When dragons became giant, majestic beasts? In medieval art they are always tiny and mutated

Keep in mind that, in Western cultures, Dragons were just a kind of Demon. It's part of the reason dragonslayers were ascribed a religious significance; it isn't the size of the monster, but rather it's alien and ungodly nature that were of penultimate importance to artists.

Well, that, and for a while the church didn't like to have non-Church affiliated artists running around.

Why are wyverns so fucken ugly?

>That pic.
"So I'm taking my wyvern for a walk under the moonlight and some asshole in armor calls it a dragon and rams a lance up its nose. And then he tramples my gardens."

>paint a wyvern
>call it a dragon
>Why do people do this?

Because the words are interchangeable in other contexts.

J.R.R. Tolkien did it and therefore all must follow.

Lol. Damage control.

>wyvern
>oh no, it's totally not a dragon
user, a wyvern is a dragon, especially if you are talking about pre modern europe heraldry

>implying OP is a faggot isn't a worn-out meme

i am one of his fanboys but.... this

people in the middle ages were too cowardly for adult dragons, so they hunted down the helpless baby dragons to impress their chicks

dragon is synonymously used for the specific 4-legged kind as well as a general term for the species as a whole. confusing? yes but that's just the way it is.

Medieval artists had shit tastes that's why

I've heard the church didn't like artists depicting something that was supposed to represent satan as "giant, majestic"
But never bothered to look into it.
small and cute is better anyway

Does anyone have the one with the knight looking down with pity on the retarded looking dragon?

That has more to do with medieval art than anything else. The picture you posted clearly shows the dragons as giant, but things like perspective were not fully understood back then.

The big question, rather, should be when dragons stopped being thought of as snakes with legs and instead became dinosaurs.

Medieval art didn't really use perspective as we use it today.

Later, Italian artists who used perspective said only art using perspective was worth anything.

Tolkien only followed a tradition set by Northern European mythology, in stories such as Beowulf and the tale of Sigurd and Fafnir.

>Northern European mythology
Greece had dragons too. The bible has dragons.

Yes, but those weren't Tolkien's primary sources when writing his stories. Every culture, or least meaty every culture, has stories about dragons.

Sure, sorry. That's totally right in terms of Tolkien. I just wanted to mention to say it wasn't only Northern European mythology that has grandiose dragons.

>that horse ass

...i've been here too long

Talk to me user.
Is it the perfectly round muscular bottom
Or the teasing way the tail is lifted slightly
Just let it all out.

definitely the roundness, though it does look a little...fatty for my tastes.

Does look a little bit on the soft side. I take it you'd prefer powerful, flexing muscles?

I bet you also believe that giant snails that can only be defeated with face shield weren't real.

Dragons change size and shape throughout history.

Didn't the christian god make the earth out of some serpent/dragon because he was kinda pissed that the creature rivaled his power so he beat the shit out of it and made earth or part of earth or something from it's body in true old testament neglectful belligerent singlet wearing dad god fashion?

No?

No, God was pretty much just like "Let there be [thing]!" a bunch of times. And it was so.

Never heard that story. Closest I can think of was the Norse gods building Midgard (earth) out of the corpse of the evil giant Jotun.

Norse have the best myths in my opinion, one time they went on an epic adventure to secure a magical cauldron big enough to brew the ocean of mead the gods needed for their upcoming party.

And that's not even getting into the genderbending, crossdressing, beastiality and m-preg.

Fun times.

I just looked it up.

I was thinking about Leviathan. I might be getting Islamic Leviathan mixed up with Christian Leviathan though.

In either case though God/Allah did make Leviathan but he was the stronkest beneath God/Allah and because he was stronger than everyone and everything and was flaunting it or maybe just because God/Allah didn't like another all powerful-esque being being around and smashed him.

The Jews have a different spin also I think.

>Jotun

it was Ymir you stupid fuck Jotunn was how ice giants (who weren't giant either, they were fucking human sized ''giant'' is a shit mistranslation) were called in general

You're right, I was wrong, the coffee hadn't kicked in yet so I pardon me.

