"Dragons, now, dragons...the thing about dragons, or
a thing about dragons, is...after the primordial stories about them, when belief was waning, say, during the Renaissance, is that the
conception of them shrank. You take a look at some of those old pictures, and the dragons are usually shown from the size of, say, a sheep, up to the size of an ox, or slightly larger. Often the knight on his horse fighting the dragon towered over the crawling beast. It wasn't until well after the Victorian age that they started to swell up again; it was as if they had to grow to awesome size to compete with the redoubtable machinery and vehicles of science or the dinosaurs so recently rediscovered and popularized. Nowadays, of course, the dragon of Fantasy is seldom smaller than an elephant, but not so titanic as an
apatosaurus, to allow a slim margin of artistic believability."
"Dragons, now, dragons...the thing about dragons, or a thing about dragons, is...after the primordial stories about them, when belief was waning, say, during the Renaissance, is that the conception of them shrank. You take a look at some of those old pictures, and the dragons are usually shown from the size of, say, a sheep, up to the size of an ox, or slightly larger. Often the knight on his horse fighting the dragon towered over the crawling beast. It wasn't until well after the Victorian age that they started to swell up again; it was as if they had to grow to awesome size to compete with the redoubtable machinery and vehicles of science or the dinosaurs so recently rediscovered and popularized. Nowadays, of course, the dragon of Fantasy is seldom smaller than an elephant, but not so titanic as an apatosaurus, to allow a slim margin of artistic believability."
1 comment:
Good analysis. I wonder what Dragons of the future might be like?
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