How Medieval Are the Dragons in ‘House of the Dragon’ Really?

The new season of HBO’s epic fantasy series House of the Dragon is about to release its fourth episode. The show is set in the fantasy land of Westeros, which is loosely inspired by England in the High and Late Middle Ages. The story is based on the second half of George R. R. Martin’s 2018 fantasy novel Fire & Blood, which describes a fictional civil war known as the Dance of the Dragons, which is, in turn, loosely inspired by the real medieval English civil war known as the Anarchy (lasted 1138 – 1153), in which Empress Matilda, King Henry I’s daughter and appointed heir, fought over the English throne with her cousin Stephen of Blois. House of the Dragon takes the general premise of this war and adds many fantastic elements; most notably, in this story, both sides have dragons that they deploy in battle against each other.

Because the series draws both aesthetic and narrative inspiration from medieval England, and dragons appear in medieval legends, many viewers may assume that the dragons they see on screen in House of the Dragon resemble what medieval people imagined when they told stories about dragons. This assumption, however, is incorrect. The dragons in Martin’s novels and the television shows based on them are awesome to read about and watch on screen, but they bear only a partial physical resemblance and essentially no behavioral resemblance to dragons in real medieval literature and art.

A point of clarification

Before I say any more, I want to be very clear that nothing I am about to say is intended in any way as a criticism of Martin’s novels or the television series based on them. Modern fantasy does not have any duty to portray dragons the way that medieval people imagined them, and it is completely normal for mythical creatures to evolve as different authors and storytellers come up with new ideas and interpretations. That’s what artists and storytellers have done throughout history, and, as we will see clearly in this post, medieval artists and storytellers did exactly the same thing.

This post is meant purely for educational purposes, to teach people the real history of how different people imagined dragons over time, using House of the Dragon, a popular, current television series, as a springboard for discussion and comparison. I hope that readers will take this post in the spirit in which I intend it.

Yahweh as a dragonslayer in the Hebrew Bible

To understand medieval dragons, you first need to understand what preceded them, and that means we have to go back to the two main sources from which medieval Europeans derived their worldview: the Bible and the ancient Greeks and Romans.

Various ancient Middle Eastern peoples told myths involving giant serpents, and, although the word dragon did not exist in any of these peoples’ languages, modern scholars often call these mythical giant serpents “dragons.” Middle Eastern myths usually associate these giant serpents with primordial watery chaos.

The Baʿal Cycle, a text written on clay tablets in cuneiform script in the city of Ugarit in the northern Levant between c. 1300 and c. 1100 BCE, describes the storm god Baʿal as slaying a giant sea serpent called Lotan, who is a servant of the sea god Yam. The text describes Lotan with the epithets “fleeing serpent” and “twisting serpent.”

The authors of the texts that now comprise the Hebrew Bible adapted this older story from Canaanite myth, but they replaced Baʿal with Yahweh, the national god of Israel and Judah. Multiple passages in the Hebrew Bible (e.g., Job 26:12, Job 41, Psalm 74:13–14, Psalm 89:9–10, and Isaiah 27:1) describe Yahweh as fighting and killing a sea serpent known as Rahab or Leviathan.

The name Leviathan in Hebrew is cognate to the name Lotan in Ugaritic, and Isaiah 27:1 even uses the exact same epithets to describe Leviathan that the Ugaritic Baʿal Cycle uses to describe Lotan (NRSVUE trans., ed.):

On that day Yahweh with his cruel and great and strong sword will punish Leviathan the fleeing serpent, Leviathan the twisting serpent, and he will kill the dragon that is in the sea.

This verse reinterprets Yahweh’s battle with Leviathan, which other texts in the Hebrew Bible describe as a past event associated with Yahweh’s creation of the universe, as a future event associated with Yahweh’s coming day of judgment. This reframing would have a major impact on Christian interpretations of the story.

Ancient Greek and Roman dragons

The word dragon comes from the Latin word draco, which, in turn, derives from the Ancient Greek word δράκων (drákōn). The ancient Greeks and Romans depicted dragons in art and literature as essentially giant snakes with beards and occasionally frills; Greco-Roman dragons don’t have legs, wings, horns, or claws, and they don’t breathe fire. They bear many similarities to ancient Middle Eastern mythical serpents.

Greco-Roman dragons are not particularly evil, but they are dangerous and difficult to kill. As I discuss in greater depth in this previous post I wrote in June 2022, they typically act as guardians of either treasure or bodies of water.

Various gods and heroes in Greco-Roman myth are said to have slain or overcome dragons. For instance, Medeia, the daughter of King Aiëtes of Kolkhis, is said to have aided the hero Iason in his quest to obtain the Golden Fleece by putting the dragon that guarded the fleece to sleep using a magic drug. The hero Herakles is said to have slain the dragon Ladon, who guarded the tree with golden apples in the Garden of the Hesperides in the far west, as part of his eleventh labor. Kadmos, the Phoenician prince who founded the city of Thebes in central Greece, is said to have slain a dragon that guarded a spring that was sacred to the god Ares.

