Secrets of Dragons! - Mythical Beasts - Documentary

The dragon, a terrifying mythical monster with scales like steel, razor sharp teeth and breath of fire. Dragons are literally the stuff of nightmares. What was the real world inspiration for this ferocious winged monster? These beasts represented everything that was wicked and evil. And could there be more to this legend than we realize? Today, investigators use new science and archaeology to uncover the truth behind this ferocious beast. This is probably where the legend of dragon's breathing fire came from. And reveal why our ancestors feared them for so long. Europe, a medieval hotspot for dragon myths. 500 years ago, tales thrived of fire breathing monsters incinerating entire towns and terrorizing those who lived here. Why were our ancestors so convinced they were real? Dragons have been around for a very long time. You see it in Harry Potter, Game of Thrones, The Hobbit. We're still fascinated with dragons today. There are stories of dragons terrorizing people across countries and across cultures for centuries. It's a rite of passage for a hero to slay a dragon and rescue a maiden at the same time. Even though now, while we've conquered the animal world, our fear is the dragon remains. All of these dragons are pretty much based on the same idea that it's a reptile that can fly and breathe fire. So where is all of that coming from? What is the truth behind these stories of fire breathing dragons? The first place to look for clues is the Norse myth of Fafnir, one of the most famous and terrifying dragons of all. According to the legend, Fafnir lives in the Rhine Valley, inside a mountain called Dragon Rock. He is a huge, merciless beast with deadly spines and an armor of impenetrable scales. Guarding a lair full of treasure, Fafnir is a brutal killer. One day, a hero named Siegfried decides to confront the beast. He hides in a pit and lies in wait. When Fafnir passes over him, Siegfried attacks the monster's soft underbelly and ends his reign of terror. This 13th century saga describes a creature of enormous proportions. One so powerful that only a hero could defeat it. So what could have inspired such a fearsome beast? I think deep down, many of us do have fears. It's hard to explain them, they're very innate. I know there are people who are afraid of spiders, afraid of snakes, afraid of lions. Pretty much anything that could instill fear in us has become a monster in mythology. In Switzerland, paleontologist Ben Papst specializes in hunting for larger-than-life creatures. He investigates skeletons more than 200 million years old that could shed new light on the dragon's origins. Why were people so sure that dragons existed and why did they describe the beast in a similar way? Ben believes that prehistoric animals may be the initial cause of mankind's belief in dragons. He hunts for evidence at the Swiss village of Frick. Well, we are digging now here for exactly 42 years. It's a very, very productive place. Ben wants to know why so many giant dinosaur bones have ended up here. He believes the answer can be found in a nearby swamp. In the late Triassic era, waterholes like this would have attracted dinosaurs from miles around. But this life source could quickly become a death trap. Whole herds of dinosaurs became buried in the mud, making Frick one of the most productive paleontological sites in the world. Ben's team makes an important discovery. Ben identifies a potential Plateosaurus. This super-sized creature roamed these lands long before dragon myths began. He collects data from the beast's anatomy. Its dragon-like characteristics are striking. Ben thinks that ancient farmers here uncovered bones like this when working the land. But before modern science, these huge fossils were seen as clear evidence of dragons. If you are a farmer or a construction worker and found things like that in the ground, you will look for explanation. That's too big to a cow. That's not a cow. Dragon, yeah, that was the best explanation. If you're digging in the ground and you find something from a fossil, you're going to assume there was something bigger around. And that's not really mythology when you think about it. That's just reconstructing some ancient animal. The large number and variety of extinct prehistoric giants that left enormous fossils here partly explains why Europe became a dragon hotspot. The Plateosaurus in Switzerland has 15-centimeter claws and 15 vertebrae in its tail alone. It spans the length of a bus. A Megalosaur unearthed in the United Kingdom has powerful legs and a mouth full of 15-centimeter long razor-sharp teeth. And in Romania, paleontologists found a Pterosaur, a terrifying flying carnivore with a wingspan of over 12 meters. But dinosaur bones can only explain a very small part of our ancestors' belief in dragons. What else would convince them that such creatures roamed the Earth and wanted to hurt them? Investigator Dr. Marta Cobb believes the answer could lie with the church. Here in Switzerland, she explores the Abbey of Saint-Gaul, home to one of the