Daniel Ogden - The Dragon in the West: From Ancient Myth to Modern Legend

Fig. 0.1 Winged, four-legged dragon. German, engraving, Athanasius Kircher: Kircher 1678: ii.96. Cornell University Library. Public domain (Artstor).

The object of this book is to answer these questions. In 2013 I published two substantial volumes on the dragon of the Greek and Roman worlds, Drakn (2013a) and Dragons, Serpents, and Slayers (2013b), in which I offered an account of its physical formin essence just that of a massive snake, a great worm, albeit many qualifications are neededas well as of the story-types and of the motifs in which it was engaged in that era. Since the appearance of those publications I have come to wonder about the joining of the dots. How did we get from there to here, to the modern notions of dragondom? I was frustrated by the fact that there existed no serious or systematic attempt, in any language, to follow this path and address this question, of such foundational importance and self-evident interest. And so it has been that, not for the first time, I have attempted to create myself the book I longed to read but could not find. My training and experience in scholarship is almost exclusively in the field of Greek and Latin Classics, and it is with some trepidation that I venture so deeply into the full chronological span of the hagiographical tradition, and it is with even greater trepidation that I venture into the world of Old Norse and Medieval Germanic literature. I trespass in these fields not in a spirit of arrogance but one of despair: if no one else will attempt the book the world awaits, it falls to me to do so. If the inadequacies and infelicities of my account provoke the practiced experts of those fields at last to tell the story properly, with greater authority, closer accuracy, finer sensitivity, and subtler nuance than I have been able to do myself, then this volume may yet provide a worthwhile service after all, in the greater scheme of things: material to burn.