ABOVE: Tondo from an Attic red-figure kylix by the Douris Painter dating to between c. 480 and c. 470 BCE, discovered in Etruria, depicting the Kolkhian dragon regurgitating the hero Iason in front of the goddess Athena while the Golden Fleece hangs in the tree behind it

ABOVE: Paestan red-figure kylix-krater dated to between c. 350 and c. 340 BCE depicting Kadmos, the founder of Thebes, slaying the dragon guarding the spring of Ares

Satan as the “great red dragon” in the Book of Revelation 12

The Septuagint, a translation of the texts of the Hebrew Bible into Greek that was produced over the third and second centuries BCE, renders the Hebrew word that is translated as “serpent” in Isaiah 27:1 above using the Greek word δράκων (drákōn). Partly as a result of this, Greek-speaking early Christians conflated the mythical serpents in the Hebrew Bible with the dragons in Greek and Roman myths. They also identified the dragons whom God is described as slaying in the Hebrew Bible, along with the serpent in the Garden of Eden in Genesis 3, as Satan.

In the 90s CE, a Christian man named John who was living in exile on the Greek island of Patmos wrote the text that would define the Christian conception of dragons for millennia to come: the Book of Revelation, which uses allegory and symbols to convey a message attacking the Roman Empire for its persecution of Christianity.

Revelation chapter 12 describes an allegorical vision in which John sees a “great red dragon” with seven heads, ten horns, and seven diadems terrorizing a woman clothed with the sun who is in the agony of giving birth. The dragon represents Satan and the Roman Empire, while the woman represents the nation of Israel giving birth to the community of followers of Jesus.

Next, John describes seeing a “war in heaven,” in which the archangel Michael leads his angels to victory against the dragon and his angels. Revelation 12:9 expressly identifies the red seven-headed dragon as Satan (NRSVUE trans.):

The great dragon was thrown down, that ancient serpent, who is called the devil and Satan, the deceiver of the whole world—he was thrown down to the earth, and his angels were thrown down with him.

Because of this Biblical association of dragons with Satan, the overwhelming majority of dragons in Christian literature are depicted as evil, demonic, or corrupt.

ABOVE: Illustration in the Facundus Beatus (Ms. Vit. 14.2) folio 186v, copied in Iberia in 1047 CE, depicting the Great Red Dragon and the woman clothed with the sun from the Book of Revelation chapter 12

The Physiologos on dragons, panthers, and ichneumons

A widespread belief among early Christians held that God intentionally designed every animal to teach theological or moral lessons, which humans can discover by studying animals’ anatomy and behavior. The Physiologos, an early Christian text originally written in Greek by an anonymous author probably in Alexandria sometime between the second and fourth centuries CE, describes anatomical and behavioral characteristics of various animals and explains the theological and moral lessons that humans can learn from them.

The Physiologos includes descriptions of real animals such as lions, elephants, and hyenas, as well as animals that ancient people believed existed that are now known to actually be mythical, such as phoenixes, unicorns, and dragons. It does not give the dragon its own chapter, but it does discuss it in chapters about other animals.

For instance, the chapter about the panther describes it as a gentle creature whose only enemy is the dragon and says that, when the panther roars, all the other creatures are attracted to the sound and the sweet smell that issues from its mouth—except for the dragon, which is terrified of the panther and will hide in a hole whenever it hears the panther’s roar. The chapter goes on to explain that the panther represents Jesus, while the dragon represents Satan.

A later chapter about a creature known in Greek as the ichneumon (which may be a mongoose or possibly a purely mythical creature) says that the ichneumon is the mortal enemy of the dragon and will attack and kill any dragon it sees.

As I previously discussed in my post from December 2025 about ancient and medieval beliefs about unicorns, the Physiologos became one of the most widely read and translated texts of the Middle Ages. By the fifth century CE, it had already been translated into Latin. Over the course of late antiquity and the Middle Ages, it was translated into Coptic, Geʿez, Syriac, Armenian, Georgian, Old English, Old High German, Old French, Old Icelandic, and various Slavic languages. It also served as the main source and inspiration for medieval bestiaries.

Medieval manuscripts of the Physiologos were often illustrated. One of the oldest surviving such illustrated manuscripts is the Bern Physiologus, also known as Codex Bongarsianus 318, which was most likely copied at Rheims sometime between c. 825 and c. 850 CE and contains the Latin translation of the text along with lavish color illustrations, which are probably based on older illustrations in a lost fifth-century CE manuscript.

The illustration on folio 15 recto shows the panther’s roar attracting all the animals, while the dragon, which is depicted as a coiled blue snake, hides behind a rock. This dragon looks much smaller than any of the other animals in the scene, and its only fearsome quality is the fact that it is breathing fire.

