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A Scientific Theory of the Origin of Dragons
I’ve just stumbled upon a scholarly article on the origin of dragon-lore in early human cultures: Robert Blust, “The Origin of Dragons,” Anthropos 95 (2000): 519–36.
This is far more highbrow than many of my readers will appreciate, but it’s the sort of thing that stokes my imagination as I think through how I want magic, dragons, and other mythological creatures to “work” in my writing. Here’s an intriguing paragraph from near the beginning:
[T]he idea of the dragon arose through processes of reasoning which do not differ essentially from those underlying modern scientific explanations. Far from being the product of a capricious imagination, the dragon was mentally constructed in many parts of the world as a by-product of 1. meticulously accurate observations of weather phenomena, and 2. an earnest but unsuccessful attempt to grasp the causality of natural events, particularly those relating to rainfall. The dragon thus stands as one of the supremely instructive examples of convergent evolution in the symbolic life of the mind.
By the way, dragons will make their first appearance in the Into the Wonder series with its fourth book, The River of Night, which is currently in the hands of my beta readers. 🙂
The Science of Dragons (and Other Assorted Beasties)
Is “hard fantasy” a thing? Because I love it when there is at least the attempt to ground fantastic beasts, magic, and so forth in known science.
Maddie Stone has enlisted the help of some biology experts to uncover the science behind some of the creatures found in Game of Thrones. She looks at dragons, direwolves, manticores, lizard lions, krakens, and white walkers.
A while back I noted some prehistoric beasts that would make excellent stand-ins for some of the more notable monsters of mythology. One of those, the naked bear (aka the stiff-legged bear) even made its way onto the cover of The Devil’s Due.
Dragons of Ancient India
Adrienne Meyer of Wonders and Marvels is blogging today about the dragons of ancient India:
“Dragons of enormous size and variety infest northern India,” concluded Apollonius of Tyana who traveled through the southern foothills of the Himalayas in the first century AD. “The countryside is full of them and no mountain ridge was without one.” Locals regaled visitors with fantastic tales of dragon hunting, using magic to lure them out of the earth in order to pry out the gems embedded in the dragons’ skulls.
Trophies of these quests were displayed in Paraka at the foot of a great mountain, “where a great many skulls of dragons were enshrined.” Ancient Paraka has never been identified, but linguistic clues suggest it was the ancient name for Peshawar. In later times a famous Buddhist holy place near Peshawar was known as “the shrine of the thousand heads.”
Not surprisingly (to me), the bones of prehistoric creatures are likely the explanation for these legends:
Apollonius traveled through the pass at Peshawar and southeast on a route that skirted the Siwalik Hills below the Himalayas. The barren foothills of the Siwalik range boast vast and rich fossil beds with rich remains of long-extinct bizarre creatures. On these eroding slopes and marshes from Kashmir to the banks of the Ganges, people in antiquity would have observed hosts of strange skeletons emerging from the earth: enormous crocodiles (20 feet long); tortoises the size of a Mini Cooper; shovel‑tusked gomphotheres, stegodons, and Elephas hysudricus with its bulging brow; chalicotheres and anthracotheres; the large giraffe Giraffokeryx; and the truly colossal Sivatherium (named after the Hindu god Siva), a moose‑like giraffe as big as an elephant and carrying massive antlers. It seems safe to guess that the “dragon” heads exhibited at Paraka included the skulls of some of these strange creatures from the Siwalik Hills.
Large Flying Beasties
Speaking of dragons, I’ve been trying to nail down the physiology of some large mythological flyers for possible inclusion in my third Into the Wonder novel. I’ve come across the following rules of thumb that may prove helpful to others trying to imagine dragons, griffins, and other creatures in something like a realistic way:
- Birds have a wingspan of roughly 2 times their head-body length (falcons average around 2.5)
- Bats have a wingspan of roughly 5 times their head-body length
- Pterosaurs had a wingspan of roughly 6 times their body length (first dorsal to last sacral vertebra)
Within these parameters—and assuming the creature is not too heavy to fly at all!—a smaller ratio (like a finch) provides greater maneuverability while a larger ratio (like an albatross) provides greater endurance.
Furthermore, you can make a guess about the weight of a flying creature, or at least avoid something impossible, by taking wing loading into account. This has to do with how much weight and pressure a wing can manage. For birds, five pounds of body weight per square foot of wing surface is about the limit.
Some cool sources I found along the way:
The Anatomy of a Dragon
The British Library has compiled a treasury of medieval images of dragons in honor of Saint George’s Day.
Dragons are near-ubiquitious in medieval manuscripts. They take pride of place in bestiaries and herbals, books of history and legend, and Apocalypse texts, to name a few. They serve as symbols, heraldic devices, and even as ‘just’ decoration, and their physical characteristics can vary widely. Cinematic and literary depictions of dragons today are fairly consistent; they are almost always shown as reptilian, winged, fire-breathing creatures (in a word, Smaug). But this was by no means a constant portrayal in the medieval period.
Let’s have a look at a very common medieval trope – of the dragon as the nemesis of a saint or angel. Below we can see dragons facing off against St George (again), St Margaret, and the Archangel Michael. All these examples are drawn from late 15th century manuscripts, but their dragons are very different, and range from a lizard-y animal with duck-like feet to a winged leonine creature and a demon.
The Dragons of Europe
Leo Elijah Cristea discusses the dragon-lore of Europe, specifically from Norse and Slavic mythologies, in the last installment of his series on dragons at Fantasy Faction. At the bottom of the post, you’ll also find links to other installments in this series.
Darrell J. Pursiful 