Papers · Where Do Dragons Come From?

Chapter 1

Where Do Dragons Come From? The Two Usual Answers

Nearly every culture on earth has a story about a giant snake. Greece, Israel, Egypt, Babylon, India, Scandinavia and China all have one, and none of these places got the idea from the others, or so we are told.

Ask a scholar where dragons come from and you will get one of two answers. Usually both.

1.1 The first answer: everyone made them up separately

Snakes are dangerous. Snakes live almost everywhere people live. A person who is frightened of a snake can easily imagine a bigger one, and a person imagining a bigger one can keep going until the snake is the size of a hill.

So, the argument runs, no culture needed to borrow the dragon from anyone. Every culture invented it, because every culture had snakes and fear.

This is a reasonable thing to say and it is probably true of some things. It does not work here, and the reason is gold.

1.2 What the gold problem is

Look at what these creatures actually do.

In Greece, a dragon called Ladon lies coiled around a tree of golden apples and guards them (Hes. Th. 333–336). Another Greek dragon lies on top of the Golden Fleece and never sleeps until Medea drugs it (Ap. Rhod. 4; Pi. P. 4).

In Scandinavia, Fáfnir kills his own father for a pile of gold and then lies down on it, and lying on it is what turns him into a dragon.

In England, the dragon in Beowulf lies on a hoard of gold inside a burial mound for three hundred years. A man steals one cup from it. The dragon burns the kingdom.

Now ask what fear of snakes has to do with any of that.

Nothing about being frightened of a snake makes you imagine that the snake will sit on metal. Gold is not food. A snake cannot spend it, wear it or eat it. There is no reason at all for a frightened person inventing a monster to decide that the monster's main activity is lying on treasure and refusing to move.

And yet four traditions that supposedly never met each other all say exactly that.

Worse, none of them can explain it. Beowulf says the dragon enjoys owning things. Three hundred years is a very long time to enjoy owning things. Fáfnir's gold is cursed, which explains why he comes to a bad end, not why he lies on it. The Greek sources do not even try. They just say the apples are gold and the dragon is there.

When several unconnected people tell you the same strange and pointless detail, and none of them knows why, they did not each invent it. They heard it from somewhere.

1.3 The second answer: the dragon was built in medieval Europe

The other standard answer is about the dragon's shape rather than its existence.

The dragon you picture has wings, four legs, breathes fire, and sits on treasure. That creature, we are told, was put together slowly in northern and western Europe, finished in the Middle Ages, and then wrongly painted onto older stories by translators and artists who should have known better. Fire is said to be a Viking contribution. Wings are said to come in through Christian art. The hoard is traced to Fáfnir.

This can be tested, because it makes a prediction. If wings are medieval, then the ancient Greeks should not have flying dragons.

They do.

Apollodorus writes that after Medea murdered her children she escaped to Athens in a chariot given to her by the Sun and *drawn by winged dragons* (Apollod. 1.9.28). Ovid says the same, twice, describing her carried up to the sky on the wings of her dragons (Ov. Met. 7).

Euripides put the escape on stage in Athens in the fifth century BCE, with Medea out of Jason's reach above the roof of the house (Eur. Med. 1317–1322). It is worth being exact about what he says and does not say. He gives a winged chariot and names Helios as the giver. He does not mention the dragons. They come from Apollodorus and Ovid and from the painters.

So the flight is firmly attested. The Greek word used is the ordinary Greek word for dragon, and the creatures are in the air roughly seventeen hundred years before the Middle Ages.

Fire is the same story. Hesiod describes Typhoeus with a hundred snake heads, calls him a fearful dragon, and says fire burned from those heads as he glared (Th. 820ff).

So Greece has the wings. Greece has the fire. Greece has the gold-guarding.

What Greece appears not to have is any single animal with all three, and the reason is that Greek dragons come in two kinds that never overlap.

*The cosmic kind burns.* Hesiod's Typhoeus has a hundred snake heads and is called a fearful dragon outright, and fire burns from those heads as he glares (Th. 820ff). The Chimera is introduced by Hesiod as a fierce dragon with a dragon for its hind part, and it breathes a fearful blast of blazing fire (Th. 319–324; Il. 6.179–182). These two are the only organic fire-breathers in Greek myth, and Hesiod calls both of them dragons.

Neither of them guards anything. Typhoeus attacks Zeus for the rule of the world. The Chimera lays waste to Lycia until Bellerophon kills it. They answer to nobody and they are employed by nobody.

*The guardian kind does not burn.* Ladon, the serpent of Colchis, Python and the serpent of Ares at Thebes are all posted on something valuable and all stay awake. Not one of them breathes fire. Not one of them flies.

*And the flying kind does neither.* Medea's dragons fly in three sources and that is all they do. This was checked rather than assumed. Apollodorus, Ovid twice, and Euripides on stage all put them in the air, and not one says they breathe fire, carry it, or are warm to the touch.

So the pieces are distributed by class. The burners are cosmic and answer to nobody. The guards are cold and work for somebody. The fliers pull a chariot. Three kinds of Greek dragon and no crossover between them.

That has always been the reason for not taking Greece seriously as the origin. The parts are all there, sorted into classes that never mix, so Greece looks like a place the dragon passed through rather than a place it came from.

The animal a modern reader would recognise, the one that flies and burns and lies on gold, would require a creature that was cosmic and a guardian at the same time. Greek myth has no such thing.

That objection held for a long time. Chapter 4 is about the text that answers it.

1.4 Where that leaves us

The two standard answers fail in opposite directions.

The first cannot explain why unconnected cultures share one strange, specific, unexplained habit.

The second cannot explain why the parts it calls medieval are sitting in Greek texts a thousand years too early.

Both failures point the same way, and the next chapter says where.