ABOVE: Illustration in the Bern Physiologus (Codex Bongarsianus 318) folio 15r, dated between c. 825 and c. 850 CE, based on an earlier fifth-century CE manuscript, depicting the panther attracting all the creatures to it with its roar while the dragon (the blue, fire-breathing snake in the upper right) hides behind a rock

Dragons in early medieval Germanic legends

The snake-like appearance of the dragon in the Bern Physiologus is not at all unusual for the Early Middle Ages. In fact, virtually all dragons in European art and literature until around the twelfth century CE look like snakes. They are often very big snakes, and they may have horns, frills, or even rarely wings, but they invariably look much more like snakes than what most twenty-first-century people imagine when they hear the word “dragon.” If you showed a medieval European from around the year 1100 CE a fully-grown reticulated python, they would probably say, “That’s a dragon.”

This is very true of dragons in early medieval Germanic myth, which, like classical Greek and Roman dragons, are known for guarding treasure. Unlike Greek and Roman dragons, however, early medieval Germanic dragons are morally condemned. Whereas classical dragons were most commonly seen as loyal guardians of treasure or bodies of water on behalf of gods or semi-divine kings, early medieval Germanic dragons hoard treasure simply because of their own insatiable greed and obsession with all things shiny.

An unnamed dragon appears in the Old English epic poem Beowulf, which survives in a single manuscript (the Nowell Codex, also known as Cotton MS Vitellius A XV), which was copied between c. 975 and c. 1025 CE. In the poem, the dragon sleeps on a hoard of golden treasure underneath a burial mound. A slave breaks into the dragon’s lair and steals a jeweled cup (ll. 2210–31). When the dragon wakes up, it notices that the cup is missing and goes on a rampage, burning all the lands around its cave (ll. 2287–2323).

The poem describes the dragon’s movements using the verb bugan, meaning “to bend” or “turn,” and it never mentions the dragon having legs. This strongly suggests that the dragon in Beowulf has a snake-like form. The poem never mentions the dragon as having wings, but it does describe it as flying, so it seems to either have wings or be somehow able to fly without wings.

ABOVE: Photo from Wikimedia Commons of the first page of the Old English epic poem Beowulf in its original manuscript

Another notable dragon in medieval Germanic legend is Fáfnir, who appears prominently in several literary texts written in Old Norse, including several poems of the Poetic Edda, the Prose Edda of Snorri Sturluson, and the Vǫlsunga saga. In all of these texts, the slaying of Fáfnir is the greatest achievement of the hero Sigurðr.

Of all these sources, the poems in the Poetic Edda are most likely the earliest, since, although the poems are preserved in the Codex Regius, which was copied around the 1270s CE, linguistic evidence indicates that some parts of the poems themselves date much earlier to the tenth and eleventh centuries when Norse paganism was still practiced.

Like the dragon in Beowulf, Fáfnir is notable for hoarding treasure. Reginsmál, one of the poems in the Poetic Edda, describes how Fáfnir was originally a dwarf who was a son of Hreiðmarr. Fáfnir’s brother Otr (Otter) would often take the shape of an otter and catch salmon in the falls. One day, the god Loki caught Otr in his otter form, killed him, skinned him, and made his pelt into a bag. Hreiðmarr demanded that the Æsir (the main group of deities) compensate him for his son’s death by giving him the otter pelt filled with gold and covered in more gold.

The Æsir paid Hreiðmarr this gold, but Fáfnir and his brother Regin both wanted a share of it. Fáfnir murdered his father and took all the gold for himself. When Regin demanded a share of the gold, Fáfnir refused to give him any. Fáfnir took the treasure from Otr’s ransom to a place called Gnita-heath, where he guards it in the form of a dragon.

Fáfnismál, another poem in the Poetic Edda, continues this narrative. In the poem, Sigurðr goes to Gnita-heath and digs a pit at a spot along the path Fáfnir takes when he goes down to the water. Then Sigurðr takes the sword Gramr, which Regin forged for him, and hides in the pit along the path to wait for Fáfnir (presumably laying something over the pit to disguise it). When Fáfnir slithers over the pit, Sigurðr stabs him in the belly from below and fatally wounds him.

Unlike the dragon in Beowulf, but like some other dragons in medieval and modern literature, Fáfnir is intelligent and able to speak. After Sigurðr stabs him, Fáfnir asks the hero his identity. Sigurðr, however, refuses to give his name and instead gives riddling, indirect replies (Fáfnismál 2, trans. Carolyne Larrington):

Sigurðr concealed his name, because it was an old superstition to believe that the words of a dying man had great power if he cursed his enemy by name. He said:

“‘Pre-eminent beast’ I’m called, and I go about
as a motherless boy;
I have no father, as the sons of men do,
I always go alone.”

Several early Norse artistic depictions of Sigurðr slaying Fáfnir have survived. The oldest is the Ramsund carving, which dates around 1030 CE and is carved on a flat rock near Ramsund in Eskilstuna Municipality, Sweden. The carving depicts Fáfnir as a giant serpent, with Sigurðr stabbing him in the belly from below.

