Papers · Where Do Dragons Come From?

Chapter 7

Viking Dragons, Indian Serpents, Chinese Dragons

Three traditions remain, and each of them holds a different piece.

7.1 Scandinavia and England

The Norse material has two creatures of quite different kinds.

*Jörmungandr*, the Midgard serpent, lies in the sea all the way around the world of men, biting its own tail. Snorri tells how Thor hooked it while fishing and got it to the side of the boat before the line was cut, and how the two of them kill each other at the end of the world. This creature guards nothing. All of its meaning is in where it lies: it marks the edge of the world, and the world ends when it moves.

*Fáfnir* is the other kind. He is not born a dragon. He kills his father for a hoard of gold and turns into a serpent by lying on it. Sigurd kills him from a pit dug in the track he uses to go down to water, and the dying creature talks for a long time before it stops.

The dragon of *Beowulf* completes the set. Three hundred years on a barrow-hoard, one cup stolen, and the creature burns the countryside including the king's hall.

What the north kept is the fire and the gold. What it lost is everything else. There is no watching, no guarding on anyone else's behalf, no oath, no harness, and nothing that works for anybody.

This is the version most English speakers have inherited, which is why most English speakers think a dragon is a fire-breathing hoarder and nothing else. We got the piece the Vikings kept.

7.2 India

The oldest Indian version is the fight between Indra and Vritra, in a hymn of the Rigveda (RV 1.32).

Vritra is called ahi, serpent. He lies on the mountains and holds back the waters. Indra drinks soma, strikes him with his weapon, and the waters run free down to the sea. The hymn keeps returning to the same image: the blockage removed and the flow released.

What India kept is the withholding. This creature does not guard a treasure for its owner and it does not hoard for love of hoarding. It sits on the one thing everybody needs and refuses to let it move.

The later Indian naga is a separate and much friendlier development. The Buddhist tradition has Mucalinda, a naga king who coils around the Buddha and spreads his hood to keep the rain off him. That is a guardian, and a protective one, and it is the closest thing to the Greek pattern anywhere outside Greece.

7.3 China

The Chinese long is the hardest case in this study, and this paper will not pretend otherwise at this stage.

The Yijing opens with a sequence of six lines describing a dragon at different stages, submerged in the deep, appearing in the field, and finally overreaching and having cause for regret. The creature is a figure for power moving through its proper stages. The second-century dictionary Shuowen Jiezi defines it as the chief of scaled creatures, able to become dark or bright, small or large, rising to the heavens in spring and going down into the water in autumn.

Its business is rain. It is tied to water and to imperial authority. It is nobody's enemy, and there is no story in which a hero kills one and is praised for it.

What China kept is the serpent and the weather. What it dropped is the hostility, which is the feature every western tradition holds on to.

The word "dragon" for this animal is a European translation, made by people with Fáfnir in mind, and people within the Chinese tradition have been objecting to it for some time.

Chapter 9 takes up the obvious objection, which is that a friendly dragon cannot easily be descended from a hostile one.

7.4 Egypt and Babylon

Two older traditions, noted here briefly because they matter to the dating in Chapter 10.

*Apep* is the serpent that attacks the sun's boat every night and is driven off every night and comes back the next night. Egyptian funeral texts contain spells for repelling him. He is never finished off. He is defeated on a schedule.

*Tiamat*, in the Babylonian Enuma Elish, is the salt water at the beginning of things, and Marduk kills her and builds the sky and the earth out of the two halves of her body.

Egypt kept the endless vigil. Babylon kept the monster at the beginning of the world.

7.5 Adding it up

Six traditions, six different pieces, and they do not overlap much.

Greece has wings, fire, gold, guarding, sleeplessness and oath, spread across several creatures. Scandinavia has fire and gold. Israel has the enemy at the beginning and the creature under guard. Egypt has the endless nightly return. India has the withheld water. China has the weather.

If six unconnected cultures had each invented a dragon from scratch, you would expect them to land on the same obvious features, because the obvious features are obvious to everyone. Frightening size. Hostility. Teeth.

That is not the pattern. The pattern is that each one holds something different, and the differences fit together rather than repeating.

That is what you see when one thing has been divided up, not when six things have been invented.