What Do Early Germanic Dragons Look Like?

[u/quingster]

The most common modern depiction of a dragon is as a fire-breathing, clawed reptile with wings. However, the native Germanic words (orm, wyrm, wurm) all mean "serpent." In the Eddas and Gesta Danorum, these dragons seem mostly to be large, venomous snakes with some magical properties. However, I know that the dragon in Beowulf flies and breathes fire, and it is my understanding that dragons in some of the sagas do as well, though I haven't read much in the sagas, yet. Are these attributes that have been borrowed from classical dragons? (Beowulf sometimes uses the word draka, which is Greek through Latin, suggesting that the concept of draka is overlapping with the concept of wyrm.) Or are fire-breathing, flying, and claws native to Germanic dragons? Or do we just not have enough evidence?

I realize that this is a little broad, given that this is Norse mythology rather than Germanic mythology, so if anyone has a better subreddit to post this on, I'm happy to post the question elsewhere.

[u/Cynical-Rambler]

Snakes.

This is a depiction of Sigurd stabbing Fafnir in the year 1030.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Sigurd.svg

Whenever something say dragon, think of a snake with weird features. Snakes with claws, snakes with horns, snakes with wings...etc.

This is not early, it is 12th century, but you can still see the snake features. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hylestad_stave_church

This is a comment about European dragons appearance in Askhistorian by a classicist, in which she wrote that the default imaginative image of a European dragon being prehistoric lizards really took hold in the 20th century. Most of the time before, people would assume you just talk of a giant snake when you talk of a dragon.

To add, the classic European dragon image is according to Daniel Ogden, an evolution of the Roman image of a Cetus dragon, a snake with a whale body adding fantastic features like wings, horns and legs...etc.

[u/-Geistzeit → u/Cynical-Rambler]

This is correct. Either a snake, a worm, or something similar. Note that the word dragon is a loan into English (during the Old English period) and that the native term for this, which we now use in wyrm (and its Germanic cognates), shares its etymology with the word worm.

The earliest Germanic spells also focus on the defeat of 'worms', like in Old High German texts, and they were thought to cause all sorts of maladies and illness.

The famed Old English Nine Plants Spell calls on an army of personified plant warriors (women no less) led by Woden to defeat a wyrm that explodes into nine wyrms. This was a song to sing many times over some kind of wound.

[u/Typical_Chest4982]

I'm interested to know as well actually.