ABOVE: Illustration from Wikimedia Commons showing the Ramsund carving dating to around 1030 CE, depicting scenes from the myth of Fáfnir, which is also told in Fáfnismál and the Vǫlsunga saga

Saint Margaret’s miraculous survival inside the dragon

Dragons appear in two legends about Christian saints that emerged in the Greek-speaking lands of the Roman Empire during the Early Middle Ages and became enormously popular in western Europe during the High Middle Ages. In both cases, the dragons are heavily associated with Satan, his demons, and paganism.

One of these legends is that of Saint Marina (later known in the west as Margaret) of Antioch, which originates from a lost Greek narrative known as the Passio a Theotimo. Although most likely written in the ninth century CE, this account described events that allegedly took place during the Diocletianic persecution in the early fourth century CE and pseudepigraphically claimed to have been written by Marina’s brother Theotimos. Later authors quickly adapted the legend, and Marina became known in western Europe as Margaret.

In the version of the story that became popular in the west, Saint Margaret is the daughter of a pagan priest named Aedesius in the city of Antioch in Pisidia. A Christian wet nurse convinces Margaret to convert to Christianity, undergo baptism, and swear an oath of perpetual virginity. Margaret’s father disowns her for her conversion to Christianity, so Margaret goes to live with her wet nurse, who becomes her foster mother.

Margaret grows into an extraordinarily beautiful young woman. Olybrius, the Roman governor, lusts after her and orders her to marry him. Margaret, however, refuses, so Olybrius throws her in prison. While Margaret is in prison, Satan appears to her in the form of a dragon and swallows her whole, but a cross Margaret is wearing irritates Satan’s insides and Margaret emerges unharmed from the Devil’s own belly.

Saint George and the dragon

The other popular legend about a saint involving a dragon is that of Saint Georgios (later known in the west as Saint George). The oldest surviving account of Georgios comes from a Coptic manuscript found at the site of Qaṣr Ibrîm in southern Egypt, which is dated between c. 350 and c. 500 CE. This account describes Georgios as a Greek from Kappadokia in Asia Minor who was a soldier in the Roman army. Like many other early Christians saints, he is said to have been martyred in 303 CE during the Diocletianic persecution. None of the early accounts of his life mention anything about him killing a dragon.

At some point between the seventh and tenth centuries CE, however, eastern Christian iconography began to depict another soldier saint, Theodoros the Recruit, as riding on horseback and slaying a dragon. Because Theodoros and Georgios were both soldier saints, iconography often paired them together, and, in the eleventh century, artists began to depict Georgios riding on horseback and slaying a dragon as well.

The dragon-slaying depictions of Theodoros and Georgios were most likely originally meant to allegorically represent the saints as vanquishing evil, but, eventually, a literal interpretation of the iconography gave rise to a legend that made Georgios into a literal dragonslayer.

During the First Crusade (lasted 1096 – 1099), many western lords and knights traveled through the Roman Empire on their way to the Holy Land and encountered the veneration of Saint Georgios; Georgios’s status as a soldier saint appealed to them, and many adopted him as their patron. The ensuing popularity of Georgios (who became known as Saint George in English) in the west helped transmit the legend of him slaying the dragon.

Between 1259 to 1266, the Italian writer Jacobus de Voragine produced a collection of 153 lives of saints in Latin known as the Legenda aurea (Golden Legend). In the Golden Legend‘s version of the story of Saint George, George arrives in a town called Silene in Libya (North Africa) where a dragon is terrorizing the local townsfolk. The townsfolk have run out of livestock to give the dragon to sate its hunger and have begun to give it one human tribute, chosen by lot, each day.

On the day when George arrives, the lot of tribute has fallen to the princess herself, whom George finds waiting beside the pond where the dragon lives for it to come out and eat her. When the dragon emerges from the pond, George rides against it on horseback and wounds it with his lance. Then he tells the princess to throw him her girdle, which he ties around the dragon’s neck, allowing the princess to lead it like a dog on a leash back to the town. There, George swears that he will kill the dragon if all the townsfolk convert to Christianity. The townsfolk convert on the spot, and George beheads the dragon.

ABOVE: Icon from Saint Catherine’s Monastery in the Sinai Peninsula, dated to the ninth or tenth century CE, depicting Saint Theodoros slaying a dragon (left) and Saint Georgios slaying a human enemy (right)

ABOVE: Byzantine steatite carving dating to the twelfth century CE depicting Saint George riding on horseback and slaying the dragon with his lance

The transformation of dragons in the High and Late Middle Ages

As I mentioned earlier, and as the images I’ve shown so far illustrate, throughout antiquity, the Early Middle Ages, and even the early High Middle Ages, basically all dragons in European art and literature look like snakes. Around the twelfth century CE, however, dragons in European art begin to mutate; they grow legs and wings and gradually start to look a little more like the dragons we recognize today.

