Forgive the wacked out wording of the title, please. I wrote it out 3 or 4 times and it still sounded weird to me.
Anyways, dragons appear in the art and literature of Asia as well as Britain. I think Wales even has a dragon on their flag. Did the idea of the dragon appear independently in these places? As far as I know, there wasn’t any contact between the Celts and the Chinese. Was there?
Any ideas?
And a happy Year of the Dragon to y’all.
Because Goth is as big in Dover as it is in Canton…
Cartooniverse
If you want to kiss the sky, you’d better learn how to kneel.
Because lizards are everywhere and they are creepy? There are dragons, but they aren’t really identical creatures everywhere.
Perhaps…
Dinosaur bones, like gold mines, are hard to find. All the easy ones were found a long time ago. But, there was a time in history when people just stumbled across gold mines in the wilderness. In the Yukon at the end of the ninteenth century the gold rush started when some men looked into a stream and saw gold in the rock “like cheese in a sandwich”. A few years earlier the first European explorers in Australia started a gold rush when they found vast areas of desert where gold nuggets, some huge, were just laying on the surface of the ground. Those days are gone.
It stands to reason that, all over the world throughout history, people have been stumbling across dinosaur bones eroding out of hillsides and shorelines, including the occasional huge skull. Imagine a caveman seeing a T-Rex skull sticking out of a hillside, or a Chinese emperor being presented with a giant fossilized skull. The legends are attempts to explain the phonomena.
I remember an interesting take on this. Some ten years ago a Columbia professor, sometime NY Times OpEd contributor, and regular patron of the Golden Rail and the Marlin Pub on Upper Broadway, published an essay in the NYT, Christmastime 1986 or so. Richard thought that there are indeed dragons who roam the earth, and that it was only a matter of knowing where to look.
To cut to the point: look under a magnifying lens, and a silkworm looks quite precisely
like the Chinese [anyway] depictions of a dragon. Figure in all the other metaphors, chrysalis = caverns, fire = silk, the general importance of the silk trade to Chinese, and actually Western culture too…
Or not.
I think it has more to do with the simple mysteriousness of reptiles, serpents in particular. If you accept the Fertile Crescent/Man Came From One Place theory, than it’s easy to see where reptiles such as the large snakes and crocodiles from the Middle East and the Nile would have influenced their way into folklore. Since there’s reptiles everywhere, it was easy to carry the idea with the people as the expanded.
If you don’t accept the Fertile Crescent thing, then take note that Oriental and Occidental dragons are completely different beasties. As far as I’ve seen, the Oriental variety are much more serpantine and lack wings. European dragons are blessed with wings and stockier bodies (at least according to art). For that matter, Oriental dragons are generally a sign of Good, whereas European dragons are a sign of either Evil (as in the “serpant” slash dragon in Revelation) or else a sign of strength and power without having any morality attached. In this case “dragon” is really just a generic term for “mythological creature derived from a reptile”.
As far as I know, the Americas are lacking in native dragons. I can’t think of a single North Native American myth with dragons and Central/South American mythos seems to make them more snakes than dragons, even in the Oriental sense. I might be 100% wrong on this, so feel free to correct me.
“I guess one person can make a difference, although most of the time they probably shouldn’t.”
At least one person has, with apparent seriousness, posited the notion that dragons really existed. Can’t remember his name; he wrote The Flight of Dragons, IIRC, the book that explains his theory that dragons really roamed the earth, and were the last of the dinosaur species. Some salient aspects of his theory, from memory:
Dragons flew because their bellies were filled with hydrogen. Thus they were natural dirigibles, using their undersized wings for steering and propulsion but not lift.
Dragons breathed fire to get rid of excess hydrogen. I can’t remember how it was ignited.
Dragons inhibited gold-filled caverns because they routinely fed on people, and brought the bodies, still fully equipped, back to their caverns to feed their little ones. Dragons emitted not only flaming hydrogen, but also an acid which included hydrogen (I think it was hydrochloric acid, but I can’t remember rightly). So the acid ate away at everything on the people, leaving old the gold trinkets they might have had.
Dragons are generally killed in myths with swords, in one fell swoop. This is because if you punched in your sword you would pierce their hydrogen-filled guts and they’d blow up. Clubs weren’t nearly as effective.
There is no fossil evidence of dragons because the acid in their bodies dissolved their skeletons. But plenty of cultures remember them.
Any similarity in the above text to an English word or phrase is purely coincidental.
Quote: “As far as I know, the Americas are lacking in native dragons. I can’t think of a single North Native American myth with dragons and Central/South American mythos seems to make them more snakes than dragons, even in the Oriental sense. I might be 100%
wrong on this, so feel free to correct me.”
No correction needed, you’re right.
Sometimes when I see pre-Columbian I feel that the 'gators also served the purpose of the Old World dragons. But flying 'gators doesn’t ring a bell 
What about (and I know I’m gonna spell this wrong) Quezltcoatl? Winged serpent . . . dragon . . . not that far apart as archetypes go.
