Dragons! You know the ones. Big, scaly, fire-breathing, sometimes not
any of those things. But let's be real, dragons aren't so easily
defined. And that's what makes them so special. Dragon comes from the greek drakon (δράκων),
meaning "dragon". No, but literally it means "one who stares". But despite the greek etymology of the word,
dragons aren't localized to any one region or mythos. In fact, they're damn near universal. There's a popular theory that the universality
of dragon lore was partially encouraged by the fact that you can find dinosaur bones
basically everywhere, and "huge scary bird-lizard" is as good an explanation as any, I guess. And… not really… fully inaccurate? …Huh. So before we get into their uses in modern
media, let's run down some prominent historical dragons. (Isn't this fun? You get a trope talk and a myths video for
the price of one!) Chronologically, we can probably pin down
the first known dragons in human history as tiamat and abzu from Mesopotamian mythology. Abzu and Tiamat are primordial deities and
lovers, representing fresh and saltwater respectively, and when Abzu is killed by the new generation
of gods, Tiamat is enraged and gives birth to the first dragons. Abzu and Tiamat aren't really physically described
- they're both primordial gods who got killed and repurposed into forming the actual earth
- but Tiamat is occasionally represented as a giant serpent, and her draconic offspring
are described as hybrids between serpents, lions and birds, so pretty textbook dragons. We can also pin down a couple early dragon-like
monsters in The Tanakh with behemoth and leviathan - two apocalyptic monsters, again, vaguely
described, but representing primordial chaos on land and in the sea respectively. The Leviathan is directly derived from Lotan,
a massive sea serpent from Ugarit mythology that was defeated by a storm god. And keep an eye on that theme - we'll come
back to it. Meanwhile, Behemoth seems to have influenced
Bahamut, which in some Arabian mythologies is an occasionally-winged enormous sea monster
and/or fish that carries the world. Egypt gives us the noteworthy serpents Apophis
and Orouboros - Apophis, as we've discussed before, is the giant spikey serpent that tries
to eat Ra every night, while the Orouboros is an unnamed piece of popular iconography
found in some funerary texts that alchemists got way into later. The norse give us Jormungandr, another enormous
god-eating serpent - and another one famously defeated by a storm god, in this case Thor. This is a motif across basically all indo-european
mythologies and even some beyond that, so we're gonna be seeing a lot of it. But this also isn't the only dragon around
here - the Nidhogg is a dragon that gnaws at the roots of Yggdrasil, and in the Volsunga
saga we find Fafnir, one of the most iconic folkloric dragons - a dwarf transformed into
a dragon through his own greed and also maybe that giant pile of cursed gold he stole. Hinduism gives us Vritra, a draconic personification
of drought and arch-enemy of the storm god Indra - yet another storm-god-vs-giant-snake-more-at-11
scenario. In Mesoamerica, the most well-known dragon
is the deity Quetzalcoatl, a flying feathered serpent that pops up in basically every precolonial
civilization in the region. He's not the only dragon, though - Xiuhcoatl
is a small "fire serpent" wielded as a weapon by Huitzilopochtli the sun god. If you've ever seen a picture where it looks
like he's holding a curved, spiked club? It's actually a fun-size dragon. And a bit further south in the Inca empire
is the Amaru, a two-headed serpent that lives at the bottom of bodies of water. Australia gives us the Rainbow Serpent, a
common figure in most Australian Aboriginal cultures - always a giant many-colored serpent
and usually associated with water or rain. While this is an important and recurrent figure,
it was also kinda latched onto by European anthropologists who really liked the idea
of a centrally important sky deity and glossed over (a) every other important figure and
(b) the fact that the rainbow serpent is not one pan-Australian deity, and is portrayed
very differently by many different aboriginal cultures - some places it's a creator spirit
but elsewhere it's a bit more of a classic monster, it's more of a motif than a singular
central god. Anyway, Greece gives us a metric buttload
of dragons of all shapes and sizes, starting with the classic Hydra, a many-headed venomous
swamp-monster. Ladon is the dragon that guards the garden
of the hesperides, and an unnamed dragon fills a similar role guarding the golden fleece. Helios's chariot is sometimes pulled by winged
serpents, Ketos is the sea monster that threatens Andromeda until Perseus kills it, and Python
is a cthonic serpent formerly in charge of Delphi who's killed by Apollo so he can claim
the oracle there. Typhon's dragon status is a bit debatable,