A Romanesque carved wood panel that originally decorated the doorway of the Hylestad stave church in the Setesdal district, Norway, depicts Sigurðr killing Fáfnir. This carving dates to around the late twelfth or early thirteenth century. Like the Ramsund carving of around two centuries earlier, it depicts Fáfnir with a long, snake-like body. This time, though, Fáfnir also has at least one leg ending in a clawed talon. His face also looks more like that of a feline or canine than a snake, since he seems to have matted fur and large, pointed ears. (But, then again, these could be horns.)

ABOVE: Detail from Wikimedia Commons showing part of the right portal plank of the Hylestad Stave Church in Setesdal district, Norway, dating to the late twelfth or early thirteenth century CE

The oldest surviving depiction of a dragon with a body plan resembling those of most western fantasy dragons today occurs in MS Harley 3244, a medieval bestiary dated c. 1260 CE that is now held in the British Library, on folio 59 recto. The dragon in this illustration is red, scaly, and breathing fire. It has a large body; horns; a scraggy beard; leathery, bat-like wings; four legs; and a tail ending in a point.

At first glance, this may seem like proof that the dragons in House of the Dragon are authentically medieval in their appearance. The reality, however, is more complicated. The dragon in MS Harley 3244 has a longer, thinner body than most of the dragons in House of the Dragon. It also has four legs and four wings, in contrast to the dragons in Westeros, which have only two legs and two wings.

ABOVE: Illustration of a dragon breathing fire in MS Harley 3244, folio 59r, dated c. 1260 CE

Another relatively familiar-looking dragon appears in an illustration in Verona MS 1853, on folio 26 recto, dated c. 1270 CE, around a decade after MS Harley 3244. This illustration depicts Saint George stabbing a dragon with a green, scaly body; two legs ending in clawed feet; and one set of wings. The dragon, however, is rather small compared to modern fantasy dragons (only about half the height of George’s horse), its wings are feathered like a those of a bird, and it has long, pointed ears like a rabbit, which are not typical features of modern fantasy dragons.

ABOVE: Illustration of Saint George killing the dragon in Verona MS 1853, folio 26r, dated c. 1270 CE

Other depictions of dragons from high and late medieval western Europe exhibit far stranger appearances, some of which bear very little resemblance to what anyone today would picture when they hear the word “dragon.”

For instance, an illustration in a Franco-Flemish manuscript of Hugh de Fouilloy’s bestiary, dated c. 1270, around the same time as Verona MS 1853, depicts a dragon with a snake-like tail; feathered, bird-like wings; a furry, red face resembling a mammalian carnivore; bull-like horns; and two legs that are bent backward at the knees like bird legs and yet are seemingly covered in mammalian fur, ending in three-toed feet.

ABOVE: Illustration of a dragon from a Franco-Flemish manuscript of Hugh de Fouilloy’s bestiary, dated c. 1270

An illustration in a Spanish manuscript of the Life of Saint Margaret dated c. 1440 depicts Saint Margaret emerging unharmed from the belly of a golden-brown, fur-covered dragon that looks more like a really messed up lion with an extremely long neck and tail; red eyes; big, floppy ears; four extremely short legs ending in feet with fat, possibly webbed toes; and a long, unicorn-like horn projecting from its forehead. There’s almost nothing about this “dragon” that looks even reptilian.

ABOVE: Illustration from a Spanish manuscript of the Life of Saint Margaret dated c. 1440

Even in the Early Modern Period, dragons in art still often don’t look very much like modern fantasy dragons. For instance, the following illustration from the Grandes Heures of Anne of Brittany, folio 419, dated between c. 1503 and c. 1508, depicts Saint Margaret emerging from the belly of a dragon with a long, snake-like body, no visible wings, and a furry, blue, distinctly bear-like face ending a snout.

ABOVE: Illustration from the Grandes Heures of Anne of Brittany, folio 419, produced between c. 1503 and c. 1508, depicting Saint Margaret emerging from the belly of a dragon

Things don’t get much better even if we skip ahead to the early nineteenth century. In 1801, the German publisher Friedrich Justin Bertuch published his Bilderbuch für Kinder (Picture Book for Children), which includes woodcuts of fantastical creatures, including a griffin, a faun, a hippocampus, a mermaid, a basilisk, a unicorn, a phoenix, and (of course) a dragon.

All the other creatures in Bertuch’s woodcuts look virtually identical to how they are depicted in modern fantasy—except for the dragon. Admittedly, Bertuch’s dragon is at least recognizable; it has a familiar body plan, with a head, teeth, fiery breath, four legs, claws, two wings, and a tail. But it also has some very unfamiliar features, including a furry mane like a lion, cat-like ears, and brown fur all over its legs!

