The Most Famous Dragon?

If I haven't mentioned it before, my 100-seat General Education course on world-building is going gang-busters. For my opening day, I created an awesome opening sequence, based on Kubrick's 2001: A Space Odyssey, using Adobe Premier Pro, and afterwards this adorable little fella became my course mascot.

But before having my students start creating their Legendarium artifacts in Module 2, however, we're doing a cultural history of dragons and elves in Module 1. The basic idea is 
  • (a) they're both really cool, and 
  • (b) since most artists model their imaginary worlds on real-world history and cultures, we follow suit with the same -- basically, source studies into several medieval traditions.
Well, in preparation for talking about Dragons in particular (to which I owe Daniel Ogden's fantastically thorough book, Dragons in the West, a debt), I had my students take a survey on the dragons they knew best. 

The results out of 85 respondents:
  1. Toothless – 96%
  2. Smaug – 76%
  3. Puff the Magic Dragon – 62%
  4. Beowulf Dragon – 51%
  5. Fáfnir – 47%
  6. Tiamat – 39%
  7. Super Shenron – 25%
  8. Saphira – 19%
  9. Falkor – 12%
  10. Tianlong – 8%
  11. Y Draig Goch – 5%
  12. Chrysophylax Dives – 1%
  13. Pfetan – 0%
So about one might expect, actually! The dragon from the recent Disney/Pixar series, How to Train Your Dragon, was almost universally known, and Smaug pulled a distant (but still strong) second.

Puff the Magic Dragon ranked surprisingly highly, and the two most famous dragon of the Middle Ages, Fáfnir and the fyrdraca, came in #4 and #5 ... a testament to how many students were forced to read Beowulf in high school, plus the general popularity of Norse myth.*

However, y Draig Goch (the "Red Dragon" on the Welsh flag) ranked surprisingly low on the survey ... but honestly, most people tend to forget about Wales, anyway. Luckily, I'll be spending 1 1/2 weeks on medieval Welsh literature, so hopefully that'll inspire a few of them.**

Tiamat is from D&D, Super Shenron from anime, and Saphira from Christopher Paolini's books. Some of my older students remembered Falkor. Poor Chrysophlax Dives garnered a mere 1%, which is a shame because Farmer Giles of Ham is actually one of my favorite Tolkien stories.

Overall, though, I'm buzzing from how well everything's going. For a random Gen Ed course, several students are highly engaged with the material, and we've been having a good time in general. Just the other day, they were delighted to discover (me less so!) that I had somehow never learned the difference between "venomous" and "poisonous." And after our discussion over why evil dragons are represented in Western culture with bat-like wings, class was nearly derailed by their enthusiasm yesterday when I showed them this shocking clip of ultimate evil.

* Actually, I'm a bit surprised at just how popular Norse myth is among my students. In an informal poll I took yesterday, about half of them (!) expressed a strong interest in the subject. Which made my decision to forefront Völsunga Saga for 2 1/2 weeks quite serendipitous. 

** I even have a student Rhiannon in the course!

Comments

  1. Marcel R. BüllesFebruary 7, 2025 at 7:55 AM

    Love this dragon list - they come from a huge number of backgrounds, good to see!

    ReplyDelete

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