How Does Dragons Affect Our Culture

1426 Words3 Pages

Dragons have long taken part in many cultures all over the world, spanning from the Celtic people in Ireland to ancient Japanese and Chinese beliefs. Their roles in history have affected wars, traditions, and many of our modern folklore and fairytales. These beliefs and ideas have long been subtly woven into our culture here in North America; and even though we no longer train warriors to fight and slay dragons, or listen for birds to point out weak spots in dragons armor, we are still surrounded by their tales, from flags to videogames, they are sleeping in the caves of our minds.

A strong theory about how the idea of dragons was fabricated involves ancient discovery of dinosaur bones, or large mammal bones. Dragons were known all over the world, before communication between continents existed, so that leads some people to believe that dragons were not “made” or “discovered” in one area and then spread to the rest of the world, but were known uniquely by individual cultures . Dinosaur remains are present on every continent, making this a likely explanation of the creation of dragons, when a little imagination is added. These creatures were changeable, making them an …show more content…

The fairytales we know of dragons today are mostly adapted versions of old ones. Such as Bard, slayer of Smaug in Tolkien’s, “The Hobbit”, and Beowulf, slayer of the evil Scandinavian dragon. Both dragons were angered when a cup was stolen from its hoard of treasure, but “The Hobbit” was written nearly one thousand years later. The flag of Wales is a red dragon, a symbol of the story of King Arthur, and the lake under the land where King Vortigern attempted to build a tower but kept failing due to disruption from a red dragon and a white dragon fighting in the lake. The red dragon represented the Welsh and the white dragon represented the Saxons. The red dragon wins, showing the power of

Open Document