There are no dragons in Celtic folklore - planty of wise salmon, giant bulls and mischievous pigs etc. but no dragons. The dragon (as a mythical creature) appeared in Britain around AD 1000.
As far as I know the dragon is imported from far east folklore. Regarding contact between the Celts and the Chinese I read an article last year concerning graves found in northern Asia containing europeans with celtic dress circa AD 1200 - sorry I can’t remember any details or sources.
Boris,
I remember reading that a long time ago, possibly in Omni magazine. The author claimed the dragon belched hydrogen and ignited it by causing a spark with its teeth.
When you consider the large volume of gas needed to lift a large organism though, it doesn’t make a good case for dirigible dragons.
According to Daniel Cohen, author of the Encyclopedia of Monsters, the Eurpoean dragon started as a snake, and the Oriental dragon’s prototype was probably a river alligator.
Chaim Mattis Keller
ckeller@kozmo.com
“Sherlock Holmes once said that once you have eliminated the
impossible, whatever remains, however improbable, must be
the answer. I, however, do not like to eliminate the impossible.
The impossible often has a kind of integrity to it that the merely improbable lacks.”
– Douglas Adams’s Dirk Gently, Holistic Detective
Quetzalcoatl was just a plain old feathered, legless, footless, serpent god, not a dragon.
Oh, I’m gonna keep using these #%@&* codes 'til I get 'em right.
What about the Thunderbird myth from the (I think) southwest? A giant bird, big enough to carry off a person? OK, it’s a bird, not a lizard, but the parallel is there.
“Drink your coffee! Remember, there are people sleeping in China.”
Thunderbirds are a myth? I suppose so if you consider them just a Mercury Cougar in disguise…
I’ve heard the Young-Earther speculation that the dragon myths are actually dinosaurs, presumably pteradactyls (sp?).
The most likely explantion? Some guy got scared by a bat, let out a girly scream, and then made up the story when his friends came running. Throw in a few round of grog, and you’ve got fire-breathing, flying lizards from the depths of hell. But they’re friendly if they talk like Sean Connery.
This confirms my suspicion that Immanuel Velikovsky had a cousin that was a cryptozooloygyst
My Jesus fish can beat up your Darwin fish but forgives it instead.
The creature on the Welsh flag is definitely a dragon- although stylistically I think it is more similar to the gryphon/griffins of that area than the Chinese dragons.
Miss Gretchen asked:
I’m not aware that dragons speared. I think the spear was what humans used on dragons. Probably because it was before the advent of gunpowder. A spear had a longer reach than a sword, so you were just a tad farther away, and were sturdier than arrows for penetrating the armor plating. 
Bobinelli said:
I saw a TV program on that discovery. A group of red-headed Europeans traveled to China. Remains including drawings and such were found in a cave in a desert, I believe. Don’t remember the dates.
As far as dragons being found in both cultures, they aren’t really the same beings. European dragons were those flying lizards. Chinese dragons were the wormlike things. Perhaps the reason they are known as the same thing is that when westerners learned of the Chinese myths, they associated the large fire-breathing serpentine thing they saw there with the dragons of their native legends.
I find the hypothesis that Chinese dragons are really silkworms as intriguing. The hydrogen-filled, fire-breathing, acid for blood dinosaur cousin conjecture is less convincing. And it made me think of Velikovsky, too.
I don’t know about Thunderbirds, but I seem to recall stories of Rocs - giant eagles that could carry elephants. Seems far-fetched.
Given all the scary European mythical creatures, including the aformentioned griffins, the Minotaur, ogres, trolls, etc, is it any wonder they’d concoct something out of reptiles? Given humanity’s inate fear of snakes, imagine a giant snake, then give it arms an legs with claws, and wings so it can fly. Eeewwww. Scary.
A friend of mine who was studying to be a taxonomist once mentioned to me, while we were playing D&D, that the particularly unusual thing about dragons was that they had an extraordinary number of appendages. Most animals (excluding insects and the like, of course) have two sets of appendages – arms and legs or forelegs and back legs, or wings and legs. But the dragon is supposed to have forelegs, rear legs and wings. The wyvern, on the other hand, has the more conventional four appendages – two wings and two legs. It is, therefore, a more realistic version of the dragon.
Of course, he was using `realistic’ on a fine scale.
Oddly enough, I’ve heard the same thing. Namely that dragons, at least as depicted in, say, Dragonheart would be a physiological impossibility. Namely because of the massive muscles needed to work the wings would easily interfere with the forelegs and the forelegs would get in the way of the wings attaching to the bone spur on the sternum (as it does on birds).
Not that I think it’s really necessary to go so far as to disprove the existance of the beasties.
“I guess one person can make a difference, although most of the time they probably shouldn’t.”