What’s More Medieval than a Dragon? From Smaug to Drogon to Dungeons & Dragons, the look, menace, and sheer presence of dragons is one of the most iconic legacies of the Western Middle Ages. Dragons were an easy go-to embodiment for Satan and so popular among medieval people that, by the thirteenth century, they were paradoxically pressed into service in religious art to represent Jesus. Why were dragons so popular—and what exactly was a dragon in the Middle Ages? Here are a few things you might not know about medieval dragons.
1. Medieval people understood what a “dragon” was.
Norse hero Sigurd killing Fafnir from the door panels of the Hylestad stave church, now at the Historisk Museum, Oslo, Norway – Wikimedia Commons
When I say “dragon,” you likely visualize a giant fire-breathing, flying lizard with legs, claws, and maybe even a voice. This shared cultural image is so iconic that the same was true in the Middle Ages. As Paul Acker showed, Norse sagas spend almost no time describing the physical characteristics of their dragon foes—despite the dragon’s physical form being crucial to the hero’s contest against it and the audience’s ability to follow the battle.
In the thirteenth-century Norse poem Fáfnismál, Sigurd digs a pit where he knows the greedy dwarf-turned-dragon Fáfnir will slither. Our hero stabs upwards into the dragon’s belly. This feat makes no sense to an audience expecting a monster that lumbers on legs or takes to the skies. Just as we “know” what a dragon looks like through general cultural awareness, medieval people knew too.
2. Or rather, medieval people understood what dragons, plural, were.
An elephant and a serpent in a struggle. British Library MS Harley 4751 fol.58v
Fáfnir is, for all intents and purposes, a giant snake. He spews clouds and rivers of venom, much like a giant snake. A frequent attribute of dragons in medieval bestiaries (descriptions of animals and their characteristics meant as moral lessons for people) recounts their ability to kill animals as large as elephants through constriction and suffocation—again, like a giant snake. But nobody blinked when Chrétien de Troyes’ great dragon in Yvain is “so full of evil that fire leapt from its mouth,” or when the Norse adaptation of Chrétien’s Arthurian tale lets its dragon dispense with the cooking and go straight to eating.
Sometimes dragons are specified as flugdrekar—flying dragons—and sometimes simple drekar or ormar (“worms”) are described as taking to flight. For medieval people, “dragon” encompassed a much wider range of forms than the colour-coded schemes of modern fantasy. Which brings us to one of the most fascinating types of medieval dragon:
3. Before they acquired the ability to fly, medieval dragons dropped out of trees onto people’s heads.
Iaculus depicted in a 13th century manuscript – Wikimedia Commons
According to Pliny the Elder’s Natural History, an important source for medieval encyclopedic and bestiary writing:
“The iaculus throws itself from the branches of trees; dragons are dangerous not only to the feet but also fly, like a missile from a catapult.”
Isidore of Seville in the early seventh century clarified that the iaculus indeed takes its name from the javelin, and the Norse Rómverja saga expands on this point in gruesome detail:
“…struck under the cheek that man who was called Paulus, and the serpent flew straight into his head and out of his cheek.”
4. Dragons were the monster that scientists loved to hate.
Dragon depicted in a 15th century Hebrew manuscript – British Library MS Additional 16577 fol. 44v
Dragon mythologies are incredibly ancient and span the connected Eurasian world. One of the oldest legends involves a dragon devouring the sky. Dragons already appear in Babylonian and Indian mythology as creatures that swallow the sun and moon to cause eclipses and the phases of the moon.
Medieval Muslim and Jewish astronomer-astrologers, even as they developed diagrams to explain the movements of the heavens naturally (in accordance with geocentrism), couldn’t let go of the sky-dragon. In Arabic and Persian astrological illustrations and artistic decoration, the dragon between Sol and Luna became a standard symbol of the eclipse.
5. Dragons skirted the boundary between natural and supernatural.
drawing of Tristan in armour on horseback slaying the dragon with his lance – British Library MS Additional 11619 fol. 7
How worried was King Edward III of England that a dragon might attack his castle? Not very. The one consistent feature of medieval dragons is that they were far away—in time, place, and imagination.