world's oldest libraries, to find the evidence. Some of the books in this library are more than a thousand years old. The library houses thousands of unique items that document the world as seen through the eyes of a medieval European. Marta discovers a globe composed by 16th century explorers. This map seems to suggest that the sea would be full of these strange monstrous creatures that are wrecking ships and gliding about. And more monsters of the sea. Any dragons? Marta searches the library's original manuscripts for evidence of what medieval people knew about the dragon. I'm really hoping to see how the idea of dragons was implanted in the medieval mind. In medieval times, most people were illiterate. Marta suspects preachers played a key role in fueling a fear of fire-breathing dragons in their impressionable followers. She looks for evidence in manuscripts here that are so precious they can only be handled by specially trained staff. And in one of the ancient texts, Marta discovers how the image of the dragon became used to represent hell itself. There's this wonderful beast with a wide open mouth and the souls of the damned are being crammed and stuffed inside. And then down here is a little devil and he's got bellows which he's pumping to make the fires of hell even hotter. OK, so we have two 9th century manuscripts. Oh, fantastic. And this is the opening of chapter 27 where it talks about Leviathan serpentum vectum, Leviathan serpentum tortuosum, Leviathan the fleeing serpent, Leviathan the winding or crooked serpent. This 1,100-year-old Bible contains the evidence Marta is looking for. The story of Leviathan, a huge dragon-like creature presented as terrifying fact. Leviathan is this great sea monster. It can eat whales, it's got ferocious scales and teeth. Just a monster. But Marta discovers that in some versions, Leviathan was referred to by a different name. If you look at the Hebrew, it's talking about Leviathan. But coming from the Greek, it talks about dragons. And he seizes the dragon, the serpent of old. That is the devil, that is Satan. What this text is telling me here is that the dragon is Satan. Like the devil, the dragon was out to destroy mankind. We have the Bible, which is the ultimate source of authority, the ultimate truth. And it is saying that scaly, serpentine, dragon-like monsters are real, that they exist. Dragons were no longer the stuff of mere folklore. If the church was taking dragons seriously, then ordinary people definitely would. From the comfort of the 21st century, we look at an image like this, of the beast with the souls being packed inside, and we think, but it's only a symbol, it's not real. It's important to remember, at this time, Satan is a real being. Hell is a literal place. And therefore the dragon, intimately connected with these things, can be seen as a real and very terrifying being. But if the belief in dragons was inspired partly by ancient fossils, what made people think they could breathe fire? In the medieval city of Lucerne, Marta looks for answers. She tracks down a report of a dragon attack, described in an epic poem written at least 700 years ago. When I think of fire-breathing dragons, I think of Beowulf. This is one of the earliest accounts of a fire-breathing dragon. The story of Beowulf was a medieval blockbuster. It recounts how a giant dragon goes on the rampage, leaving an entire kingdom in ruins. The king, Beowulf, leads an army to the dragon's lair to slay the beast. But when the hero and his men arrive, the monster greets them with jets of its fiery breath. All Beowulf's soldiers desert him, except the brave warrior, Wiglaf. He stands his ground and plunges his sword deep into the dragon's belly. His strike extinguishes the source of fire. And the beast becomes easy prey. The myth tells how deadly fire shoots out from deep within the dragon's belly. Was this pure fantasy? Or was there something real behind it? Comparative anatomist Dr. Joy Reidenberg searches for answers in the animal kingdom. There are no animals in nature that breathe fire. But that inspiration for the dragon must have come from somewhere. This is Ariel. Look at that tongue. It's forked. And the reason it's forked is it's actually picking up odors out of the air so they can detect which way to travel to go get towards the prey. Joy thinks the unusual shape of a snake's tongue could be a clue to the origin of the dragon's fiery breath. So what we have here in front of me is a page from a medieval book called a bestiary. This is essentially a dictionary or an encyclopedia of all the animals of the world. And right over here you see something that's very snake-like. It's got its body wound around just the same way Ariel's wound around my arm. And when you look at that tongue flicking in and out, it kind of looks like a flame going in and out of its mouth. But it's really essentially a snake. This is probably where the legend of dragon's breathing fire came from. Joy thinks books like this played a big role in fueling the fire-breathing myth. We have to remember the medieval people mostly