Why did people believe in dragons?

Welcome back to History's Not Boring! Imagine living in a tiny medieval village long ago. You have never traveled far from home, but you hear wild tales of magnificent, scary beasts! Did you know that the dragons and unicorns we love today actually came from real-life mix-ups? It is absolutely true! Long ago, medieval monks wrote giant books called bestiaries filled with drawings of creatures they had never even seen. When travelers found dinosaur bones buried in the dirt, they could not explain what they were, so they imagined giant fire-breathing dragons! And what about beautiful unicorns? Those stories started because sailors found long, spiraled narwhal tusks washing up on beaches, or travelers saw rhinos and got super confused! Even Viking sea monsters were inspired by real giant squids swimming in the deep, dark ocean! Join Mira and Finn as we dive into the Middle Ages to uncover how real animals, ancient fossils, and wild human imagination teamed up to create history's most legendary mythical creatures. Get ready for a hilarious historical adventure filled with colossal mix-ups and fantastic beasts!

Transcript

SPEAKER_01 0:00

Welcome to Histories Not Boring by kidopoly.com. I'm Mira. And I'm Finn. Today we have an absolutely awesome listener question from Addy, who reached out through our contact form. Addy asked, Where do people get the idea for dragons and unicorns?

SPEAKER_00 0:17

Ooh, that is such a cool question. Did they actually exist? Or did someone just make them up one day?

SPEAKER_01 0:24

Well, kind of a mix of both. By the way, today is a bonus interview Wednesday, and you definitely want to stick around for the end of the episode to hear about it. We have a special bonus interview with the famous explorer Marco Polo, who travelled all the way to China 750 years ago and brought back wild stories that helped inspire the exact beastries we are talking about today.

SPEAKER_00 0:49

Wait, Marco Polo saw actual dragons.

SPEAKER_01 0:53

We will get to that. But first, Finn, get ready for a mind-blowing fact to start us off. Did you know that in the 1500s, Queen Elizabeth I of England paid£10,000 for a single unicorn horn?£10,000?

SPEAKER_00 1:12

Is that a lot of money back then?

SPEAKER_01 1:14

That was enough money to buy an entire, fully built stone castle. But here is the crazy part. It wasn't a unicorn horn at all. Then what did she buy? A painted stick. That is exactly what we are going to explore today. We are travelling back to the Middle Ages, between the years 500 and 1500 AD, to figure out how medieval people mixed real animals, old fossils, and wild imagination to create the mythical creatures we still love today. Imagine you live in a tiny medieval village in England in the year 1100. You are a farmer, and you never travel more than 10 miles from your home in your entire life. There are no cameras, no internet, no encyclopedias, and definitely no zoos.

SPEAKER_00 2:01

No zoos? How did people know what animals lived in other countries, like lions or elephants?

SPEAKER_01 2:08

They relied on enormous, heavy, hand-painted books called bisturies. These were made by medieval monks who spent years carefully copying down descriptions of animals onto parchments.

SPEAKER_00 2:21

Did the monks actually see the animals they were drawing? Almost never.

SPEAKER_01 2:26

They had to rely on stories passed down from sailors, merchants, and ancient Roman writers like Pliny the Elder. Imagine trying to draw a rhinoceros when the only description you have is a traveller saying it's a large, angry beast with a huge horn on its nose.

SPEAKER_00 2:44

I bet it looked ridiculous, like a giant spiky potato.

SPEAKER_01 2:48

Exactly. Because they didn't know what was real and what wasn't, the monks mixed real animals with wild rumours. So, right next to scientifically accurate drawings of lions and bears, these massive books had detailed, serious drawings of dragons, griffins, and unicorns. They thought they were all completely real animals living in distant lands.

SPEAKER_00 3:12

Okay, so where did the unicorn rumour specifically come from?

SPEAKER_01 3:16

Well, it started with travellers who went to India or Africa and saw real rhinoceroses or rare antelopes from far away. They came back to Europe and said, I saw a magnificent horse-like creature with a single horn on its head. And the monks just believed them. Yes, but it wasn't just stories in books. People were actually buying and selling what they thought were physical magic unicorn horns in the busy market squares of Europe.

SPEAKER_00 3:44

Wait, what were they actually buying? You just said Queen Elizabeth bought one for the price of a whole castle.

