When I was twelve years old, I went to my public library in search of the answer to a question: What was the first dragon? Now, I was a pretty naive kid, but I wasn’t that naive. I didn’t actually believe in dragons, at least, not at that point. But I wanted to know where the idea of them originated. There is a pretty common theory that you’ve probably heard of, that early people found dinosaur bones and called them dragons. But, while that might not be a wholly incorrect interpretation, that’s not actually the answer I was looking for.
I wanted to know, in fiction or in myth, what was the first thing that was represented as a dragon? I wanted to know because, if I could find out what the original was, I could identify the “core traits” of a dragon, as opposed to adaptations to the central premise, and thus I would know what a “true” dragon really should be, a topic that was somehow extremely important to 12 year old me.
One major reason for my confusion was the difference between Eastern and Western dragons. For any who may not be familiar, Eastern dragons are nearly exclusively serpentine beings, though some do have small arms and legs, and they are often beings of great wisdom and power, almost akin to gods. In Western literature and myth, the intelligence of dragons is widely variable; some, like J.R.R. Tolkien’s Smaug or The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim’s Paarthunax, are just as wise as their Eastern counterparts, whereas others, like the unnamed dragons in the legends of Beowulf or St. George, are no more than particularly deadly wild animals. But the rough shape of a dragon is instantly recognizable: a huge lizard with vast, bat-like wings, breathing fire from on high.
My research did not yield any results, or at least, not the ones I had been hoping for. It turns out, no one was particularly interested in identifying the first dragon, at least, not that I could find. At that time, I was barely capable of articulating the reason for my interest to myself, so finding an answer to the question was somewhat beyond my twelve year old capabilities, even with all the resources my local library had to offer.
What I found in my fledgling research was even more confusing. There were far more categories of dragon than simply Eastern and Western. Dragons appear, in one form or another, in cultures all across the world. There is, of course, the classic western dragon, the great scaled beast with massive bat wings, the type that may have been put down by Sir Gawain. About as recognizable is the majestic eastern dragon, the huge elemental serpents that are tantamount to gods and often appear in traditional parades and festivals. There are countless other dragons besides: Meso-American dragons, from the feathered snake Kukulkan to an aspect of the deity Quetzalcoatl, African dragons in the form of lwas and other primordial beings, and a veritable wellspring of dragon myths arise when you look towards the Pacific. A cursory look at the wikipedia entry for “list of dragons in folklore” makes it seem like draconic myths hail from literally every corner of the earth.
And yet, none of them seemed to be the “first” one. That begged another question: what was it about dragons that caused them to show up again and again around the globe? Turns out, the reason why I had such trouble finding an answer to the question was because there was a flaw in the very premise of the question, looking for the true origin of a mythical idea. Dragons have no origin. There is no first dragon, because “dragon” is not a concept. It is a box. A line drawn around a collection of ideas because language sacrifices context at the altar of convenience. It has to, or we’d never be able to say anything.
To better understand what I mean by this, let’s pivot to another mythological creature: the vampire. Why vampires? Because the “core characteristics” of a vampire is a question that comes up time and again, even in mainstream conversations. Vampires, even to people who don’t know most fantastical terms or beings, are a recognizable concept. And the question of a vampire’s “core characteristics” is one that became a relatively mainstream conversation not too long ago, as the book and movie Twilight introduced a relatively derided trait into their version of a vampire: sparkling skin in sunlight.
I understand why there was such an instant backlash to the idea. It’s a bit ridiculous and hard to take seriously. Simply shimmering a bit rather than the typical spontaneous combustion can’t be a “real” trait of vampires, can it? But changing that vampiric weakness to sun into sparkling skin, while perhaps a bit too easy to dunk on, is by no means unprecedented. Every form of vampire media, every single one, reinvents the identity of Vampire; that is to say, makes choices from a conflicting canon. Ten years before twilight, Buffy the Vampire Slayer told us they were all half demons. Not long before that, Blade was telling us that they were weak to silver, while Anne Rice was telling us they weren’t weak to basically anything. Each form of vampire media takes the core concept of vampire and runs with it, in the direction of the story they want to tell.
However, there is one crucial difference between vampires and dragons as cultural identities. Even if there isn’t a protodragon, there absolutely is a protovampire: Dracula. But while Dracula is without a doubt the formative point for vampires as we know them today, his tale is just as much a reinvention as any of the ones mentioned above. Bram Stoker, when creating the idea of Dracula, drew from a number of different sources. One, perhaps the most famous, was the real life account of Vlad Tepes, a Wallachian prince with a brutal history. Somewhat less well known are the strigoi, bloodsuckers from Slavic myths that would not bear much resemblance at all to the vampires we know of today. But if Dracula is a vampire, then the strigoi most certainly are as well. In fact, bloodsucking monsters of one form or another, just like dragons, are seen in myths from around the world, and the most useful term to refer to all of them is vampires. And yet, the core characteristics of such myths vary.