ABOVE: Woodcut of a dragon from the German publisher Friedrich Justin Bertuch’s Bilderbuch für Kinder (Picture Book for Children), printed in 1801

The influence of dinosaurs and prehistoric reptiles

How then, did dragons go from the furry, eared creature of Bertuch’s woodcut to the enormous, scaly monsters in House of the Dragon? Predictably, the answer has much to do with the nineteenth-century explosion of the fields of paleontology and taxonomy.

Prior to the nineteenth century, westerners had no awareness of the existence of large, prehistoric reptiles. Occasionally, people accidentally discovered isolated fossil fragments of such creatures, but no one knew what they were.

For instance, in 1676, the English antiquarian Robert Plot examined a fragment of a fossilized giant femur that had been found in a Stonefield limestone quarry. Although Plot published an illustration of the femur in his Natural History of Oxfordshire, he initially identified it as belonging to a Roman war elephant. Later, he changed his mind and concluded it had belonged to a giant ancient human. Only centuries later did paleontologists recognize the femur as belonging to the dinosaur species Megalosaurus.

In the nineteenth century, however, this situation changed. Over the course of that century, the field of paleontology gradually emerged, and early paleontologists unearthed fossil skeletons of ancient reptiles including ichthyosaurs, plesiosaurs, pterosaurs, and dinosaurs, including the species Iguanodon, Megalosaurus, Diplodocus, Triceratops, Stegosaurus, Allosaurus, and Brontosaurus. The year 1900 brought the discovery of the first partial skeleton of the most famous dinosaur of all: Tyrannosaurus rex.

Gradually, as these discoveries became more widely known, people began to depict dragons, which had previously been fantastical chimeras stitched from various parts of living animals, in ways that more closely resembled prehistoric reptiles. Most notably, by the twentieth century, dragons have forgotten their older wishy-washiness about whether they are reptiles, birds, or mammals and have become decidedly reptiles, once and for all.

The discovery of prehistoric reptiles also had a major effect on how large people imagined dragons to be. Prior to the nineteenth century, people imagined dragons as being a variety of different sizes, but dragons in art are usually smaller than oxen. The discovery of colossal prehistoric reptiles, however, shifted people’s general expectation for the size of dragons from “the size of an ox” to “the size of a Tyrannosaurus.” As a result, the average size of dragons in stories and art dramatically increased over the course of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.

ABOVE: Photo from Wikimedia Commons of the Tyrannosaurus rex skeleton “Sue” on display in the Field Museum of Natural History in Chicago

Tolkien’s Smaug

Of course, no discussion of dragons could go without mentioning J. R. R. Tolkien, who basically canonized the modern fantasy dragon through his depiction of Smaug in his 1937 children’s fantasy novel The Hobbit. Tolkien was a professor of early English language and literature at the University of Oxford from 1925 until his retirement in 1959. He was a renowned expert in the field of early medieval Germanic literature, and his portrayal of Smaug is clearly inspired by two medieval dragons: the dragon in Beowulf and Fáfnir.

Like both the dragon in Beowulf and Fáfnir, Smaug is known for hoarding golden treasure. Like the dragon in Beowulf, Smaug guards a large underground hoard of golden treasure and hibernates for a very long time. Even the circumstances of the dragons’ wakings are extremely similar. In The Hobbit, the main character Bilbo breaks into Smaug’s lair while Smaug is sleeping and steals “a great two-handled cup,” echoing the slave stealing the cup from the dragon’s lair in Beowulf. When Smaug wakes up after Bilbo has left, he discovers that the cup is missing, flies into a rage, and burns the surrounding country just like the dragon in Beowulf.

Tolkien’s depiction of Smaug also draws clear inspiration from Fáfnir in Fáfnismál. In The Hobbit, Chapter XII, when Bilbo returns to Smaug’s lair and finds Smaug awake, a conversation ensues, in which Smaug asks Bilbo his identity, and Bilbo, much like Sigurðr in Fáfnismál, gives riddling, indirect replies:

“You have nice manners for a thief and a liar,” said the dragon. “You seem familiar with my name, but I don’t seem to remember smelling you before. Who are you and where do you come from, may I ask?”

“You may indeed! I come from under the hill, and under the hills and over the hills my path led. And through the air. I am he that walks unseen.”

“So I can well believe,” said Smaug, “but that is hardly your usual name.”

“I am the clue-finder, the web-cutter, the stinging fly. I was chosen for the lucky number.”

“Lovely titles!” sneered the dragon. “But lucky numbers don’t always come off.”

“I am he that buries his friends alive and drowns them and draws them alive again from the water. I came from the end of a bag, but no bag went over me.”

“These don’t sound so creditable,” scoffed Smaug.

“I am the friend of bears and the guest of eagles. I am Ringwinner and Luckwearer; and I am Barrel-rider,” went on Bilbo beginning to be pleased with his riddling.

“That’s better!” said Smaug. “But don’t let your imagination run away with you!”

