Every other Friday, the Outside/In team here at NHPR answers listener questions about the natural world.
“Winged or wingless, why do so many cultures have dragon myths / legends?" asked Grace, calling from Carlisle, Pennsylvania.
To submit a question to the Outside/In team, you can record it as a voice memo on your smartphone and send it to outsidein@nhpr.org. You can also leave a message on our hotline, 1-844-GO-OTTER. No question is too serious or too silly.
Justine Paradis: The dragon from the epic of Beowulf. The Aztec feathered serpent, Quetzelcoatl. Qinglong and many divine Chinese dragons. And eventually, Tolkien’s Smaug. Why do humans dream up so many dragons?
Tim Burbery: I don't know if I can give a definitive answer, because there are so many different legends and so many different types of dragon stories.
Justine Paradis: Timothy Burbery is an English professor at Marshall University in West Virginia. Tim offered a couple ways to approach this question of the dragon. There’s psychoanalysis: like, Sigmund Freud might say that the dragon tells us something about repressed ideas in the human subconscious.
Tim Burbery: Carl Jung and others talk about how [a] dragon is a good representation of the human, right? We have this kind of worm-like body that decays and gets old and so on, and yet we aspire to soar in the heavens. So there's this duality to our nature.
Justine Paradis: Tim isn’t a psychologist or an archaeologist - he thinks about the dragon mostly through the lens of geomythology, which is basically the idea that myths should be taken seriously because they could contain real insights into Earth’s history.
For example, the oral traditions of Indigenous Australians give an account of a 4000-year old meteor strike deep in the continent’s interior. Sometimes, this kind of oral history might improve scientific understanding, like in the case of the native Hawaiian legend of the goddess Pele: the stories are consistent with historical eruptions of the volcano Kilauea. But it took science a while to figure that out—and as one USGS volcanologist put it, “...geologists were somewhat sidetracked by not taking the oral traditions into account.”
Tim Burbery: People made some pretty good observations… back in the day… whether it was a, you know, a weather event, a catastrophe, a disaster, or some discovery that they made, they would come up with a story.
Justine Paradis: So, what about dragon stories? Some geomythologists contend that legends of mythical beings may have been influenced by fossils, when prehistoric people came upon the remains of extinct animals, like dinosaurs or wooly mammoths.
Tim Burbery: Skulls. Antlers. Sometimes entire skeletons, the teeth… they didn't know exactly what they were, but they came up with some creative explanations.
Justine Paradis: Consider the cyclops, a mythical giant one-eyed man associated with the island of Sicily. Some argue that the cyclops may have been a way of explaining the huge skulls with a hole in their center, discovered on the island—skulls that we now know to be ancient elephant skulls, with a hole for the trunk.
Tim Burbery: There are stories of one-eyed monsters or three eyed monsters, you know, some kind of variation, around the world. But a lot of those sort of classic Cyclops stories do seem to have arisen right in the areas where we find those particular bones.
Justine Paradis: Meanwhile, some theorize that the skulls of extinct giraffes, discovered in the Sivalik Hills of India. were once identified as the skulls of dragons.
But Tim says geomythology is not a science. Beings like dragons could have been influenced by fossils in the area, or maybe the idea of the dragon already existed, and then the discovery of fossils appeared to confirm it – or maybe the fossils have nothing to do with it at all.
The idea does have its critics. Actually, paleontologists recently examined one of the most famous theories: a potential link between fossils of a horned dinosaur called a Protoceratops and the mythical griffin, a half-lion, half eagle. The authors found the connection "unconvincing" and “superficial.” But Tim thinks it’s quite possible that it’s more than just coincidence. The debate is ongoing.
Tim Burbery: I don't know if there's a myth out there that's just completely made up from completely whole cloth. You know, there's got to be some foundation to it.
Justine Paradis: After all, even if they’re not influenced by fossils, dragon stories come from somewhere and from someone.
Additional reading
Timothy Burbery is the author of Geomythology How Common Stories Reflect Earth Events.
The hypothesis connecting the griffin and the Protoceratops was popularized by Adrienne Mayor, author of The First Fossil Hunters: Dinosaurs, Mammoths, and Myth in Greek and Roman Times.
Here's the paper critiquing Mayor's interpretations, "Did the horned dinosaur Protoceratops inspire the griffin?" by Mark Hitton and Richard Hing.
USGS volcanologist Don Swanson's paper on what geologists missed for so long in the stories of Pele, from indigenous Hawaiian oral tradition.
