How Dragons and Men Live Together

In trying to craft a mythical world where dragons and men might live together, mythology formed a basis for setting up the world.

First issue, how do dragons get along with other dragons.

In brief, they don’t. The tale of the red and white Welsh dragons depicts two dragons at war with one another. None of the myths I read gave any suggestion of dragons living together peaceably with one another, much less cooperating with one another. So maybe, left to their own devices, these creatures would tend to be in a perpetual state of war with one another.  Not a bad place to start a story, really.

Secondly, how did dragons get along with people.

With the exception of the legend of the Dragon of Mordiford (which we’ll talk about next week) there was pretty much universal agreement—dragons killed men and men killed dragons. They did not cooperate with one another, they did not get along, and that was all there would be to the matter. Unless—and of course this is a great story premise—someone very special, like Uther Pendragon maybe intervened and changed the situation. And that ladies and gentlemen became the starting point for the Pendragon Treaty and the Pendragon Accords which created the Blue Order and established the way humans and dragons (and the various dragons) would all live together in harmony.

How might they all be able to live together?

But since large dragons were not apt to get along well, how could the Pendragon Accords be structured to manage their natural territorial instincts? The majority of dragon myths have the dragons tied to specific locations, wells, rivers, towns etc. So perhaps, the sensible approach would be to assign dragons specific territories according to their type and strength. If hereditary Keepers were assigned to each dragon and territory, they might watch over the dragons, making sure local populations avoided their territory and ensuring the dragons’ needs were met. Since in many stories the right to rule over a piece of land was earned by vanquishing the resident dragon, it felt like a perfect fit!