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Robert Blust in The Origin of Dragons (2000) argues that, like many other creations of traditional cultures, dragons are largely explicable as products of a convergence of rational pre-scientific speculation about the world of real events. In this case, the event is the natural mechanism governing rainfall and drought, with particular attention ...
The word dragon derives from the Greek δράκων (drakōn) and its Latin cognate draco.Ancient Greeks applied the term to large, constricting snakes. [2] The Greek drakōn was far more associated with poisonous spit or breath than the modern Western dragon, though fiery breath is still attested in a few myths.
The European dragon is a legendary creature in folklore and mythology among the overlapping cultures of Europe.. The Roman poet Virgil in his poem Culex lines 163–201, [1] describing a shepherd battling a big constricting snake, calls it "serpens" and also "draco", showing that in his time the two words probably could mean the same thing.
During the Spanish conquest of the Inca Empire in the 16th century, Spanish conquistadors fought on horse with arquebuses, prefiguring the origin of European dragoons. [6] The origin of the name remains disputed and obscure. It possibly derives from an early weapon, a short wheellock, called a dragon because its muzzle was decorated with a ...
The dragon was the symbol of the Chinese emperor for many dynasties. During the Qing dynasty, the Azure Dragon was featured on the first Chinese national flag. It was featured again on the Twelve Symbols national emblem, which was used during the Republic of China, from 1913 to 1928.
As in the later conception of the dragons in the Legendarium, the winged dragons had not yet been devised by Morgoth at the time of the Fall of Gondolin. The first winged dragons appeared at the same time as Ancalagon the Black. [T 2] In the late Third Age, the dragons bred in the Northern Waste and Withered Heath north of the Grey Mountains. [T 3]
The oldest creatures outright referred to as "winged dragons" are Helios's chariot steeds, which aid Medea. In British heraldry, the term "wyver" first appears in Great Roll in 1312, and is derived from the Old French "wyvre", meaning "serpent". The term "dragon" appears by the following century.
Urnes-style runestone U 887, Skillsta, Sweden, showing a runic dragon and a bipedal winged dragon.. Worms, wurms or wyrms (Old English: wyrm, Old Norse: ormʀ, Old High German: wurm), meaning serpent, are archaic terms for dragons (Old English: dracan, Old Norse: dreki, Old High German: trahho) in the wider Germanic mythology and folklore, in which they are often portrayed as large venomous ...