but he does follow the dragon-vs-storm-god-ultimate-smackdown format when he's defeated by Zeus, so I'll
say he counts. Fun fact, there's also an Armenian deity,
Vahagn the Dragon-Slayer, who is also a thunder god. It's seriously everywhere. I don't know why. As mentioned way back when I did Mwindo, Kirimu
is a seven-headed dragon in the folklore of the African Great Lakes region, in the rare
position of being blood-brothers with the storm god instead of nemeses. In western europe, both four-legged winged
dragons and Wyverns - two-legged, two-winged dragons - are very popular in heraldry, especially
in Wales, where a dragon is on the flag. And there are quite a lot of ballads about
dragons causing problems for a region before being killed by a passing knight or saint. Some of these were also metaphors for christianity
triumphing over paganism. And of course this region also gives us the
unnamed dragon from Beowulf, which keeps the traditional venomous quality while also adding
fire-breath, a trait that has since become iconic. Meanwhile, China kinda has the dragon market
cornered. They're incredibly common symbols representing
strength, power, divinity, fortune - basically all good things. They're also very commonly seen as deities
of bodies of water. There's evidence that dragons were prominent
symbols in the area as early as the neolithic. Chinese dragons, like many others, appear
as combinations of several other animal traits, but with Chinese dragons it's actually very
specific - stag antlers, horse, camel or crocodile head, demon or rabbit eyes, snake neck, clam,
frog or tortoise intestines, carp scales, eagle claws, tiger paws and cow ears. Prominent dragons in Chinese mythology include
Longshen, the Dragon King; Ao Guang, the Azure dragon of the East China Sea; Ao Qin, the
Vermillion dragon of the South China Sea and the essence of summer; Ao Shun, the Black
dragon of Lake Baikal and the essence of winter; and Ao Run, the White dragon of Quinghai Lake
and the essence of autumn, who you may remember from their cameos in Journey to the West. There's also Huanlong, the draconic form of
the Yellow Emperor, the center of the cosmos, the element Earth and the Chinese quintessence. Chinese dragons are basically all divine and
fundamentally good, which is quite a change from the Indo-European model of "general monster". And Japan sorta has two trypes of dragons
- one kind, the Ryu, is very similar to chinese dragons, typically water-based, divine and
occasionally wish-granting. And then on the other hand there's things
like Ikuchi, a sea-serpent yokai that sinks ships; and Yamata-no-Orochi, an eight-headed
snake killed by - wait for it - Susano-o the storm god. Boom. Now that's a pretty solid rundown of the major
folkloric dragons - obviously there are more, but I'm trying to do a video here, and this
gives us plenty to work with. Now one might be tempted to try and do some
kind of taxonomical breakdown of categories of dragon based on morphology and stuff - numbers
of legs, wings, preferred habitat, etc. But while that could be fun, there's… not
really a point here. Dragons aren't a real animal that evolved
- you can't arrange them on a cladogram to try and figure out when exactly fire-breath
developed and if it was before or after ground-based dragons split off from the sea serpent line
or whatever. We're looking at these guys from a STORY perspective,
so instead of trying to categorize by legs or wings or scales, let's start breaking them
down by what role they play in a story and what qualities inform that. Let's start big. Thanks to Tiamat, Abzu, Bahamut, Behemoth,
Leviathan, Typhon, Jormungandr and Apophis, the concept of an apocalyptically enormous
dragon is pretty well-precedented. Apocalyptic dragons tend not to feature directly
in a story except as a super final boss, and are more likely to be in the background lore
as some kind of ultimate enemy or former threat defeated by a god or something. Unless it's a kaiju movie, in which case full
steam ahead on the dragon apocalypse. Apocalyptic dragons are also often evil gods
or god-scale threats, and it's also not unheard of for dragons to be framed as explicitly
demonic - this probably has roots in the western-european "dragon as metaphor for paganism" thing. But dragons aren't always evil. Now thanks to Chinese dragons, Quetzalcoatl,
Tiamat, Abzu, Bahamut and the Rainbow Serpent, one suprisingly common draconic trait in modern
media is divinity. Many dragons are either gods, godlike, or
just generally magical and positive-thinking. Divine dragons usually fill a support role
rather than being the focus of the story - providing guidance, wisdom, magic, or whatever. Being much more magical than the typical monster
dragon, these dudes can sometimes end up being a bit more of a dragon ex machina than anything
else, popping out when the story needs some added coolness and then going away again. Related to the divine dragon and drawing on
