What is it about dragons?
They don’t exist, and yet they do.
From sweet Toothless in How to Train Your Dragon to the terrifying Smaug in The Hobbit, they occupy a large space in the human mental landscape.
But the ways in which a dragon might occupy our mental spaces differ depending on your cultural background – a difference outlined in RA MacAvoy’s novel Tea with the Black Dragon (a wonderful book, which I urge you to read; be aware that the blog post linked to here contains spoilers). The main character, the mysterious Mayland Long, is talking to Fred Frisch, a computer nerd in the burgeoning 1980s PC industry. Fred opines that dragons symbolise: “Terror on bat wings. Fire and cold stone. Gold and jewels in heaps. Raw power!”
Long replies: “Chinese dragons were not always such brutes. They lived for centuries and had a certain reputation for wisdom.”
And across those cultures, we have ways of organising how we think about dragons. A 2014 blog post by Foz Meadows points out that very few other fictional creatures boast such a comprehensive meta-mythology. “I can’t think of a single narrative that talks about breeds of unicorn or manticore, or lavishes paragraphs of description on the crucial difference in coloration, size, intelligence, and native abilities of the various types of phoenix, but when it comes to dragons, we have entire series [of books] devoted to classifying them with scientific precision.”
So why are dragons so fascinating?
I did some research, and found a range of completely non-scientific dragon fan theorising, a lot of history and a wide range of ideas. I then had Google’s NotebookLM summarise the theories. Here is my highly edited version of reasons for dragon worship:
- Majesty: It’s simple: dragons are awe-inspiring.
- Complexity: They bring fire and destruction, yet also knowledge, wisdom, and peace.
- Thrill-seeking: Dragons provide the potential for danger and excitement while being totally safe because they do not exist. This capacity for offering dangerous thrills without ever delivering actual harm is very appealing to people (similar to the appeal of zombies or children’s love of dinosaurs).
That last one is probably closest to the truth. And yet, I think there’s something else going on.
What I think dragons mean to people
In all the research I did, this quote from an article on The Conversation by Emily Zarka, instructor in English at Arizona State University, is the closest I came to an explanation of the wellspring of the fascination with dragons:
One enduring reason dragons continue to appear in our world could be because they represent the power of nature. Stories about people taming dragons can be seen as stories about the ability of humans to dominate forces that cannot always be controlled.
To gain control over a dragon underscores the problematic idea that humans are superior to all other animals in nature. Dragons challenge the concept of human biological supremacy, raising questions about what it means if humans were forced to reposition themselves as lesser members of the food chain.
In that sense, a dragon represents one of our deepest fears, externalised into something that can be conquered, or tamed, against all the odds.
If dragons are about the power of nature, they could also be about the power of human nature, the things about ourselves that we don’t understand, and don’t like. It’s taken me a long while to understand this but I believe that we all have a powerful inner self that needs to be understood for what it is: beautiful and wild, untameable but offering the possibility of collaboration.
As always, no one understands this better than the wonderful Ursula le Guin and so I leave you with these cautionary words from The Wave in the Mind: Talks and Essays on the Writer, the Reader and the Imagination:
People who deny the existence of dragons are often eaten by dragons. From within.
Picture: I wanted a map with the words “here be dragons” but it turns out that’s a myth. Instead, I went with an Unsplash image of a dragon inside the Buddhist monastery Thrangu Tashi Yangtse, Nepal near Stupa Namobuddha in the Himalaya mountains, by Raimond Klavins.
Other things I have written, all featuring Le Guin:
Musings on the meaning of work – When did the work done in the home become less important than work done elsewhere? And why are the people who do that work so under-valued?
Colonisers and colonised – the shadows of the past – Reflections on a television series that subversively takes on questions of colonisation, and what it means to be colonised.
I’m not old, I’m a perennial – Senior? Silver surfer? Retiree? None of these words will do. Join me in my quest to find an answer to the question: what to call old people?
Inner work: Strange and lovely journeys – My theme word for the year 2024 was adventure. That didn’t mean travel, or exotic sports: it meant doing inner work.
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I have been thinking about this a lot – and keep coming back to the idea that perhaps dragons should be appointed as the ‘spirit animal’ of veganism – its primary tenet is that humans are indeed not superior to any other animal in nature. And, yes, this idea – that dragons ‘challenge the concept of human biological supremacy, raising questions about what it means if humans were forced to reposition themselves as lesser members of the food chain’ – is something I think about a lot too. If only more people would consider how they would feel if they were no longer the primary predator…
Indeed – we could all do with some quaking in our boots, I think.