didn't read or write. Only the very well-educated could do that. So things might have been written down in books. Someone may have read it aloud as a story. Someone takes that story, describes it to someone else, who then maybe draws a picture of it. And you end up adding a little more fantastic features until it morphs from a snake to something magnificent like a dragon. The word dragon itself comes from the word serpent. Even though we've conquered the animal world, serpents are still very dangerous. And so it's kind of our fear of snakes personified as a great monster. That's why the dragon remains. Medieval texts and illustrations presented ferocious dragons as indisputable fact. But what inspired the idea of these monsters using fire to raise villages to the ground? Marta thinks a church in the Swiss village of Hagersfeld may provide a clue. Now that is something. She tracks down a carving that introduced a new and terrifying concept to medieval people. The fires of hell. Jesus doesn't have a lot to say about hell. That really took the theologians to develop and explore this concept of hell as a place where the damned will burn forever. This idea of eternal fire was used to warn people of the perils of sin and the dangers of being tempted by the devil. Images like this are meant to teach lessons. Do what the church tells you or you will go to hell and you will be there forever. Belief in hellfire became mainstream and with it fire-breathing monsters. Satan becomes increasingly associated with hell, this place of burning flame. So it is really not surprising that the dragon becomes associated with fire. Historian Manuel Menrat believes fire was one of the most terrifying aspects of medieval life. He's come to Lucerne to investigate the extent of damage caused by a recent blaze at a 700-year-old hotel. They are very old buildings from the Middle Ages. Could this help explain why fire-breathing dragons were so feared? Now we see the damage, how huge the fire went up. If this building caught fire in the Middle Ages, the other buildings would have caught fire too. Theo Honnemann, Lucerne's fire chief, was first on the scene. The fire started here in a pan, then went into the ventilation. Be careful. And what is the thing that burned the most? It's the wooden structure. And also here, I mean, you know that in the roofs, the wood is really very, very dry. Manuel thinks the devastation at this hotel offers an insight into how much damage that fire would have wreaked on the medieval city. When wooden builds like this lined Lucerne's streets. We have a lot of fires in the Middle Ages. And we have a list of these fires. Manuel hopes to get a sense of the scale of the blazes that swept across medieval Lucerne by investigating a history of the city's fires. In 1340, there was a huge fire on the right-hand side of the river, which was the bigger part of the city. And it destroyed almost everything. Then, 1412, there was a fire on the left-hand side. That's where we are standing. In 1462, the same street, just above here, around the corner, maybe seven or eight houses completely destroyed. Fires were an ever-present threat to the people of medieval Lucerne. They had to be on constant alert. They had these watchmen. There were like 13 watchmen during the night, walking through the streets. And then there were watchmen on the towers. These guys could see in every direction. Fire is still a part of our lives. But for these people, there was a fire. It was just destroying a lot of houses, not just a single like this one. In the Middle Ages, these wooden buildings incinerated instantaneously. But even worse, they didn't have the equipment or technology to put out the blaze. There is no way in the Middle Ages to extinguish these fires. If a whole street caught fire, they lost everything they had. It was just a disaster. Medieval cities and fire were a deadly combination. In the year 1212, a blaze started in South London and burnt swiftly through the streets of wooden houses. Hot embers drifted across the Thames, igniting the straw roofs on the other side. Flames that spread at the speed of a flying dragon. And cities, left devastated in the blink of an eye, might explain why people associated dragons with fire. Fire was the means by which human beings obtained supremacy over other creatures. So the idea that an animal could also master fire would cause fear amongst human beings. But fire was not the only way dragons were thought to terrorize medieval people. They were also believed to bring devastating storms. Dr. Marta Cobb looks for the reasons why at the Sproyer Bridge in Lucerne. A 500-year-old account about this river offers clues to the real-world inspiration for this belief. This is a picture from a chronicle depicting something that happened here at the turn of the 15th century. The account tells how on one night in May 1499, a tremendous storm swept in from nearby Mount Pilatus. Floodwaters washed through the city. A huge raging torrent. The next morning, among the carnage, people on the bridge over the lake witnessed the terrifying