Then is it the bloodsucking? Well, no. Because chupacabras suck blood, and aren’t generally considered to be “vampires”, and there are vampires, such as one of the leads from the show What We Do in the Shadows, which are psychic vampires, leeching off of energy without so much as a fang.
Well, then, what is a vampire? A vampire is a useful term, no more and no less. It is useful because of its cultural recognition; show someone a being with 9 of 10 recognizable traits of a vampire, and that person will be able to tell that it’s a vampire, sparkling skin or no sparkling skin. They might think the portrayal is silly, but they won’t be confused, and ultimately, that’s what fantastical terms are meant to accomplish: clarity. Because if I want to tell a narrative using a particular monster, I need to be sure my audience understands what that monster is. If I’m inventing the monster from scratch, then I have to describe every core characteristic of that monster, but if I’m using a culturally identifiable shorthand, I can simply say “vampire” and my readers will know what I mean. Any deviations from the vampire, like, say, sparkling skin, a weakness to silver, or a predilection for hopping instead of walking, simply need to be explained in the text, and then that deviation just becomes part of the suspension of disbelief.
That said, there should always be a reason for the changes that you make. Anne Rice wasn’t particularly concerned with defeating vampires as her core conflict, instead wanting to tell stories about vampire society, and her choices in limiting their limitations reflect that desire. Even Bram Stoker, in his inception of what would become the protovampire, was making choices about the monster’s characteristics, choices that were directly connected to the sort of story he wanted to tell, and, more importantly, the themes he wanted to explore.
Do you know why we have different words for cow and beef, pig and pork, chicken and poultry? For the most part, it’s because of interbreeding in the European nobility across much of the Medieval and Renaissance eras. Because it was only acceptable for nobles to marry other nobles, the pool of options for nobility was very limited, and therefore, it was more common to marry mainland nobles. Therefore, through much of England’s history, the ruling class didn’t even speak English. Farmers would slaughter cows, but nobles would be served beef, simply because the french word for cow was “boeuf”. Similarly, French for chicken is poulet, and for pig is porc.
This dynamic was still very present in late 1800s England, perhaps even entrenched. After all, 20 years after Dracula was published, the First World War broke out, and the heads of state of all three major parties were all cousins [editor’s note: anyone interested in this dynamic must read Miranda Carter’s George, Nicholas, and Wilhelm: Three Royal Cousins and the Road to World War I] . Therefore, it’s no accident that Dracula was a foreign noble, a Count, and that he was defeated by a professor and a solicitor, representing the academic and financial interests of Britain. The fact that the strigoi sucked blood from their victims made a perfect allegory for the sort of leechcraft that Stoker wished to depict relative to the nobility in England at the time.
Those choices, the changes made to a core concept, should be made with care, however. In fact, out of all of the examples I have mentioned already, I would say sparkling skin is by no means the most problematic deviation point. It’s perfectly suitable, if a bit silly, to explain why a vampire is able to attend high school but doesn't generally want to be seen in sunlight.
I’d say a much more tenuous addition to the established lore would be the weakness to silver exhibited by Blade’s vampires. For one, it doesn’t add anything to the story; no greater symbolism is achieved, no plot points are made possible. It allows Blade to shoot stakes out of a gun, but I’ve seen bullets dipped in holy water used the same way. Still, that’s not the problem; the problem is cultural association between silver as a weakness and werewolves, especially since the third Blade movie actually introduces werewolves, confusing the cultural identity of each beast a bit more. Are werewolves genetically linked to vampires? No, they are not. Why do they share the same weakness? So Blade can shoot at them. Paper thin, if you ask me, and introduces far more issues than it solves.
In fact, that’s one of the most effective possible uses of fantastic characteristics: not just identification, in the case of many of these vampires, but differentiation. Because as the field of culturally understood magical creatures and concepts becomes more and more crowded, the need to create boxes and draw lines becomes more and more important. Not absolute boxes; after all, as I was just saying, each new telling reinvents the core identity. But, within a narrative, a clear understanding of qualities allows a fantasy author to tell stories with a bit more nuance.
Which brings us to wizards. Or, should I say, magic users, as wizards are, rightfully, a subcategory. What is the difference between a wizard, a warlock, and a witch?