the same roots is the dragon shifter, a dragon who can turn human, or at least humanoid. Chinese dragons could sometimes take human
form, and Quetzalcoatl has one too, so there's precedent here among the more intelligent,
less malevolent mythological dragons. This concept was kinda solidified by dungeons
and dragons, where all dragons gain the ability to take a humanoid form - and this is, in
fact, how half-dragons happen. Beyond DND you can sometimes get characters
who are descended from dragons and have sparse draconic traits for this reason. Also sometimes if your big bad needs an upgrade
before the final battle, they'll turn into a dragon. Just happens sometimes. Actually related to that is the draconic curse
variant, which originates specifically from Fafnir, a dwarf who gradually transformed
into a dragon. There's actually a few other sources for this
kinda thing, including the Norwegian tale of Prince Lindwyrm, a prince who was born
a dragon because his mother didn't listen to a witch, and was only fixed by a brave
young peasant girl who did listen to a witch - but anyway, mostly the source is Fafnir. In this version, a transformation into a dragon
is a curse, often as a punishment for greed or hubris something. This shows up in one of the later Narnia books
as a direct homage to Fafnir. Also in some lamer cases it's not a physical
transformation, but a character might start acting more draconic because of some cursed
gold or whatever. Sorry, hobbit movies, just cuz your "dragon
sickness" plotline has roots in classic scandinavian folklore doesn't mean it isn't stupid. Anyway, on a related note, dragons often like
hoarding stuff. Fafnir and his giant golden hoard is a major
source for this one, as is Beowulf's dragon, which was provoked by the theft of part of
its hoard - but Greek mythology also has its fair share of dragons protecting magical artifacts
or locations, so there's lots of precedent for this one. It's probably the most cliched dragon trope
these days - dragons just love them some gold. In the cases of more intelligent dragons,
this can be something of an amusing character quirk, but in more antagonistic and monstrous
cases, it's likely to be their driving motivation - either protecting their hoard or seeking
out more stuff to put in it. Some modern media plays with the idea of dragons
hoarding specific things depending on their individual personality, like first edition
comic books or really shiny rocks. Amusingly, while dragon hoards used to be
very common in western european folklore, they became less popular macguffins as the
region got more into chivalry - because gold is a much less noble reward than rescuing
a princess. And on that note, some dragons are way into
sacrificial young ladies. Between all those western european folktales
of knights rescuing princesses, the Japanese folktale of Susano'o killing the Orochi to
save a girl from being sacrificed to it, and the iconic Greek myth of Perseus rescuing
Andromeda from Ketos, it seems that dragons really like endangering young ladies. This is another pretty cliched one, and between
that and the additionally maligned cliche of "sexy lamp damsel in distress" most writers
only bring it up to subvert it these days - the dragon's just misunderstood, the girl
is actually the villain, the girl is doing the rescuing, the girl is the dragon, the
girl is dating the dragon, it can get pretty weird. Now a lot of modern dragons actually get written
as "not bad, just misunderstood". After all, if you're looking to subvert a
cliche, "dragon as bad guy" is a pretty well-trodden one. How this manifests kinda depends on how smart
the dragon is - or, rather, if it can communicate with humans. If the dragon can talk, and is basically just
a big scaley person, then one conversation with the protagonists is usually sufficient
to reveal that it's actually a decent sort. But if the dragon's more animalistic, what
usually happens is it turns out they're basically cats. Cats aren't malevolent, but they can be a
bit antisocial and hard to read if you don't really know your way around them, and if you
scale that up about five hundred times and give it fire breath, you can get some pretty
serious collateral damage from misidentifying something as a scratching post, and humans
might conclude that they are actually malicious when they're really just misunderstood and
potentially adorable. "Dragon as cat" is an extremely popular interpretation,
and as a side benefit, it can make dragons cute. Win-win. Now this last one is actually kinda new. There's no folkloric precedent for it as far
as I can tell, and instead it can be traced back to Anne McCafferey's Dragonriders of
Pern, which first came out in 1967. True to the name, this book features dragons
as noble steeds for the first time basically ever. The dragons in this series form unique, lifelong
psychic bonds with their chosen rider so they can work together as a single unit - and if