sight of a great dragon that the flood had washed down from the mountain. Even today, abnormally fierce storms here seem to come from Mount Pilatus. Marta suspects the weather could explain why people thought dragons once controlled the skies from remote mountaintops. She heads to the summit to investigate. At two kilometers high, Mount Pilatus towers above Lucerne. You can imagine the dragons of Mount Pilatus in their lair looking down on the city below. In the Middle Ages, this would have been a difficult and dangerous journey. Without modern equipment, Pilatus is inaccessible. So hundreds of years ago, it would have seemed quite remote and mysterious. At the peak of Mount Pilatus is an extensive cave system. It looks like a dragon's lair. In stories about dragons, the lair can be in different places. It's always remote, it's always at the fringes of civilization. So, in a way, the dragon's lair represents the unknown. But why did people believe dragons were responsible for terrible storms? To find out, Marta works with meteorologists Yves Allain-Roulet and Michael Kopp to investigate the mountain's volatile weather systems. The wind sensor up there got hit by the thunderstorm yesterday evening. Winds reaching nearly 160 kilometers an hour have been known to batter the peaks at Mount Pilatus. In summertime, we'll have a lot of heavy thunderstorms producing rain and lightning over the whole region. Here we get twice as much precipitation as Lucerne, which is only a couple of kilometers away from here. So most of the rain will fall here in Mount Pilatus, but then it will flow down to the valley. More rain has fallen here at Mount Pilatus in a single day than has fallen across the wettest month ever in Los Angeles. Yves Allain services the rain sensors that record this extreme precipitation. This is a rain gauge, the same as the one we use here at Mount Pilatus So the water will drop into this one. As soon as you have 0.1 millimeter of water in this recipient, it will keep and continue to measure on the other side. At the end, you just need to count the number of switch to know the amount of water that has been registered with the rain gauge. That's a heavy rain. It's a thunderstorm on Mount Pilatus. That's a thunderstorm rain, yeah. Towering high into the sky, the mountain not only attracts storms, it directs their force onto the town of Lucerne below. We have here a mountain which will act as a kind of lift for this warm and moist air coming from southwest. So this mountain actually triggers thunderstorms? Yeah, that's correct. Marta believes that medieval people didn't understand what caused storms, so dragons became the reason behind them. Dragons may seem like a rather frightening explanation for this, but sometimes a frightening explanation is better than no explanation at all. A lot of times myths came from a need to understand the world around us or to rationalize and explain what was going on. Myths are often reflecting the biggest challenges, like why it rains or what's behind an earthquake. And that makes myths endure because we're always going to be struggling with these universal questions of survival. Europe wasn't the only continent to believe in dragons. China is another dinosaur fossil hotspot. Hundreds of years ago, giant bones helped inspire the idea of huge scaly creatures here too. What's amazing is that China's discovery of dinosaur bones might have inspired their dragon myths completely independently of Europe. Chinese dragons were very different from their European counterparts. Why? Gabrielle Flexer thinks she can find a clue on a precious artifact uncovered at a dig in China. This is a Chinese vessel, and we're going to x-ray it in order to find out if there's any cracks or weaknesses in the surface and the structure. At her lab, Gabrielle begins restoration work on the 3,000-year-old artifact. The Chinese vessel appears to have dragon decorations, particularly around the handles. So by conserving it today, we're hoping to get a much better understanding of what the dragons actually look like. As Gabrielle removes the impurities, she identifies a very distinct beast. Now I've cleaned up the outside of the details, we can clearly see that the emperor's vessel was definitely decorated with dragon handles. Unlike the fearsome and aggressive European dragons, Chinese dragons are benevolent magical spirits. Long and snake-like, they can fly without wings, and they can change color to fit their surroundings. In China, dragons are part of the spirit world and very rarely reveal themselves to people. They also have control over the forces of nature. Chinese dragons would not have been breathing fire or terrorizing towns. Instead, they were much more associated with water, rain, and bringing the rice crops that were so needed. An ancient inscription reveals more clues about the kind of relationship Chinese people once had with this benevolent beast. It translates as, May this honored Gui vessel be used in prayer for a vigorous old age. May Xi's sons and grandsons forever value and employ it for a myriad