The dragons in Ragnars saga delightfully start their lives small enough to fit in a wooden jar before growing up to, you know, eat a building. But for every “natural” description of a dragon, there is a scribe copying the ancient writer Lucan’s claim that dragons are grown-up snakes from Medusa’s hair, or describing how something about the Libyan desert makes them spontaneously airborne. For medieval people, dragons were always just out of reach. Their saints exorcised demons in the form of dogs and battled Satan in the guise of frogs and beautiful women, but the great dragon-slaying saints hailed from the ancient, pagan “East.”
6. St. George was not the only dragon-slaying saint!
St Goerge and the Dragon – BNF Français 414 fol. 127v
St. George’s conquest of the dragon does not appear in manuscripts of his hagiography until the thirteenth century. He is preceded in the dragon-slaying tradition by numerous Greek and Latin saints, whose dragon encounters took on an increasingly larger role in their legends throughout the Middle Ages.
One such example is Constantinople’s St. Elizabeth the Wonderworker. As the story goes, she was the abbess of a financially struggling convent in the fifth century. To help the community, the emperor donated a parcel of city land—but it was in ruins, with decayed buildings and abandoned streets. The residents had long vanished in fear of the dragon prowling the area. Elizabeth confronted the dragon and, in proper biblical fashion, trampled it underfoot.
7. St. Margaret of Antioch killed a dragon and became the patron saint of… pregnancy?
Margaret of Antioch and the dragon by Raphael
The medieval West’s preferred St. Elisabeth was a Hungarian widow, but they had their own dragon-slaying heroine: Margaret of Antioch. As the western legend tells it, Margaret was imprisoned and tortured by pagans for her Christian beliefs. But more than pagans wanted to torment Margaret. While in prison, she was attacked by a dragon, who promptly ate her. Yet, with God’s help, Margaret burst out of the dragon’s stomach, killing it—and saving herself, albeit temporarily, as she was martyred shortly after.
This dramatic encounter made Margaret a symbol of resilience for medieval women. Childbed prayers to Margaret became common, and scraps of her hagiography or her name were often placed in birthing rooms as protective amulets. To this day, Margaret of Antioch is the patron saint of nurses, exiles, Malta (where she holds special significance), peasants—and childbirth.
By Cait Stevenson
What’s More Medieval than a Dragon? From Smaug to Drogon to Dungeons & Dragons, the look, menace, and sheer presence of dragons is one of the most iconic legacies of the Western Middle Ages. Dragons were an easy go-to embodiment for Satan and so popular among medieval people that, by the thirteenth century, they were paradoxically pressed into service in religious art to represent Jesus. Why were dragons so popular—and what exactly was a dragon in the Middle Ages? Here are a few things you might not know about medieval dragons.
1. Medieval people understood what a “dragon” was.
When I say “dragon,” you likely visualize a giant fire-breathing, flying lizard with legs, claws, and maybe even a voice. This shared cultural image is so iconic that the same was true in the Middle Ages. As Paul Acker showed, Norse sagas spend almost no time describing the physical characteristics of their dragon foes—despite the dragon’s physical form being crucial to the hero’s contest against it and the audience’s ability to follow the battle.
In the thirteenth-century Norse poem Fáfnismál, Sigurd digs a pit where he knows the greedy dwarf-turned-dragon Fáfnir will slither. Our hero stabs upwards into the dragon’s belly. This feat makes no sense to an audience expecting a monster that lumbers on legs or takes to the skies. Just as we “know” what a dragon looks like through general cultural awareness, medieval people knew too.
2. Or rather, medieval people understood what dragons, plural, were.
Fáfnir is, for all intents and purposes, a giant snake. He spews clouds and rivers of venom, much like a giant snake. A frequent attribute of dragons in medieval bestiaries (descriptions of animals and their characteristics meant as moral lessons for people) recounts their ability to kill animals as large as elephants through constriction and suffocation—again, like a giant snake. But nobody blinked when Chrétien de Troyes’ great dragon in Yvain is “so full of evil that fire leapt from its mouth,” or when the Norse adaptation of Chrétien’s Arthurian tale lets its dragon dispense with the cooking and go straight to eating.
Sometimes dragons are specified as flugdrekar—flying dragons—and sometimes simple drekar or ormar (“worms”) are described as taking to flight. For medieval people, “dragon” encompassed a much wider range of forms than the colour-coded schemes of modern fantasy. Which brings us to one of the most fascinating types of medieval dragon:
3. Before they acquired the ability to fly, medieval dragons dropped out of trees onto people’s heads.
According to Pliny the Elder’s Natural History, an important source for medieval encyclopedic and bestiary writing:
“The iaculus throws itself from the branches of trees; dragons are dangerous not only to the feet but also fly, like a missile from a catapult.”