one member dies, the other one usually doesn't survive either. This concept was later… "borrowed" wholesale
by Eragon, which is probably a little more familiar to most of you guys. Dragon as Noble Steed has since become a very
popular concept - because let's be real, dragons kick ass, and therefore riding a dragon makes
you kick ass. Amusingly, the concept of bad guys riding
dragons is actually a bit older - Tolkien had his ringwraiths riding "fell beasts",
which he wouldn't define as dragons (because he had very specific opinions about what constituted
a real dragon) but were nevertheless large scary winged animals. So all these traits are pretty cool and overall
create a lot of possibilities for dragons in fiction. But it does kind of beg a question… why dragons? This is a LOT of ground for one trope to cover. Dragons can be everything from divine to satanic,
animalistic to brilliant, personable to completely alien, and anywhere on the moral spectrum. We can't even pin down a physical definition
of what a dragon really is. Now Tolkien had some pretty interesting thoughts
on what defined a real dragon. According to Tolkien, there were only two
- our old friends Fafnir and the Beowulf dragon. These guys were more than just big scaley
monsters; they meant something in their stories. Fafnir is an object lesson on the dangers
of greed, while the Beowulf dragon kinda smacks of the inevitability of age and mortality. To Tolkien, a dragon had to be essential to
"both the machinery and the ideas" of the story - "essential to the machinery" meaning
"important to the plot," while the rarer trait was being in line with the THEMES of the story. And you can kinda tell this in how he wrote
HIS dragon - Smaug is definitely plot-relevant, but his pride and deadly greed are also theme-relevant,
since those are the traits that end up leading to Thorin's downfall. This is a good angle, and it's very useful
for the purposes of literary analysis. But I'm gonna respectfully disagree with the
idea that these are the only dragons that matter. I think the fact that dragons can fill so
many roles is much more interesting than the fact that only a few of them are actually
structurally essential. Let's ask, why is the dragon the iconic fantasy
creature? Why is it "dungeons and dragons", not "basements
and basilisks" or "mineshafts and manticores”? "Gorges and griffons." "Treasures and Tarasques." Sorry, I'll stop. Why are dragons so special? Well, there's a few reasons! Some of them we've already discussed - since
draconic folklore is present worldwide, dragons aren't restricted to any one specific region
or culture, whereas critters like phoenixes, unicorns or griffons are rather more localized
and less universally recognized. We might wonder why exactly dragons are so
widespread, and to that, I'd say - we're asking the question backwards. It's because we categorize a lot of fundamentally
different things as dragons. Apophis and Jormungandr are just really big
snakes. Mesopotamian dragons have bird wings and lion
bodies. Hydra, Kirimu and Yamata-no-Orochi have way
too many heads. Chinese dragons are highly intelligent gods,
while western european dragons are animalistic monsters. Some of them are venomous, some of them have
toxic blood, and only a sparse handful of them can actually fly. So it's not "why are there so many dragons"
- it's "why are we classifying all of these things as dragons"? And while this answer is circular, it's because
"dragon" has never meant anything more specific than that. Language is really defined by how we use it,
and "dragon" has historically meant so many different things that it can't really have
a rigid definition now. Dragons are everywhere because "dragon" can
mean… almost anything sufficiently snakey and powerful that can't readily be categorized
as anything else. The most universally consistent traits of
folkloric dragons are… "powerful" and "important". They're never irrelevant, they're never harmless
or even weak. Even the nice ones are usually very destructive
when angered. Folkloric dragons are always powerful, and
if they're not explicitly friendly, they are ALWAYS a serious threat. This doesn't apply as universally to modern
media, but you might've noticed it's always a purposeful subversion to make a dragon harmless. It surprises the audience, because the danger
is supposed to be baked-in - so a cute tiny dragon or a dragon that can't breathe fire
is often played for comedy, because it's an inherent contradiction to their original nature. Dragons are made to be powerful. It's the single consistent throughline in
their mythical portrayal. Compare a "dragon" to any other popular folkloric
creature. A griffon is a lion plus a bird. A phoenix is a bird plus fire. A kraken is a giant tentacle-y sea monster
that attacks ships. A manticore is a lion with a man's head and
a scorpion's tail. A chimera is lioness plus goat plus snake
and also it breathes fire. A unicorn is horse plus spike. A mermaid is top half of woman plus bottom