years. The relatives of the family are continuing to use the vessel into the future to honor their ancestors and their dead relatives. The inscription reveals that while Europeans lived in fear of dragons, the Chinese invited them into their most sacred ceremonies. In the Museum of East Asian Art, Dr. Nicole Chang searches for the reasons why. She finds an artifact almost 300 years old, once owned by Emperor Yongzheng of China. This ball is decorated with nine red dragons, and you can see the dragons' heads right here. The quality of the clay is quite fine. The painting, the decoration on the ball, is also very nicely done. Nicole identifies writing on the ball's reverse that shows its very important owner. You can see the emperor's trademark right here. It's a Chinese imperial porcelain ball coming from the court of the Yongzheng emperor. Nicole reveals that the creatures Europeans thought of as vicious and evil, the Chinese revered as noble and protective. Dragons symbolize power and authority. They have control over the weather, the ocean, rainfall, so they are very powerful, mythical creatures. Not only did the Chinese look up to dragons, the emperor himself even had his own special type. Nicole identifies clues. So these nine dragons have five clouds. That's a symbol of imperial power and the symbol of emperors at the time in the 18th century. The dragons, they appear among waves, ocean waves and clouds, and that's because dragons are often associated with water. Nicole thinks the water and clouds refer to China's ancient account of how the world was formed. All dragons played in it. The Yellow River once burst its banks, turning the land into a sea, forcing people from their homes and up into the mountains. Determined to tame the water and protect his people, the demigod Yu comes to the rescue. With a great benevolent dragon, together they dig deep canals to drain the water and build strong dams to tame the mighty rivers. Now people can return to their homes and be safe from the floods. Yu becomes emperor of China, and the dragon a symbol of protection. The dragon was strongly associated with the birth of Chinese culture. The dragon was there at the beginning of time, and the emperors of China often styled themselves as descendants of the dragon. In China, lives were enriched by protective dragons. But in Europe, people were still living in fear. Someone had to come to the rescue. It was time for the dragon slayer to take up arms. But who were the people who could kill such monsters? In the Alps, Dr. Marta Cobb hunts for answers. She tracks down the most famous dragon slayer of all. And there it is. It's the statue of St. George. This monument was erected 500 years ago. It honors the man who could finally free Europe from merciless dragons. With so many dragons about, it's not surprising that people wanted the protection of a dragon slayer like St. George. But he originated a long way from here. In one account, St. George is in North Africa. Here, a venomous water dragon threatens to poison a town. The citizens offer a princess as a human sacrifice. But a passing soldier comes to the rescue. He not only wounds, but tames the dragon, so the princess can lead him home like a pet. The soldier vows to kill the captive beast if the citizens convert to Christianity. The dragon's fate is sealed, and the soldier becomes St. George. But how did this story become so closely linked to religion and the church? Dr. Campbell Price thinks the answers could lie in Egypt. He believes the idea of a noble dragon slayer didn't originally come from Christianity, but from the ancient gods people worshipped here. This wall carving shows two of the ancient Egyptian gods who were constantly fighting. There's Horus, the falcon-headed god of kingship, and Seth, the god of chaos, a demonic, nondescript hybrid creature. These Egyptian gods represent good battling evil. In the myth, Seth and Horus fight a series of battles to determine who will be king of Egypt. The final contest is a boat race. When Seth's vessel sinks, he is enraged and plots to deceive Horus by transforming into a vicious river monster. The beast attacks Horus in his boat, but the god fights the monster off with his spear. Campbell believes that this myth changed over the centuries, becoming more like the story of St. George and the dragon that we know today. So this is a carving of Horus from the 4th century AD, but this time he's wearing armour and he's on the back of a horse. Here Horus is spearing Seth, who's depicted as a crocodile. This is an image very similar to those depicting George slaying the dragon. But how did a story that began in Egypt take hold in such a different form in Europe? St. George was known throughout Europe in the early Middle Ages, but not as a dragon slayer, just as a martyr. The dragon slaying part of his story got added by crusaders returning from the Middle East. With medieval Europe believing it was under attack from dragons, tales of St. George's slaying these in the East became hugely popular. The people finally had their hero. When St. George killed