SPEAKER_01 3:51

They were buying the tusks of narwhals! Narwhals are real, medium-sized whales that live way up north in the freezing waters of the Arctic Ocean.

SPEAKER_00 4:01

Oh, the whales with the huge spike on their heads. I've seen pictures of those. Exactly!

SPEAKER_01 4:08

Male narwhals grow a single, straight, spiraled tusk right through their upper lip that can be up to ten feet long. Viking sailors from Scandinavia would brave the icy waters, hunt these whales, take the ten-foot tusks, and bring them down to the royal courts of Europe.

SPEAKER_00 4:27

And they just told the kings and queens they were from magical land unicorns.

SPEAKER_01 4:31

Yep. The Vikings kept the Narwhals a total secret to protect their business. They sold the tusks to European royalty for many times their weight in solid gold. People believed a unicorn horn had intense magic powers and could cure any poison if you drank from it.

SPEAKER_00 4:51

No way! So Queen Elizabeth spent a whole castle's worth of money on a whale tooth.

SPEAKER_01 4:57

She sure did. And scientifically, the Narwhal tusk is amazing. It is actually a highly sensitive tooth with up to 10 million nerve connections. But it took hundreds of years for European scientists to figure out the truth about where they came from.

SPEAKER_00 5:15

Okay, that explains unicorns, but what about dragons? Did Vikings sell fake dragon scales too?

SPEAKER_01 5:22

The dragon story is even wilder, and it comes from all over the world. Let's talk about the famous explorer Marco Polo. Around the year 1290, he was travelling through a province in China called Karajan. Did he see a real dragon? He wrote in his famous travel book that he saw huge serpents that were 30 feet long. He specifically noted that they had two short legs with three claws, glaring eyes the size of a loaf of bread, and massive jaws wide enough to swallow a man whole.

SPEAKER_00 5:58

That sounds exactly like a terrifying fire-breathing dragon. What on earth did he actually see?

SPEAKER_01 6:05

Historians today believe he probably saw a massive Chinese alligator or a giant Asian crocodile. But because Europeans had never seen a 30-foot crocodile, he described it in a way that sounded exactly like the terrifying dragons from the bisturies.

SPEAKER_00 6:22

Okay, so Marco Polo just saw a huge, grumpy crocodile. But what about the dragons in Europe? Crocodiles definitely don't live in the freezing rivers of England or Austria.

SPEAKER_01 6:35

That brings us to my absolute favourite part of the mystery. The fossils! For thousands of years, people all over the world would dig in the dirt to build houses or farm, and they would uncover enormous, terrifying bones.

SPEAKER_00 6:51

Dinosaur bones! They were digging up fossils!

SPEAKER_01 6:54

Yes, dinosaur bones, or sometimes bones from giant extinct ice age mammals. Imagine you are a medieval farmer, you were just trying to dig a well, and suddenly you unearth a skull the size of a wagon, filled with teeth the size of bananas.

SPEAKER_00 7:12

If I didn't know what a T-Rex was, I would 100% think it was a giant monster.

SPEAKER_01 7:17

Exactly! In fact, there is a famous and incredibly detailed story from the city of Klagenfurt in Austria. Back in the year 1335, workers were digging deep in a gravel pit and found a massive, monstrous skull buried in the dirt. Did they freak out? What did they do with it? They were totally convinced it belonged to a Lindworm. A Lindworm was a legendary, terrifying water dragon that local Austrian myths said used to cause terrible river floods and eat travellers. The town was so proud that they kept the massive skull on display in their town hall for centuries.

SPEAKER_00 7:56

Did they build anything to celebrate killing it?

SPEAKER_01 7:58

They did. In the year 1590, a sculptor carved a huge six-ton stone statue of the Lindworm dragon for the town square. And the coolest part? They actually modelled the stone dragon's head directly on that giant skull they found.

SPEAKER_00 8:15

That is amazing! But wait, what was the skull really? Was it a T-Rex? No!

SPEAKER_01 8:22

In the 1800s, modern paleontologists finally examined it. It wasn't a dragon or a dinosaur at all. It was the fossilised skull of an extinct Ice Age woolly rhinoceros.

SPEAKER_00 8:34

A woolly rhino? So they based their terrifying, legendary water dragon on a big fuzzy rhino.