half fish. A minotaur is head of bull plus body of man. A centaur is top half of man plus full body
of horse. A satyr is top half of man plus goat legs
and horns. They're all clearly defined. You can mess with the designs a bit, but fundamentally
their formula is what makes them what they are. If you take away two of the centaur's legs,
he's not a centaur anymore. If you put wings on the unicorn, it's… an
alicorn, I think, but it's definitely not a unicorn anymore. But a dragon? Add as many horns as you want, put on more
legs or take 'em away - it's still a dragon. Where these other things are defined by their
specificity, a dragon is defined by its lack of definition. We can subcategorize and classify all we want
- but a sea serpent is still a dragon, and so is a lindworm, and so is a wyvern, and
so is an eight-headed snake that really likes booze. If it can't be classified as anything else,
it can probably be a dragon. A dragon isn't a specific kind of creature
- it's a category, like… "fairy" or "demon", with a few central characteristics and popular
trends but no strict morphological definition. This is why I never see the point in people
arguing dragon taxonomy. It's way too late to be worrying about that
now! We've already been calling all these things
dragons for thousands of years! Anyway, this built-in versatility, plus the
inherent power behind the trope, is a big part of why dragons are so popular. And because of that, they're really… weighty. A dragon in your story isn't just a dragon
- it's got the full weight of thousands of years of power-based tropes behind it. An ultimate enemy, a divine protector, a monster
to slay, a curse to dispell, a treasure to win, a village to save - there's always something
in the implications that makes them automatically important. Dragons are the iconic fantasy creature because
they represent the full spectrum of what you can do with fantasy. Magic, curses, good vs evil, treasure, battle,
heroic rescues, riding a motherf**king dragon because hell yeah. Dragons aren't rigidly defined, which means
they have near-limitless potential, which makes them the perfect symbol of a genre built
on exploring the unrealistic and the fantastical. Dragons are awesome because… dragons have
always been awesome. In the most literal sense - awe-inspiring. Like I said, their defining characteristic
is power. If you make a dragon, you're echoing sources
from all over the world and every period of history reiterating that. It's trope-subversive just to make a dragon
small and cute, because it's so built-in that they have to be huge and dangerous. And even if the dragon is dealing with a bunch
of OTHER similarly huge and dangerous things, its dragon-ness alone will elevate it and
make it stand out from the crowd. I've seen some people suggest that dragons
are cool because they're the ultimate fusion of every primal threat hard-coded into humanity
- venomous snakes, big cats, predatory birds, and also fire. I get this argument, and dragons are definitely
equipped to be the ultimate apex predator, but I think that's actually selling them kinda
short. Dragons are really cool because they don't… HAVE to be any of those things to be a dragon. While the modern image of a stereotypical
dragon is a scaly fire-breathing winged quadruped with one head, two eyes, some horns and assorted
spikes, if you wanna call your primordial multi-headed sea-serpent or your feathered
flying snake or your usually human-shaped bad guy a dragon, nobody's gonna stop you. And because of what it means to be a dragon,
the audience will know to expect something powerful and important no matter what shape
it is. And it's funny - even a character who's not
PHYSICALLY a dragon in any way can get that kind of reputation by being nicknamed after
a dragon. I ran a twitter poll asking about people's
favorite dragons and one of the most common answers was Uncle Iroh, the Dragon of the
West. And also, let's be real, the ultimate fusion
of human primal fears would probably have a lot more spiders involved. So… yeah!
Dwagons
I’m embarrassed to admit that I thought Tiamat only came from D&D.
But What. About. Dragons!
I loved this one! Although honestly for a second I thought it was going to be about "The Dragon" trope and not really dragons.
Also, dragons are love, dragons are life.
Based S ranked genius...
To be honest I never considered a lot of beasts she categorize as dragons, dragons. For me dragons are just dragons, Wyvers and chinese dragons
I was waiting to see earthsea dragons :/
I was surprised she didn't bring up Joseph Campbell's description of Dragons as representative of nature, even human nature, unconquered. Especially in light of our modern fascination with the dragon as a friend or steed being representative of our modern dominance over nature and changing relationship with it.
I'd love to get that "dragon trait chart" just by itself