Tolkien describes Smaug in the text as “a vast red-golden dragon,” with wings, claws, and fiery breath. An illustration that Tolkien himself drew in 1936, titled “Conversation with Smaug,” depicts Smaug as almost identical to the dragon in MS Harley 3244. The resemblance is so striking that one wonders if Tolkien had seen that illustration and was using it as a model. The only noticeable differences are that, where the dragon in the manuscript has two sets of wings, Smaug only has one, and, where the manuscript dragon has horns, Smaug has a pair of little, pointed ears.

Thus, Tolkien’s depiction of Smaug in The Hobbit closely follows the portrayal of dragons in actual medieval sources, but it draws on sources from different time periods; Smaug’s character is based on dragons in early medieval Germanic texts, but his appearance is based on dragons in high medieval manuscripts. The result is a unique creation.

The one area where I suspect that paleontology may have influenced Tolkien is Smaug’s size. Tolkien describes Smaug in his text and depicts him in his illustration as absolutely enormous, practically a living mountain. In the illustration, Smaug’s face alone is about the length of Bilbo’s whole body. This stands in contrast to the typically much smaller dragons in medieval art.

ABOVE: Illustration drawn by J. R. R. Tolkien in 1936 depicting Bilbo’s conversation with Smaug

Anne McCaffrey’s Dragonriders of Pern

Martin himself has regularly cited J. R. R. Tolkien as a major influence on his work, but, when it comes to the dragons in Martin’s novels specifically, it’s clear that Tolkien was a relatively minor influence. Instead, Martin’s portrayal of dragons’ behavior clearly owes its greatest inspiration to Anne McCaffrey’s science fantasy series Dragonriders of Pern, whose first novel, Dragonflight, was originally published as two novellas in 1967 and then as single novel in 1968.

McCaffrey’s series is set in the far future, in which humans have colonized a planet called Pern, which is located in another solar system. In the series’ universe, dragons were originally alien creatures native to Pern that humans genetically modified to make them bigger and to enable the formation of telepathic bonds between individual dragons and humans known as dragonriders. Dragonriders use their dragons to fight alien spores known as “Thread.” The bond between dragons and their riders so strong that, if a dragon’s rider dies, the dragon will invariably kill itself.

After genetically engineering dragons, however, humans on Pern quickly regressed to a pre-industrial level of technology, so that, by the time the series begins, Pernese society largely resembles medieval Europe, and there are only occasional appearances of post-medieval technologies.

There’s nothing at all medieval about McCaffrey’s dragons, and that was very much intentional. Dragonriders of Pern, after all, is not actually set in medieval Europe or even a medieval-inspired fantasy world in the classic, Tolkienian sense, but rather on a future, distant planet with creatures that happen to resemble legendary dragons.

Although McCaffrey does not have nearly the level of name recognition as Tolkien or Martin, none of her novels have ever been adapted for either film or television, and, even within her own fandom, she is known just as much for her bizarre beliefs about male homosexuality and eccentric rules about how fanfiction writers could portray dragonriders’ sexuality as for her actual work, her depiction of dragons has been, if anything, more influential than Tolkien’s on subsequent fantasy.

Dragonriders of Pern has inspired (whether directly or indirectly) not only the dragons in George R. R. Martin’s novels and their television adaptations, but also Cressida Cowell’s children’s book series How to Train Your Dragon (2003 – 2015) and its film adaptations (2010–present), and Rebecca Yarros’s new adult romantasy series Fourth Wing (2023). Any story you’ve read that involves humans riding and forming psychic bonds with dragons is downstream of McCaffrey.

ABOVE: Cover of the first edition of Anne McCaffrey’s novel Dragonflight, the first novel in her series Dragonriders of Pern

Dragons in A Song of Ice and Fire, Game of Thrones, and House of the Dragon

In terms of appearance, needless to say, the dragons in Martin’s novels and the television series based on them look nothing at all like the snake-like dragons that are predominant before the twelfth century. They are not completely far-off from the dragons in thirteenth-century manuscript illustrations, but they do depart from these dragons in significant ways.

Martin himself explains in a post on his blog why he designed his dragons the way he did, drawing inspiration from birds, bats, and pterosaurs in his decision to give his dragons two legs (instead of four) as well as large wings:

In A SONG OF ICE & FIRE, I set out to blend the wonder of epic fantasy with the grittiness of the best historical fiction. There is magic in my world, yes… but much less of it than one gets in most fantasy. (Tolkien’s Middle Earth was relatively low magic too, and I took my cue from the master). I wanted Westeros to feel real, to evoke the Crusades and the Hundred Years War and the Wars of the Roses as much as it did JRRT with his hobbits and magic rings.

I would have dragons, yes… in part because of my dear friend, the late Phyllis Eisenstein, a marvelous fantasist and science fiction writer in her own right, now sadly missed… but I wanted my dragons to be as real and believable as such a creature could ever be. I designed my dragons with a lot of care. They fly and breathe fire, yes, those traits seemed essential to me. They have two legs (not four, never four) and two wings.