SPEAKER_01 8:42

They sure did. It just goes to show how powerful human imagination is. But not all mythical creatures were just mistaken bones in the dirt. Let's hell out into the deep, dark ocean, where sailors told terrifying stories of the mighty kraken.

SPEAKER_00 9:00

The kraken? The giant sea monster with huge tentacles that could wrap around a ship's mast and pull the whole galleon underwater. That one isn't real, right?

SPEAKER_01 9:12

Well, for hundreds of years, scientists completely dismissed it. They thought the kraken was just a silly sailor's myth, born from being out at sea too long. But then, massive rubbery tentacles started washing up on beaches around the world. Wait, the kraken is actually real? It is! It is called the giant squid, and its scientific name is Archituthis Ducks. They are massive, highly intelligent creatures that live in the freezing, pitch black deep sea. And they can grow up to 43 feet long. 43 feet? That's as long as an entire yellow school bus. Exactly! And here is a crazy fact that will blow your mind. A giant squid's eyes are the largest of any animal on planet Earth. They are the exact size of large dinner plates, which helps them see in the total darkness of the deep ocean.

SPEAKER_00 10:08

Eyes the size of dinner plates? If a Viking sailor saw that giant eye surface next to his tiny wooden boat in the storm, I totally get why he thought it was a demonic sea monster.

SPEAKER_01 10:20

You see, that is the true magic of history, Finn. Medieval people weren't silly or foolish. They were incredibly observant. They just didn't have all the modern scientific tools to explain what they were looking at.

SPEAKER_00 10:33

So they took the real things they found, like long narwhal tusks, massive woolly rhino skulls, and 40-foot giant squids, and used their imagination to fill in the missing pieces.

SPEAKER_01 10:45

Hugh got it! They created a world of magic because the real world they lived in was already so wild and unexplained. And honestly, I think a real whale swimming around with a 10-foot unicorn horn is just as magical as a horse with one.

SPEAKER_00 11:00

Me too. History is so much cooler than just reading plain facts from a textbook. Speaking of facts, can we do the quiz now?

SPEAKER_01 11:08

Alright, Finn, it is quiz time. Let's see how much you remember about our mythical beasts and medieval monsters.

SPEAKER_00 11:15

Okay, my brain is ready. Let's do this.

SPEAKER_01 11:19

First question. What real animal did the extremely expensive unicorn horn bought by Queen Elizabeth actually come from? Next one. How much money did Queen Elizabeth I actually pay for that single tusk? Question 3. Which famous Italian explorer described a 30-foot serpent in China that sounded exactly like a terrifying dragon? Here's number four. What extinct animal's skull did the people of Klagenfurt, Austria, find in 1335 and mistake for a water dragon? Last question. Great job! Let's see how you did. The first answer is it came from a gnarble, a type of Arctic whale with a massive tooth. For question two, she paid£10,000, which was the cost of an entire stone castle. Number three, the answer is the famous explorer Marco Polo, who likely saw a giant crocodile. Question 4, it was an ice age woolly rhinoceros skull. And the final answer is the giant squid or Architectux.

SPEAKER_00 12:56

Wow, I still can't believe people thought fuzzy woolly rhino fossils were actual water dragons that caused floods. This was absolutely the best episode ever.

SPEAKER_01 13:06

I know, right? It just shows that history is full of amazing mysteries and incredible human stories.

SPEAKER_00 13:12

Listeners, if you guys love learning about the true origins of dragons and unicorns as much as I did, please leave us a five-star review.

SPEAKER_01 13:21

Yes, just scroll down on your podcast app and tap those five stars. Tell us which mythical creature was your favourite. It really helps other kids find the show.

SPEAKER_00 13:30

Oh, and don't forget to check out our site kidopoly.com. We've got tons of fun learning games, cool activities, and more awesome history stuff there to explore.

SPEAKER_01 13:40

Definitely! And if you want to shout out on the show, just like Addy got today, or if you just want to say hi to us, send an email to hello at kidopoly.com. We love hearing from you. Wait! Don't forget about the bonus episode. Oh my goodness, yes! Listeners, right after this, make sure to check your podcast feed for today's special bonus interview Wednesday episode. Finn and I actually get to meet Marco Polo himself and hear all about his wild journey to China 750 years ago.

SPEAKER_00 14:13

It is packed with even more amazing stories, so you do not want to miss it. See you next time on Histories Not Boring.