Was there no way you could possibly have said that without resorting to being a condescending ass? Insulting people over an easily corrected mistake doesn't exactly make those people want to listen to your information.

because medieval artists drew everything as small, ugly and mutated?

Are you describing your dick to me?

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>Tolkien
>Not Wagner
>Not Beowolf
at least if you're going to be hipster, try to be somewhat knowledgeable on the subject

Medieval art in general is something to behold

...

>He takes his knowledge about Beowolf from the CGI movie

The dinky dragons in medieval art were symbolic. It was supposed to show that god was with the hero, trampling the vile agent of Satan underfoot.

If you look at the literature of the time you'll see a discrepancy. Dragons there are depicted as big, powerful and frightening. Exact size varies; the Beowulf dragon is specified as being about fifty feet long. The Lambton worm, along with some other serpent dragons of English folklore, was noted as wrapping multiple coils around a hill. Some of the ancient, Pre-medieval cosmic dragons, the monsters that gods tended to fight, seem to have been envisioned as much, much larger, like Jorumungand, Tiamat, Apophis, and others.

Most actual dragon literature deals with serpent-dragons, IE worms. This is, traditionally, the most common kind of dragon in myth, with the dragon as we envision it being a later creation. That dragon started to emerge in art before it did in writing; we have more pictures of dragons with horns, legs, wings, etc, then we do stories that explicitly describe them as having those features. Even later stories that do include those in the description at the offset tend to hearken back to older conventions once battle starts: the dragons tend to be described as attacking with their constricting coils, not clawing their opponents. Flight in combat is rarely utilized.

In literature, the first of what we now envision as the classic dragon appears in Edmund Spenser's epic poem "The Faerie Queene." This dragon is enormous, compared to a walking hill. It has claws, wings, fire-breath, a poison sting in its tail, impenetrable armor, and it uses all of these in its battle with the Redcrosse Knight, who gets his ass kicked repeatedly and only survives through divine favor. Still, Spenser's dragon seems to be drawing off a preexisting conception: this version of a dragon emerged in the public consciousness before it was really put down in writing.

>a worn out meme
god i hate summer

nah they was just bad at drawin dragons n shiet

More where that came from.

Firstly, it's Germanic dragons. Tolkien may have made them popular, but he didn't invent our dragons, the Norse did. (Technically, other cultures may have similar legends, but it was from Germanic and European myths that Tolkien took inspiration. Personally, I believe anime and the influence of Asian culture also influenced modern dragons to some degree - unless I'm completely wrong and there's actually well known western myths about wise, benevolent, magic-wielding dragons, in which case call me a faggot.)

Secondly, fuck off Bogleech.

Except most Germanic dragons are lindworms and snakes. Hell, even the heraldic definition of a dragon, for most European dragons, was a more snakey creature, or what the English would have called a wyvern. Dragon exclusively meaning a four-legged, winged reptilian monster is purely an English thing.

>implying OP is a faggot isn't a worn-out meme

Thanks for the correction. I guess it's more European pre-Christianity dragons in general.

Well, the legged, winged dragon is post-Christianity. Hell, when you think about it, that's probably the explanation.

Demons had already been depicted as winged and horned for generations. The pagan dragons of Europe and the Middle East were largely serpents and they mainly killed by constriction or venom. They almost never breathed fire, generally breathing poisonous vapors instead. Post Jesus the cultural image of the dragon endured (the Greeks and Romans had plenty of dragons, after all) but it got identified with Satan, thanks to Leviathan, the serpent in the garden, and by the time Revelation was written dragons were seen as distinctly infernal. And post Christianity the get the bat wings, the horns, the fire-breath... They're made more overtly demonic in appearance.

I believe there's a medieval Jewish legend about a creature called Rahab that God slew before the Earth was made, a primordial chaos serpent likened unto Tiamat.

