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: Toothless – 96% Smaug – 76% ...