multiple-headed creatures (two-headed trolls in Norse mythology, for instance). Do you seriously think that there used to be two-headed creatures that gave rise to these mythologies? Or is it just that creative story-tellers in many different cultures came up with the same concepts?
Well, there are occasionally animals born with multiple heads. (Maybe a lot of Ripleyesque museum ‘freaks of nature’ are fakes, but I’m sure it happens sometimes. I don’t think it’s necessary that mythological creatures had to be based on real ones, though. Many of them are simple combinations of ordinary animals – a chicken with a snake’s tail (cockatrice) or a lion with the head and wings of an eagle (gryphon). Like multiple-headed animals, these are probably just the product of a creative imagination:
“You know, Hesiod, this story is really good, but I can’t help thinking that maybe the Underworld should be guarded by something scarier than the dog I have to guard my house.”
“I think you’re right. What if it was a dog that has three heads, with really big teeth?”
These creatures evolved over time, too. Different versions of Cerberus, for example, have three heads or fifty. Some have dragon tails, or snakes coming out of the backs of the heads. So it might have been with dragons, with ordinary snakes or lizards evolving into bigger ones, ones that could fly, ones that could breathe fire, and so on.
I think it’s possible that dragons were inspired by dinosaur fossils, but it’s not necessary to use that explanation simply because there really were very large reptiles once. Mythological animals are just ordinary animals made more interesting by imagination.
No it wouldn’t. The first verifiable bone attributed to what we now consider dinosaurs was originally thought to be the mineralized scrotum of a giant.
One does not find complete, articulated dinosaur skeletons just lying around. One finds isolated bones and bone fragments, then has to chisel and dig to find the rest. Bone fragments would not have even remotely been linked to some mythical creature, and isolated bones would likely have been mistaken for something else entirely (such as giant human scrota…). Fossils, for the most part. weren’t even considered to belong to old dead things until fairly recently (probably 17th century or so at the earliest). Rather, they were thought to be just what they looked like: mineral objects, which may have happened to resemble organic ones.
Comparative anatomy being not exactly high science back in the day, it is unlikely that even if a good thigh bone or some such were found, it likely wouldn’t even have been considered “reptilian” much less draconian.
I’m positive the esteemed ancestors had enough pure imagination to come up with dragons. Look how much stuff we, their descendents, can come up with.
I think Dragons are just the biggest exaggerated snakes we could come up with. Snakes and large reptiles are universal bio-switches. Most animals react to them instinctually, Danger Danger Danger! I think dragons are probably the lower instinctual function of the mind mingling with higher functions (imagination).