I would say there are three different types of answers to that question. The one attempts to hone in on exactly what the core characteristics of each are in order to draw differentiation. The second is to use the boundaries of a single narrative, and accept the differentiation as given. And the third, which to my mind is probably the truest answer, is that there simply is no inherent difference.
After all, magic doesn’t exist. Wizards don’t exist, nor witches, warlocks, conjurers, sorcerers, or magicians (unless you count the Vegas kind).. Therefore, all of these terms mean the exact same thing, to us: a person who uses magic. Sure, there might be some connotations to each, we might have an understanding of a witch as a lady with a hat and a broomstick, a wizard as a man with a long beard and a staff, and a warlock as being somehow nefarious. But if a fictional work were to refer to all magic users as “practitioners”, as, indeed, Rivers of London does, it wouldn’t confuse readers at all.
However, those cultural differences become useful when comparing classes of being inside the same narrative. Wizard may not have much specific identity in a story where “wizard” is the only word used for “magic user”, but in Harry Potter, wizard and witch become very specific things: a wizard is a male magic user, and a witch a female magic user. This is clearly informed by our cultural understanding of each. As is the portrayal in Discworld, where wizarding is the primarily male practice of casting spells from books, and witchcraft is the primarily female practice of riding broomsticks and brewing potions in cauldrons. The reason for the slight difference between these depictions is rooted in the sort of story each wanted to tell: Rowling was more interested in creating a whimsical universe, whereas Pratchett wanted to examine what happens when one wants to cross these cultural lines, as the third Discworld book revolves around a girl who doesn’t want to be a witch but a wizard.
This sort of differentiation becomes necessary in any world where there are different types of magic users. Forgotten Realms, the main setting for the role-playing game Dungeons & Dragons, is perhaps the most magically saturated universe out there, and consequently, has a lot of different terms for different magic users. In the Forgotten Realms, a warlock is a magic user who made some unbreakable pact with a being of vast potential, something most people would probably consider nefarious to some extent. In the Dresden Files, it is even starker: warlocks are wizards who break the laws of magic, and, as magic criminals, their lives become forfeit. Very different, but still drawing on understood cultural concepts.
This is all why, if anyone ever asks you if vampires sparkle, or if dragons breathe fire, or if witches can cast spells, the answer is always “it depends.” There are no hard and fast lines when it comes to fantastical concepts, as each new story is a reinvention, and each reinvention changes the core concept. However, this brings me to one of my most common refrains when it comes to writing: if you want to break a rule, understand why it’s a rule. No one says your vampires need to die in sunlight, or be weak to wooden stakes and garlic. But if one wants to portray a vampire in a different light, so to speak, they have to understand why the changes are being made, and what the value in the original qualities was in the first place.
Which brings us back to the idea of dragons. Because the question of where “dragon” comes from is not one of myth, history, or even culture. It’s one of categorization, which is to say, language.
The word dragon comes to us from Old French, which derived the word from the Latin/Greek word “draco”. So, you might think the first “draco” in myth might be the first dragon. But draco, to the Romans and Greeks, did not mean dragon. It meant great serpent. And sure, great serpent may be a decent description of a dragon, but the Greeks wouldn’t have differentiated between the real and the mythical; to them, an anaconda or a boa constrictor would have been “draco” as well, and they are obviously not dragons.
So the word “dragon” didn’t really come to mean the cultural idea of “dragon” until we get to the 13th century in France, and at that point, there were hundreds, perhaps thousands of different things from different myths that were large reptiles with various fantastic qualities. All of these things were, in one form or another, a dragon, and “dragon” came to be a term that meant “fantastical being with roughly these characteristics”.
This is not a question of chicken and egg, trying to find out which came first, but more an examination of concepts that don’t fit neatly inside arbitrary boxes. Why are Eastern and Western dragons so different? Because they came from different cultures, completely separate conceptually, and it became convenient to English (and French) speaking people to lump them all under the umbrella of “dragon”. Just like vampires, wizards, and nearly every other mythological entity without a specifically named origin, there is no “one true protodragon”. By the time the very idea of a dragon was invented, there were already thousands of protodragons.
Our error is in thinking of mythological creatures, or even just fictional concepts, as working the same way that evolution does. That an idea must either be based on another idea, or the first of its kind. That qualities of the child are inherited from the parent. And that is true, in a certain respect. But unlike with genealogy, there is no direct lineage to trace, because dragons and vampires are not species, they are tropes. Tropes diffuse through the sea of human imagination, and qualities are added or discarded constantly through each retelling.
Alex Conroy is a fantasy author from New Hampshire with a Masters in Creative Writing from University of Southern Maine’s Stonecoast Program.