Isidore of Seville in the early seventh century clarified that the iaculus indeed takes its name from the javelin, and the Norse Rómverja saga expands on this point in gruesome detail:
“…struck under the cheek that man who was called Paulus, and the serpent flew straight into his head and out of his cheek.”
4. Dragons were the monster that scientists loved to hate.
Dragon mythologies are incredibly ancient and span the connected Eurasian world. One of the oldest legends involves a dragon devouring the sky. Dragons already appear in Babylonian and Indian mythology as creatures that swallow the sun and moon to cause eclipses and the phases of the moon.
Medieval Muslim and Jewish astronomer-astrologers, even as they developed diagrams to explain the movements of the heavens naturally (in accordance with geocentrism), couldn’t let go of the sky-dragon. In Arabic and Persian astrological illustrations and artistic decoration, the dragon between Sol and Luna became a standard symbol of the eclipse.
5. Dragons skirted the boundary between natural and supernatural.
How worried was King Edward III of England that a dragon might attack his castle? Not very. The one consistent feature of medieval dragons is that they were far away—in time, place, and imagination.
The dragons in Ragnars saga delightfully start their lives small enough to fit in a wooden jar before growing up to, you know, eat a building. But for every “natural” description of a dragon, there is a scribe copying the ancient writer Lucan’s claim that dragons are grown-up snakes from Medusa’s hair, or describing how something about the Libyan desert makes them spontaneously airborne. For medieval people, dragons were always just out of reach. Their saints exorcised demons in the form of dogs and battled Satan in the guise of frogs and beautiful women, but the great dragon-slaying saints hailed from the ancient, pagan “East.”
6. St. George was not the only dragon-slaying saint!
St. George’s conquest of the dragon does not appear in manuscripts of his hagiography until the thirteenth century. He is preceded in the dragon-slaying tradition by numerous Greek and Latin saints, whose dragon encounters took on an increasingly larger role in their legends throughout the Middle Ages.
One such example is Constantinople’s St. Elizabeth the Wonderworker. As the story goes, she was the abbess of a financially struggling convent in the fifth century. To help the community, the emperor donated a parcel of city land—but it was in ruins, with decayed buildings and abandoned streets. The residents had long vanished in fear of the dragon prowling the area. Elizabeth confronted the dragon and, in proper biblical fashion, trampled it underfoot.
7. St. Margaret of Antioch killed a dragon and became the patron saint of… pregnancy?
The medieval West’s preferred St. Elisabeth was a Hungarian widow, but they had their own dragon-slaying heroine: Margaret of Antioch. As the western legend tells it, Margaret was imprisoned and tortured by pagans for her Christian beliefs. But more than pagans wanted to torment Margaret. While in prison, she was attacked by a dragon, who promptly ate her. Yet, with God’s help, Margaret burst out of the dragon’s stomach, killing it—and saving herself, albeit temporarily, as she was martyred shortly after.
This dramatic encounter made Margaret a symbol of resilience for medieval women. Childbed prayers to Margaret became common, and scraps of her hagiography or her name were often placed in birthing rooms as protective amulets. To this day, Margaret of Antioch is the patron saint of nurses, exiles, Malta (where she holds special significance), peasants—and childbirth.
Cait Stevenson earned her PhD in medieval history from the University of Notre Dame. She is the author of How to Slay a Dragon: A Fantasy Hero’s Guide to the Real Middle Ages. You can follow her on BlueSky @anyfourcastles.bsky.social
Further Readings:
Paul Acker, “Dragons in the Eddas and in Early Nordic Art,” in Revisiting the Poetic Edda: Essays on Old Norse Heroic Legend, ed. Acker and Carolyne Larrington (New York: Routledge, 2013), 53-75.
Sara Kuehn, The Dragon in Medieval East Christian and Islamic Art (Leiden: Brill, 2011)
Monica White, “The Rise of the Dragon in Middle Byzantine Hagiography,” Byzantine and Modern Greek Studies 32, no. 2 (2008): 149-167
Top Image: British Library MS Harley 1662 fol.90
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