The scene is already set, while the third episode of House of the Dragon will air Monday, September 5 on OCS. Although this new adaptation of George R. R. Martin’s work takes place almost two centuries before Game of Throneshis universe of medieval armor, castles and bloody swords hardly changes, except that dragons occupy much more space in the sky of Westeros and Essos, the two great continents of the saga.
House of the Dragon “will get more attention” about a fantastic animal that “fascinates people all over the world with its legendary powers”, Advance Emily Zarka in The Conversation. According to this researcher in British literature at Arizona State University, the mythical reptile has something of the chameleon, it adapts to different contexts and takes very variable forms:
“As a monster scholar, I found dragons to be an almost universal symbol, used by many civilizations.”
This great fire-eater, at least in the European tradition, is found in a number of religions and cultures, where it appears under very different faces (it is sometimes willingly an aquatic creature in East Asia, for example). It is found in theEnuma Elishthe Babylonian epic of the creation of the world which was written between 2000 and 1000 BC, but also in Chinese ancestral astrology, Anatolian cults, Sumerian myths, Germanic sagas, Japanese Shintoism or Abrahamic scriptures.
Also, writes Emily Zarka, “The creature’s repeated and prominent presence in different religions and cultures raises an important question: why did dragons make their appearance?” However, the answers to this question are almost as numerous as the religions and cultures in question.
Our fear of predators
First, continues the academic, “a long-proposed theory” relies on causes “natural”. The dragon of course never existed, but it could be imagined from similar animals, the remains of unidentified beasts or mysterious biological phenomena. It may even be, according to a scientific paper published in 2020, that the fossil of an extinct species of plant, the lepidodendron, was mistaken for the remains of a dragon.
In the 1977 book The Dragons of Eden (published in French by Éditions du Seuil), the American scientist Carl Sagan explores the ontological reasons for this invention. According to him, the dragon comes from an antediluvian fear, born of our need to protect ourselves against predators who often took the form of reptiles, details Zarka. It would then have sufficed to exaggerate the ferocity of flying lizards, crocodiles, vipers, large snakes or even certain birds.
As for the fire spit by the dragons, it could be used to explain the prodigies of chemistry. To take just one example, the flames produced by gas eruptions would have been attributed to dragons in order to rationalize the inexplicable. In a more metaphorical sense, finally adds Emily Zarka, the legendary animal can represent the forces of nature, which man still struggles to domesticate.
“Dragons challenge the concept of biological supremacy of human beings”, she observes. A theme with modern echoes that goes far beyond the medieval fantasy setting of the HBO series, therefore.
“It questions the ability of humans to occupy a lower position in the food chain.”