This morning I pulled a baby dragon from the random object randomogrifier, a yellow Safari toy holding a pearl the size of a volleyball to him. That got me thinking about how dragons evolved from terrifying monsters to cute companions, because baby dragons didn’t exist in mythology until the 1980s.
Sketch & Coffee, Live! is streamed daily at 5:30am, Texas Time, at the YouTubes
The oldest written dragon we know about is the Mushkushu from the Mediterranean, around 2100 BCE. Just a mosaic and some writings, not much detail beyond leathery wings. The big question is where dragons came from in the first place. Most likely ancient humans ran across crocodiles, monitor lizards, giant pythons, and got the living breath scared out of them. We have that ancient fear of big reptiles and slithering things hardwired into us. Some folks argue they found fossils, but they would have known the difference between bone and rock, so I doubt they thought fossils were live animals.
Here’s where it gets interesting. Eastern dragons are wise, benevolent gods. Chinese and Vietnamese people believed they descended from dragons. But Western dragons are evil treasure hoarders that heroes have to slay. Why the difference? The East had literacy for centuries before the West. Western dragon stories were oral tradition written down by Christian monks after Christianity arrived. These were pagan monsters nobody had seen, so the monks assumed they were evil. That completely changed the narrative we got, like a massive game of telephone played over centuries.
Quetzalcoatl makes this even more fascinating. The Aztecs had a feathered serpent god, wise and benevolent, bringer of knowledge and rain. But these people descended from Asian tribes that crossed the Bering land bridge 12,000 years ago and were cut off from Asian culture for tens of thousands of years before the Aztec empire. Yet their dragon is still wise and good, just like Asian dragons. That’s either cultural convergence or ancient oral stories surviving an incredible journey through time.
Tolkien’s Smaug in 1937 started the modern fantasy dragon tradition, but baby dragons didn’t show up until Marvel’s Lockheed in 1983, Kitty Pryde’s companion in the X-Men. That’s where cute dragons holding oversized pearls came from, leading to Game of Thrones babies and Harry Potter’s Norbert.
Click here to watch this episode of Sketch & Coffee!
Also, if you or a teacher friend are in need of a 20-30 minute lesson plan about dragons, feel free to download and shair this one:
Leave a Reply