Scott G. Bruce - The Penguin Book of Dragons

We live in the golden age of dragons. The twentieth century witnessed the rapid ascent of these reptilian monsters in popular media and their momentum shows no sign of slowing down. In recent decades, readers have thrilled to the stories of heroes who sparred with weapons and words against dragons in the novels of J. R. R. Tolkien, Ursula K. Le Guin, George R. R. Martin, and J. K. Rowling. Through the magic of special effects, feature films like The 7th Voyage of Sinbad (1958) and Dragonslayer (1981) have allowed the viewer to experience wonder and awe at the might and majesty of these legendary creatures. Since the 1970s, tabletop role-playing games like Dungeons & Dragons (D&D) have introduced generations of aspiring adventurers to the perils and promises of doing battle with fire-breathing red dragons, poison-spewing black dragons, and lightning-shooting blue dragons. Building on the foundation of D&D, modern video games have gone one step further, allowing players to step into the role of fantasy heroes in imaginary worlds rendered in exquisite digital detail. Since the launch of World of Warcraft in 2004, millions of gamers have fought cooperatively against dragons, whether venturing into the dark lairs of Onyxia and Nefarian or launching their assault against the undead frost wyrm Sapphiron in the floating necropolis known as Naxxramas. In the past decade, dragons have featured prominently as bosses in many popular video game franchises, including Dark Souls, Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim, and Minecraft, the highest-selling video game in history. Most recently, the HBO series Game of Thrones captivated television audiences worldwide and made one of its lead characters Daenerys Targaryen, Mother of Dragons, a household name.

By any measure, dragons are currently the most popular mythological creature in the human imagination, but our infatuation with these creatures is deeply rooted in the distant past. From classical antiquity to the dawn of the modern age, stories about the menace and mystery of dragons have been told and retold in the heroic and historical literature of Europe and Asia. Ranging from ancient Greece and India to medieval Europe and China to the badlands of modern America, this anthology collects legends and lore about dragons and explores the meaning of these monsters in religious myths and popular folklore. While dragons are ubiquitous around the globe, their character and habitat differ considerably from place to place, from author to author. Modern storytellers have so successfully distilled the essence of the great wyrms of northern European literature sung in mead-halls a millennium ago that it is easy to lose perspective on the rich diversity of dragons in world literature. From the dark halls of the Lonely Mountain to the blue skies of Westeros to the hidden vaults of Gringotts Wizarding Bank, we expect dragons to be gigantic, reptilian predators with massive, batlike wings, who wreak havoc and ruin by breathing fire to defend the gold and other treasures they have hoarded in the deep places of the earth. But dragons are full of surprises. Indeed, many of the stories collected here defy these expectations about the appearance and character of these creatures, their habitat and diet, and their relationship to human beings. As we will see, every culture shaped its dragons according to its needs and fears.

Dragons have a long and storied history that dates back to the earliest human civilizations in the eastern Mediterranean and the Near East. In the ancient world, they took the form of enormous serpents ready to crush with their coils and kill with their venomous breath. They stood guard over sacred groves and springs, their watchfulness implicit in their name in ancient Greek (drakon), which derived from the verb derkomai, to see. Roman encyclopedists like Pliny classified dragons as exotic fauna inhabiting distant lands, a tradition that persisted among medieval authors. The currency of dragons did not diminish with the arrival of Christianity, which transformed these winged giants from living perils into agents of an older evil and amplified their importance on a cosmic scale by depicting them as harbingers of the last days. Northern pagan cultures of medieval Europe nurtured their own traditions about the meaning of these great reptiles, from the Midgard serpent Jrmungandr of Norse mythology to the fire-breathing dragon of