the dragon, he also saved mankind from sin. For human beings to live, the dragon needed to be destroyed. Now dragons could be slaughtered. What would the people of medieval Europe do with them? Could they harness the powers of these mighty beasts? Accounts reveal that many people tried and were thought to have success. In the summer of 1420, a farmer is working in his field when a fire-breathing dragon flies across the sky above him. As the dragon swoops down, the farmer sees him drop something. He finds a stone covered in dragon blood. The farmer takes the rock back to the nearby city of Lucerne, where for hundreds of years it brings great healing powers to the people. Could there be any truth at all in the dragonstone's healing qualities? Medievalist Dr. Marta Cobb is now on the hunt for the original dragonstone described in the myth. We need to appreciate that this is a time that had a very different conception of where the boundaries between magic, between medicine and between religion lay. Marta's destination is Lucerne's Natural History Museum. So is this the dragonstone? Yes, this is the famous Lucerne dragonstone. This rock was believed to be a miraculous cure for everything from poisoning to nosebleeds and the plague. Could it contain any substances that have medicinal properties? And where does it come from? Geologist Benedikt Hotz uses an X-ray fluorescence analyzer to find out. The legend tells how the dragonstone fell from the sky. So Benedikt suspects this could be a meteorite fragment. If it is, it will contain large amounts of nickel. Now you can see it's a lot of iron inside, a little bit of lead, a small amount of copper. Okay. Yeah, there's a small amount of nickel, but it's not enough to be a meteorite. If it's not part of a meteorite, what is it? It's probably made out of clay. So this is a man-made object. The dragonstone may be a fake. But if the stone has no obvious medicinal qualities, why would people think it could heal them? Marta believes that it could be similar to the idea behind religious relics. She hunts for further clues at this Swiss church in Wiel. Now here's something I'm really excited to see. The remains of St. Pancratius have been on display here for hundreds of years. And there he is. Now that is something else. He's a full skeleton in a suit of armor, and he really is magnificent. In the Middle Ages, there was a belief that relics could work miracles. If you prayed to a saint and to the right saint, perhaps that saint could help you, perhaps that saint could give you healing. Many churches in the Middle Ages showcased the relics of saints. Here in Switzerland, similar powers were transferred onto dragon relics as well. So it was a way of dealing with the unknown, of seeking help for problems you couldn't solve yourself. For centuries, people tried to harness the healing power of dragon relics. But when and why did this belief stop? At this museum in Basel, historian Martin Kluger tracks down some of the earliest pharmaceutical items in Switzerland. Martin believes the contents of this 300-year-old container can help solve the mystery. At the end of the Middle Ages, people believed in dragons. For example, here, this is dragon blood. Just like the dragon stone of Lucerne, this blood was thought to have healing powers. In particular, it was placed on wounds to stop bleeding. Our people believed that it's dragon blood, but of course it's not. It's the sap of a tree coming from the Canary Islands. But knowledge and science were starting to kill off the dragon. So here I have two volumes of one of the most famous authorities in the 17th century. All the known animals described, like the birds here, all the fishes, and at the end we have snakes. They developed a new kind of thinking and scientific approach. And 100 years later, in the 18th century, nobody believed anymore in dragons. Increasingly, people recognized dragon relics as the bones of extinct animals or clever imitations. The dragon's days were numbered. It was modern civilization that ended it all for the myth of the dragon. Even though science tells us that the dragons did not live, this fascination with dragons remains. The dragon, one of the most fearsome mythical beasts of all. Capable of generating horrifying storms, burning whole villages to the ground, and terrifying the people of Europe for centuries. These beasts were created to help explain seemingly inexplicable phenomena, from giant bones to bolts of lightning. The dragon is an embodiment of our biggest fears. And by writing stories where we can fight them, it gives us a feeling of control over those fears. Born from the fires of hell, they represent one of man's greatest enemies, that only our superheroes can kill. I think we like to think that we are so far removed from ancient people who invented these myths. But really, we share similar concerns, similar hopes, and similar fears. And I think that's why these legendary beasts still speak to us. It's the dragon's power, strength, and savage beauty that still fascinates us today. And why their myth will never die.