LARGE wings. A lot of fantasy dragons have these itty bitty wings that would never get such a creature off the ground. And only two legs; the wings are the forelegs. Four-legged dragons exist only in heraldry. No animal that has ever lived on Earth has six limbs. Birds have two legs and two wings, bats the same, ditto pteranodons and other flying dinosaurs, etc.

Martin makes a couple of minor incorrect statements here. First, insects are animals, and there are many species of insects that have six (or more) limbs. Second, although Pteranodon is a genus of prehistoric reptile that existed contemporaneously with the dinosaurs, the members of this genus are pterosaurs (a distinct clade of reptile), not dinosaurs. Martin’s point, however, is correct: no vertebrate animal that has ever lived on earth has had six limbs.

Two-legged dragons do appear in medieval art, but four legs or no legs are also common; Martin chose to imitate the two-legged examples because they are more taxonomically realistic. Martin is also right that many dragons in both medieval art and modern fantasy have wings that are so small compared to their body size that it is hard to imagine them getting off the ground; he chose to give his dragons larger wings so that their ability to fly would seem more plausible.

Martin’s dragons also differ from medieval dragons in ways he doesn’t mention. For one thing, they are consistently reptilian; they are covered in scales with no fur or feathers to be seen, and they lack external ears, which sets them apart from most high and late medieval dragons and even from Smaug in Tolkien’s illustration shown above.

ABOVE: Screenshot of the dragon Drogon from Game of Thrones, Season 7, Episode 4

Martin’s dragons are also much hornier than medieval dragons. Dragons in medieval art might have one pair of horns, but they just as often have no horns or even only one horn. By contrast, the dragons in Game of Thrones and House of the Dragon have dozens of horns and spikes all over and around their heads. I strongly suspect that this portrayal owes its inspiration to dinosaurs such as Pachycephalosaurus, Ceratosaurus, Triceratops, and Styracosaurus, which all had numerous horns in various places on and/or surrounding their heads.

Finally, Martin’s dragons can grow vastly larger than basically any dragons in medieval art and most dragons in medieval literature. In A Clash of Kings, Chapter 12, Daenerys describes the size of Aegon the Conqueror’s dragons, saying, “Meraxes swallowed horses whole, and Balerion … his fire was as black as his scales, his wings so vast that whole towns were swallowed up in their shadow when he passed overhead.” Later, in A Storm of Swords, Chapter 8, Arstan Whitebeard says to Daenerys:

Balerion the Black Dread was two hundred years old when he died during the reign of Jaehaerys the Conciliator. He was so large he could swallow an aurochs whole. A dragon never stops growing, Your Grace, so long as he has food and freedom.

The largest living dragon that has appeared in any of the television series based on Martin’s novels so far is Vhagar, who appears on screen in House of the Dragon as virtually the size of a living mountain. Balerion’s skull appears in both House of the Dragon and Game of Thrones, and the prop skull they used is roughly nine meters (thirty feet) long, with teeth as long as swords.

All of these characteristics—a consistently reptilian appearance with no fur, feathers, or external ears; two legs instead of four; large, pterosaur-like wings; horns and spikes all over their heads; and a much larger body size—make Martin’s dragons more closely resemble prehistoric reptiles than dragons in medieval art and literature.

ABOVE: Screenshot of Vhagar from House of the Dragon, Season 1, Episode 10. Notice that her rider Aemond (who is a full-grown man in this scene) is so small compared to her that he is barely visible.

Behaviorally, however, is where Martin’s dragons most overtly differ from dragons in medieval sources. Throughout all of premodern European literature, the most defining behavioral trait of dragons is that they exist completely outside the realm of human control. Whether they are portrayed as personifications of primeval chaos, as divinely appointed guardians of treasure and bodies of water, as symbols of voracious greed, or as representatives of Satan and his demons, the common theme is that no human can possibly tame them. They cannot be controlled; they can only be slain.

By contrast, the most defining behavioral characteristic of dragons in Martin’s universe is the fact that they form psychic bonds with their human riders. After this bond is formed, the dragon will obey virtually any command its human rider gives it, including a command to attack another dragon, and it will not obey any other person’s commands or allow any other person to ride it alone. This bond lasts until either the rider or the dragon dies. Martin has clearly drawn the inspiration for most of this from Dragonriders of Pern.

Behaviorally, Martin’s dragons are more like temperamental fighter planes than actual living creatures—let alone the awful, untamable monsters of ancient and medieval legend.

The dragons in Martin’s universe are fun and entertaining, but there is nothing medieval about the way they behave; instead, they reflect a quintessentially modern belief in humanity’s mastery over nature and ability to compel all things to obey all wills. They are, in essence, the ultimate expression of a modern power fantasy.

ABOVE: Screenshot of the dragon Caraxes from House of the Dragon, Season 1, Episode 2