DRAGONS IN THE WEST, by Daniel Ogden
So, been reading this book, Dragons in the West (Oxford UP, 2021), and there's a pretty interesting Tolkien reference in there -- as you might imagine, perhaps, considering the book's subject. Anyway, Ogden is basically writing a culture history of western dragons, though actually more "encyclopedia" than "history," and there's been a couple of distinct dragon permutations. In the Classical world, for examples, dragons (Gr. drakon ; Lat. draco ) were almost entirely giant snakes with preternatural abilities or roles. Then the artwork in the early Christian era started conflating dragons with sea monsters, which gave dragons their animalian heads and bulbous bodies. For legs and wings, though, we had to wait for dragons to start being conflated with demons and the Devil. By the 9th century AD, the dragons is a wyvern-creature and basically set, though the Western world needed until the turn of the 15th century to make them four-footed creatures permane...