Dragons Around the World
From the winged wyrm of the Norse to the wingless Lung of China, the dragon is the most widespread of all the world's mythical creatures.
In this section
European vs Asian Dragons
The winged fire-breathing wyrm of the West and the wingless weather-controlling Lung of the East are two halves of a single world-wide dragon family.
Quetzalcoatl: The Feathered Serpent
The Mesoamerican god of wind, learning, and the morning star, the feathered serpent of the Aztecs, Maya, and Toltecs.
The dragon is the most widely distributed of the great mythical creatures, and the most varied. It appears in the folk traditions of every inhabited continent: as a winged, fire-breathing quadruped in the Europe of Beowulf and St George; as a long, wingless, weather-controlling serpent in the China of the imperial dragon-roofs; as a feathered god of wind and learning in the Mesoamerica of the Toltecs and the Aztecs; as a rainbow-bodied creator in the Dreaming of Aboriginal Australia; and as a great celestial serpent in the Yoruba traditions of West Africa. The family is unified less by any single body plan than by a shared sense of immense age, of bigness, of being older than human memory, and of being sacred.
This page surveys the dragon family in turn, drawing on the deeper entries collected under the European vs Asian Dragons comparison and the Feathered Serpent of Mesoamerica, and connecting the family to the broader bestiary of mythical creatures.
The dragon and the snake
The dragon is closely related to the snake, and in many traditions the dragon is a snake, a giant snake, a serpent of the deep earth or the deep water. The Norse Jörmungandr is a snake, and the Norse word ormr means both snake and dragon. The Anglo-Saxon wyrm is the same word. The Greek drakon, from which dragon descends, is a great snake. The Sanskrit nāga is both a snake and a dragon. The Chinese Lung is a long, sinuous being with a serpent’s body, and the Lung is sometimes said, in the older stratum of the tradition, to have been a great python.
The dragon is therefore the snake that has grown too big to be only a snake — the snake that has become a feature of the landscape, a hill, a range, a constellation. The dragon of Weltenburg on the Danube is a hill; the dragon of the Mesoamerican temple-pyramid is the temple; the dragon of the Australian rainbow is the waterhole. The dragon is the geological snake, the snake that is the size of the country.
The dragon is also, in the older traditions, the snake of the underworld. The Babylonian Tiamat is the salt-water mother, the mother of the dragons, slain by Marduk to create the world. The Aztec Cihuacoatl is the snake-woman, the mother of the moon. The Japanese Yamata no Orochi is the eight-headed snake of the deep Izumo, whose tail is eight valleys long. The dragon is, in these traditions, the older world that the newer world is built on, and the hero who slays the dragon is the one who rebuilds the world.
The shape of a dragon
Any definition of dragon runs into a problem: the European and Asian dragons look so different that it is reasonable to ask whether they are the same kind of creature. The European dragon of the medieval bestiary is a quadruped, often winged, capable of breathing fire, and a guardian of treasure in a cave. The Chinese Lung is a long, sinuous, four-legged, scaled, antlered, pearl-chasing, weather-controlling being, without wings but with the gift of flight through its control of the clouds. The Mesoamerican feathered serpent has wings in the form of feathers, a long tail, and a divine face. The Aboriginal Australian Rainbow Serpent is a great snake of immense length whose body forms the waterholes and the ranges. The Yoruba Aido-Hwedo is a great cosmic serpent whose body is the rainbow and whose food is the iron disc of the sun.
What these creatures share is a sense of bigness, of age, of weather, and of the threshold. The dragon is the creature that lives at the edge of the world that humans have mapped: under the mountain, on the floor of the sea, beyond the monsoon, on the rim of the cosmos. The dragon is the older thing, the powerful thing, the thing that the hero must meet in order to become a hero.
The European dragon
The European dragon of the medieval bestiary is unambiguous: large, often winged, breathing fire, living in a cave, guarding a treasure, and doomed to be killed by a hero or a saint. The English Beowulf dies killing the dragon after taking its hoard. The Norse Sigurd, on the advice of the dwarven smith Regin, slays the dragon Fáfnir and eats its heart. The Greek Apollo kills Python at Delphi and takes the oracle. St George, in the legend that begins in the Golden Legend of Jacobus de Voragine (c. 1260), rescues a princess of Libya from a dragon by making the sign of the cross. St Michael, in the Book of Revelation, defeats a dragon identified as the devil. Margaret of Antioch tames a dragon with her girdle.
The European dragon is also the wyrm — the long, legless, often subterranean serpent of the Norse and Anglo-Saxon tradition. The wyrm of the Old English Beowulf (composed c. 700–1000 AD) is the last and most terrible of the three monsters of the poem. The Norse Jörmungandr, the Midgard Serpent, encircles the world with his tail in his mouth, and at Ragnarök he rises out of the sea and faces Thor in a battle that kills them both. The Welsh dragon Y Ddraig Goch is the dragon of Llywelyn ap Gruffudd, prince of Wales, and a more recent emblem of national identity; the Pendragon of the Arthurian cycle is the great dragon-king of Britain, the title that Uther and Arthur bear.
