Enter the dragon

It's brought its own unique brand of magic to everything from Game of Thrones to Harry Potter. But how did the modern dragon come into being? Daniel Ogden traces the six stages of the creature's evolution in the west - from ancient serpent to medieval fire breather

- Daniel Ogden

1 Slithering into infamy

Forget wings and legs, the earliest western dragons resembled massive snakes

Every small child of the modern west can describe a dragon: it is a broadly serpentine creature (colour of choice: green); it has an animalian head; between its longish neck and longish tail it has a fattish body; it has four legs; it has a pair of wings; it can be somewhat spiky.

Adults might add a further observation: that the dragon of this shape is a thing of beauty. The internet is awash with contemporary fantasy-images of the creatures, lovingly tricked out in elaborate detail.

And this points up a paradox: although the function of dragons is to be creatures of ultimate terror, we just love them. Who cares about St George and his damsel in distress? It's the dragon that makes the legend. And are the dragons not the cherries in the cakes baked by Tolkien, JK Rowling and George RR Martin? But the universality of this dragonshape across the west should not blind us to the fact that it is artificial, a random collection of body parts drawn from different creatures of the natural world.

So where does this amalgamation come from? How did the dragon so familiar to modern fans of fantasy fiction come to be?

To answer this question we must first return to classical Greece. The word "dragon" derives, via medieval French, from the Latin draco, which is itself a borrowing of the ancient Greek term drakön_