Here be dragons
Nov. 17th, 2013 08:58 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
blatherskiteIn a discussion in the F&SF forum, the subject of dragons came up. One participant (Kevin C) wondered whether they might have been extrapolated from fossils and why people assumed the bones were reptilian. This got me thinking, leading to my participation in the discussion. A modified version of that contribution appears here:
It would only take one skull of the right type to make the association between dinosaur bones and dragons click. Ancient hunters would be intimately familiar with the bone structures of anything they hunted or that they had to kill to protect themselves, and would have no trouble extrapolating from the skull to the being that inhabited it. I suspect that many of them could teach modern paleontologists a thing or two about the meaning of bones.
Etymological footnote for those who aren't up on dragon lore: one of the traditional names for dragons is "worm" or "wyrm", which dates back (at least) to the old Norse term for a serpent.
Kevin noted that "There are dragons in European, Indian, North African, and Asian cultures, but apparently none in African, American, or Australian."
I noted that dragons are likely to be more ubiquitous than that. I can't speak with any authority about African mythology (it's a large gap in my knowledge), but given the size of some African snakes, I'd be surprised if there isn't something worm-y in that mythological background. You could easily make a case for Quetzlcoatl as a dragon in the old "worm" mode: though most often considered a bird deity, Quetzlcoatl also had a winged serpent form. There are definitely horned serpents in Amerindian myth, though they don't seem to be a dominant part of the mythology. My limited knowledge of Amerindian myth is concentrated on West Coast and East Coast tribes, with a dash of southern/desert tribal myth thrown in. I'd want to look into the mythology of peoples from areas with large and exposed fossil beds such as Montana and Alberta to see what they have to say about the notion.
Kevin wondered whether it might be a coincidence that legends of dragons occurred wherever trade existed, and proposed that the dragon idea might have arisen in one place and spread, evolving as it passed through various cultural filters.
This kind of thing seems unlikely to be a coincidence. Humans seem to have a storytelling gene that is highly conserved, and everywhere people meet, they swap stories. It's amazing how knowledge spreads along trade routes and is distorted; just think of the bizarre critters that Herodotus chronicled based on the distorted accounts of travelers and how subsequent bestiaries evolved from his descriptions. (Though known as "the father of lies" even as soon after his works as the time of Cicero, Herodotus was a classical author, and to many of his less scholarly and less critical heirs in the West, he became a primary source.) I didn't fully appreciate just how widespread these trade routes were until I learned of the trade between the eastern Mediterranean and Ireland during the "dark ages" to supply (among other things) various dyes used for illuminating the Book of Kells. We tend to forget that even when dominant situations such as Rome have fallen, people living in the "ruins" keep on keeping on, and aspects of life such as trade continue.
Although the following is highly speculative, it seems plausible: Of all the dinosaurs that I'd expect to survive previous mass extinctions, plesiosaurs and other marine dinosaurs would get my vote. The oceans tend to remain much more "climatically" stable than land masses over millions of years of climate change, which would give such organisms plenty of time to evolve in response to changing conditions. Early seafarers would probably have lacked sufficiently advanced weaponry to hunt such critters, and by the time they did evolve the skills to hunt large organisms, I suspect the marine dinosaurs would have been outcompeted by more modern predators such as whales or more nimble ancient predators such as sharks. Most of the skeletons would sink to the bottom of the ocean, where they would not be seen again; conditions for fossil formation are poor, witness the large communities of organisms that consume whale carcasses right down to the last yummy molecules. A little research led me to the Finnish term lohikäärme, or "salmon snake", which provides tenuous support for the notion of marine dragons.
Kevin reiterated the idea that early dragons were depicted as winged serpents. That's certainly true, hence the use of "worm" to describe dragons. I speculate (caveat: I'm not a cultural historian and don't play one on the Internet) that the bigger, thicker dragons of the West date back to around the time when the first complete dinosaur skeletons were excavated. In a newly scientific age, the old myth would have suddenly received objective support, leading to a revision of the myth.
Kevin questioned whether dragons might be a purely instinctual construct, to which author
Matthew Hughes proposed the idea of a "buried archetype". I confess that I'm a skeptic about archetypes from the perspective of the collective unconscious—though I'd love to see him include this notion in one of his noosphere (dream world) stories. My sense is that archetypes depend on some deep brain structures to reify, but that they don't arise spontaneously from that structure; they require some objective or physical trigger (e.g., a dinosaur skeleton) as a call to action for those brain structures. Once such an idea arose, I'd expect it to spread through the irresistable human impulse to tell tall tales, whether orally or in print. (Leads me to wonder whether there might be a "mythome", parallel to genome, that is the means by which memes propagate from culture to culture.)