The medieval Mediterranean bestiary also recognised the amphisbaena, a serpent with a head at each end; the basilisk, a small serpent whose breath and gaze killed; the cockatrice, half rooster and half serpent; the hydra, whose many heads grew back when cut; and the wyvern, a two-legged, often wingless cousin of the dragon. The wyvern is the common English dragon of the heraldic age, the form taken by the Welsh dragon of Llywelyn in the medieval manuscript marginalia.
The Asian dragon
The Asian dragon is a different beast. The Chinese Lung is a long, sinuous, four-legged, scaled, antlered, pearl-chasing, weather-controlling being, the chief of the four spiritual creatures (the others being the fenghuang or phoenix, the qilin or unicorn, and the tortoise). The Lung lives in the rivers, the lakes, the clouds, and the seas. He rises from the water at the spring equinox to bring the rains, and descends at the autumn equinox. The Dragon King, Lung Wang, presides over the four seas. The Dragon Boat Festival of the fifth lunar month is held in his honour, and the boats of the world dragon-boat-racing tradition are the modern descendants of those racing boats. The dragon is also the emblem of the emperor, and the dragon-robed emperor of the Qing, the Ming, and the Han is the human counterpart of the celestial Lung.
The Japanese Ryū is the same family. The Ryū lives in the rivers, the lakes, and the sea, and the great Ryū of the Inland Sea, the Yamata no Orochi of the Kojiki (712 AD), is the eight-headed, eight-tailed serpent slain by the storm god Susanoo. The Korean Yong, the Vietnamese Rồng, and the Tibetan Druk are all members of the same family. The Druk of Bhutan is the Thunder Dragon, and it is on the flag of Bhutan, where the white Druk clutches jewels and thunders across the sky.
The Indian Nāga is another branch of the great-serpent family. The Nāga is a great snake, sometimes with one head, sometimes with many, sometimes with a human face, sometimes crowned. The Nāga is the king of the snakes, the guardian of treasure, the holder of occult knowledge, and the patron of the water. The Nāga king Shesha (also called Ananta, the infinite) supports the world on his thousand hoods. The Hindu god Vishnu reclines on Shesha between cycles of creation. The Buddhist Nāga Mucalinda shelters the meditating Buddha from a storm with his coils.
The Mongolian Yilbegān, the great serpent of the steppe, is the enemy of the celestial Gur, the wild goose. The Mansi and Khanty of Western Siberia have their own great serpents, and the Quetzalcoatl of Mesoamerica is sometimes classed with them by comparative mythologists.
The dragon as guardian, enemy, creator, and opponent
Across these traditions, the dragon plays four principal roles. It is a guardian of treasure, of a river, of a city, of a kingdom. It is an enemy of the hero, the saint, the city, the kingdom. It is a creator of the world, or of a part of it. And it is an opponent of a hero in a single combat that is also a moral test.
The four roles are not exclusive. The European dragon is guardian and enemy: it guards the gold of the Nibelungen, and it must be killed by Sigurd. The Chinese Lung is guardian and creator: it guards the rivers and it created the world by shaping the rivers. The Quetzalcoatl is creator and opponent: he brought the calendar and the arts to humanity, and he was opposed to Tezcatlipoca in the central myth of Mesoamerican religion. The Norse Jörmungandr is enemy and opponent: he is the enemy of the gods and the final opponent of Thor at Ragnarök.
The dragon is also a test. The killing of a dragon is the founding act of a hero: Beowulf, Sigurd, St George, St Michael, Susanoo, the Buddha’s predecessors. The killing of a dragon is also the founding act of a city: the dragon of London, the dragon of Kraków, the dragon of Kyoto, the dragon of Beijing. The cities that did not have a dragon to slay did not, in the stories, become a city.
The dragon in the modern world
The dragon has not been retired. The European dragon is a fundamental piece of the Dungeons & Dragons bestiary, with a chromatic table (black, blue, green, white, red) that has been extended through the editions. The Asian Lung is a fundamental piece of the Pokémon bestiary, and the Dragonair and Dragonite of the Kanto Pokédex are recognisable descendants of the Chinese Lung. The contemporary fantasy of George R.R. Martin, of Ursula K. Le Guin, of J.K. Rowling, of Patrick Rothfuss, of Robin Hobb, and of R.F. Kuang draws on both families at once, and the A Song of Ice and Fire dragon of Daenerys Targaryen is a hybrid: it breathes fire, it is winged, it is a creature of the East Asian type in the colour of its egg, and it speaks with a human voice.
The How to Train Your Dragon films of DreamWorks (2010, 2014, 2016, 2019) tell the story of a Viking boy and a dragon of the Monstrous Nightmare species, and the film reframes the dragon as a creature to be understood rather than slain. The Monsterverse films of Legendary Pictures (2014, 2017, 2019, 2021) present Godzilla as a creature of the same family, and Godzilla vs. Kong (2021) is in part a dragon-fight. The dragon, in short, is still a creature we tell stories about, and the stories are still those of creation, of guardianship, of enmity, and of the hero’s fight.