Feel free to ignore the quest below in your reply!!! If you want to make notes about what the myths really are and how the books are wrong, or if you expand to Good or Evil or whatever, go for it! Anything you turn up might help other folks with worldbuilding ideas or give them interesting things to follow up! I am particularly interested in any harder to find dragons in mythology.
I'm on a quest to find a popular/general audience book of mythology that would have been regularly available sometime in the range of 1950-1974 that has any of the following:
My hypothesis is that there is literally only one readily findable dragon that fits any of these conditions.
Why do this? Because I am being pedantic and avoiding real work.
Note: If you've come here from an obvious other thread, I find no particular difference at all between a hypothetical person who wanted to make the dragon of law male and dragon of chaos female as a dig at women and then made that dig explicit, and a hypothetical person who found that the single obvious chaotic dragon happened to be female, dug up a name to use for a male dragon of law, and then made a dig at women. It changes nothing to me about the points made in that other thread and it seems like a sad dig to make in either case. Any discussion of that other thread's main issue (e.g. what's in this italicized note) probably belongs there and not here.
What have I found so far?
Funk & Wagnalls Standard Dictionary of Folklore, Mythology, and Legend by M. Leach and J. Fried (1972) has
and Tiamat also listed in the Dragon entry
and then gets to Chaos in her entry
The Beasts of Never by G. McHargue (1968) has the following under "Dragon"
Both of these books are mentioned in the further reading appendix of Moldvay Basic, which was put together with the help from the the late Barbara Davis at the Lake Geneva Public Library.
I'm on a quest to find a popular/general audience book of mythology that would have been regularly available sometime in the range of 1950-1974 that has any of the following:
- A named dragon under a listing for "Chaos" or in the index under "chaos". (Or "Entropy" instead of "Chaos")
- A named dragon in the "Dragon" entry that is described as being related to "chaos" (or "entropy") either there or under its own entry, or is found in the index under "dragon" and has the "chaos" (or "entropy") mentioned in their own entry
- A named dragon under a listing for "Law" or under "law" in the index. (Or "Order" instead of "Law")
- A named dragon in the "Dragon" entry that is described as being related to "law" (or "order") either there or under its own entry, or is found in the index under "dragon" and has the "law" (or "order") mentioned in their own entry
My hypothesis is that there is literally only one readily findable dragon that fits any of these conditions.
Why do this? Because I am being pedantic and avoiding real work.
Note: If you've come here from an obvious other thread, I find no particular difference at all between a hypothetical person who wanted to make the dragon of law male and dragon of chaos female as a dig at women and then made that dig explicit, and a hypothetical person who found that the single obvious chaotic dragon happened to be female, dug up a name to use for a male dragon of law, and then made a dig at women. It changes nothing to me about the points made in that other thread and it seems like a sad dig to make in either case. Any discussion of that other thread's main issue (e.g. what's in this italicized note) probably belongs there and not here.
What have I found so far?
Funk & Wagnalls Standard Dictionary of Folklore, Mythology, and Legend by M. Leach and J. Fried (1972) has
and Tiamat also listed in the Dragon entry
and then gets to Chaos in her entry
The Beasts of Never by G. McHargue (1968) has the following under "Dragon"
Both of these books are mentioned in the further reading appendix of Moldvay Basic, which was put together with the help from the the late Barbara Davis at the Lake Geneva Public Library.
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