It would only take one skull of the right type to make the association between dinosaur bones and dragons click. Ancient hunters would be intimately familiar with the bone structures of anything they hunted or that they had to kill to protect themselves, and would have no trouble extrapolating from the skull to the being that inhabited it. I suspect that many of them could teach modern paleontologists a thing or two about the meaning of bones.
Etymological footnote for those who aren't up on dragon lore: one of the traditional names for dragons is "worm" or "wyrm", which dates back (at least) to the old Norse term for a serpent.
Kevin noted that "There are dragons in European, Indian, North African, and Asian cultures, but apparently none in African, American, or Australian."
I noted that dragons are likely to be more ubiquitous than that. I can't speak with any authority about African mythology (it's a large gap in my knowledge), but given the size of some African snakes, I'd be surprised if there isn't something worm-y in that mythological background. You could easily make a case for Quetzlcoatl as a dragon in the old "worm" mode: though most often considered a bird deity, Quetzlcoatl also had a winged serpent form. There are definitely horned serpents in Amerindian myth, though they don't seem to be a dominant part of the mythology. My limited knowledge of Amerindian myth is concentrated on West Coast and East Coast tribes, with a dash of southern/desert tribal myth thrown in. I'd want to look into the mythology of peoples from areas with large and exposed fossil beds such as Montana and Alberta to see what they have to say about the notion.
Kevin wondered whether it might be a coincidence that legends of dragons occurred wherever trade existed, and proposed that the dragon idea might have arisen in one place and spread, evolving as it passed through various cultural filters.
This kind of thing seems unlikely to be a coincidence. Humans seem to have a storytelling gene that is highly conserved, and everywhere people meet, they swap stories. It's amazing how knowledge spreads along trade routes and is distorted; just think of the bizarre critters that Herodotus chronicled based on the distorted accounts of travelers and how subsequent bestiaries evolved from his descriptions. (Though known as "the father of lies" even as soon after his works as the time of Cicero, Herodotus was a classical author, and to many of his less scholarly and less critical heirs in the West, he became a primary source.) I didn't fully appreciate just how widespread these trade routes were until I learned of the trade between the eastern Mediterranean and Ireland during the "dark ages" to supply (among other things) various dyes used for illuminating the Book of Kells. We tend to forget that even when dominant situations such as Rome have fallen, people living in the "ruins" keep on keeping on, and aspects of life such as trade continue.
Although the following is highly speculative, it seems plausible: Of all the dinosaurs that I'd expect to survive previous mass extinctions, plesiosaurs and other marine dinosaurs would get my vote. The oceans tend to remain much more "climatically" stable than land masses over millions of years of climate change, which would give such organisms plenty of time to evolve in response to changing conditions. Early seafarers would probably have lacked sufficiently advanced weaponry to hunt such critters, and by the time they did evolve the skills to hunt large organisms, I suspect the marine dinosaurs would have been outcompeted by more modern predators such as whales or more nimble ancient predators such as sharks. Most of the skeletons would sink to the bottom of the ocean, where they would not be seen again; conditions for fossil formation are poor, witness the large communities of organisms that consume whale carcasses right down to the last yummy molecules. A little research led me to the Finnish term lohikäärme, or "salmon snake", which provides tenuous support for the notion of marine dragons.
Kevin reiterated the idea that early dragons were depicted as winged serpents. That's certainly true, hence the use of "worm" to describe dragons. I speculate (caveat: I'm not a cultural historian and don't play one on the Internet) that the bigger, thicker dragons of the West date back to around the time when the first complete dinosaur skeletons were excavated. In a newly scientific age, the old myth would have suddenly received objective support, leading to a revision of the myth.
Kevin questioned whether dragons might be a purely instinctual construct, to which author
Matthew Hughes proposed the idea of a "buried archetype". I confess that I'm a skeptic about archetypes from the perspective of the collective unconscious—though I'd love to see him include this notion in one of his noosphere (dream world) stories. My sense is that archetypes depend on some deep brain structures to reify, but that they don't arise spontaneously from that structure; they require some objective or physical trigger (e.g., a dinosaur skeleton) as a call to action for those brain structures. Once such an idea arose, I'd expect it to spread through the irresistable human impulse to tell tall tales, whether orally or in print. (Leads me to wonder whether there might be a "mythome", parallel to genome, that is the means by which memes propagate from culture to culture.)