>He hasn't actually read Beowulf.

Beowulf is where literally all the standard dragon tropes come from. Up to and including fire breathing/treasure hording.

Treasure hoarding predates Beowulf. Greek dragons guarded treasure. Hell, by the time of the Roman empire, it was an established trait of there. There's a Roman collection of fables that includes a story using the concept for satire; a fox burrows into a dragon's hoard by accident, asks it what it needs all that gold for when it can't spend it, and the whole thing is basically just a send up of rich landowners.

established trait of them*

...

The fuck dragons need treasure for if they don't buy anything?

George R R Martin's autism

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One of the great mysteries of dragon lore that nobody has ever come up with a satisfying answer to.

Its [Spoiler]their fetish[/spoiler]

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Why do magpies like to shiny things? Why do miserly people spend their lives accumulating wealth and die without spending any of it?

Two different motivations there, each could apply though.

Magpies, and other animals with obsessions for collecting things, usually do it to attract mates. The one with the most stuff is shown to have worked the hardest, proving it can provide for a mate and thus is the better prospect, it's a status symbol to impress others.

Misers and the like often see some inherent emotional satisfaction in their wealth. Even if they don't use that money to get 'stuff' that they can enjoy, the act of owning a large amount of wealth is in itself satisfying.

Either could apply to dragons.

>Misers and the like often see some inherent emotional satisfaction in their wealth. Even if they don't use that money to get 'stuff' that they can enjoy, the act of owning a large amount of wealth is in itself satisfying.
It's also entirely possible that they're incredibly paranoid about suddenly incurring huge losses or fines, and want to be prepared. Probably mostly what you said, though.

Because old medieval art was more about presenting a fantastical concept rather than giving a supposed realistic image of a thing.

Read a fucking book.

I'm a Muslim from a religious family and I don't think I have ever heard of this story in my entire life

That's because he's thinking of the sea monster Rahab, from Psalms, who doesn't pop up in Islamic texts:

>en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rahab_(Egypt)

>confusing?
No.

How the fuck is it confusing. We call more things "lizards".

You never actually read Beowulf have you?

You are confusing the Hebrew God El/Jhvh with the Babylonian God of storm and winds who slew the serpent God Tiamat that created the world.

>Y'see class, there's a lot of history behind the movies and tv shows you know today. For instance, there was a medieval European story that got adapted and re-adapted throughout the ages, eventually giving us "Old Yeller".

It can also be part of the moral of the story or parable the dragon appears in. You got a dragon, a symbol of extreme greed and selfishness. He's got a shitload of money. He could only get that money by being big and strong and clever enough. He also sits around congratulating himself on his wealth.

You've got your symbol of greed accumulating a ton of wealth through his own virtues, but never actually accomplishing anything. Thus, what good is in him is rendered meaningless.

Pre Christianity dragons in Europe were almost the same shit as the Chinese flood dragons.

Then they got demonized and started representing Satan thanks to the church having a hateboner on snakes.

It's funny how they managed to keep a neutral image in Slavic myths because their take on Satan is more like the LN trial master who rewards those with a pure heart and devours the wicked which may indicate on how dragons in Slavic culture were perceived prior to christianization (trialmasters who grant magic power and devour the ones who abuse it for evil).

That's not realistic. I don't like my games to be unrealistic.

> I don't like to pretend unrealistically

kek what

My dragons breath fire by lighting little matches with their tongues, and then breathing a mixture of methane and Lynxe antiperspirant. They have two legs and two wings (vertebrates only have four limbs!) and fly by...helium.

These myths originate from a different time, user. They predate modernity, from before we realized that greed is good and anything that makes money for its own sake is and ultimately noble pursuit.

Dragons are so quaint, but they make good stories.

(OP)
Why must we have this thread every day? Seriously. Just call "dragon" to whatever the fuck you want and stop it. I'm tired of trying to explain this every week.

Nice bait,pleb.

It's fun to talk about dragons

It should be more fun than this.