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Comment by fogihujy | Hacker News Reader

I'm not sure about the descriptions of Neanderthals presented in this article, but the idea that old tales of orcs and elves originated many millennia ago as descriptions of other human species or other primates isn't that far-fetched.

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> the idea that old tales of orcs and elves originated many millennia ago as descriptions of other human species or other primates isn't that far-fetched.

Given that we know that thoughout recorded history people have made stories like that up about the community of the same human species over the next hill, it may be not-too-farfetched, but it is also a wildly unnecessary conjecture.

Definitely. It's an interesting idea, but going from "this could have happened" to saying "it did happen", is quite a leap. :)

I always though that dragons were also sourced from a vague genetic memory passed down from very remote ancestors that met dino descendants.

The other way around is more plausible to me: the way we reconstructed dinosaurs was influenced by the corpus of representations we developed with dragons.

Oh, I never thought of that, but it could explain why the idea of dinosaur with feather sounds weird even though biologically it wouldn't be surprising at all.

Well, there's been a number of very large bird and reptile species that humanity has been in contact with since the dawn of man. Many of our forefathers were rather small compared to modern humans, and a gigantic serpent or amphibian would probably be outright terrifying for small early humans armed with rocks and spears.

I'm not sure about genetic memory, but human oral tradition is very old, and while I haven't heard about any evidence suggesting it predates modern humans, I wouldn't be surprised if there are stories that turns out to be as old as human language is.

Or found their skeletons.

I agree. Imagine finding something like a Pachycephalosaurus skeleton without a modern education.

https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Pachycephalosaurus_w...

If you're in a pre-civilized, just-barely-scraping-by survival mode, you'd probably conclude: (1) this thing was a monster, and if it lived here I'm not safe. (2) This thing must have been killed by something worse, and if it's around I'm really not safe.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Flight_of_Dragons_(book)

It makes less sense than imaginations running wild at the sight of crocodiles and dinosaur bones.

Even the fisherman's tale of how big the fish was, applies.

Some guy with a sword kills a big croc, which is a good feat! Yet each telling the croc is bigger, more fierce, especially as the alcohol flows.

His grandkids hear the story too.

Don't forget hippos! Their skin can be up to two inches thick. That would be incredibly difficult to penetrate with stone age (or even later) weapons.

It’s a very good possibility that the reason we think dragons lived in caves was because there are so many cave bear skeletal remains in caves throughout Europe.

Imagine finding a 12 foot long skeleton in a cave, or just a skull of an impossibly large animal, of course it’s a dragon!

Chinese dragons may be a better depiction of what could be the source of the myth. A Chinese dragon is like a flying snake, although I'm not sure they ascribe fire-breathing to it. But if you combine a flying snake and fire-breathing then there was an ancient device that looked very much like such a creature.

Some ancient armies used long cloth bags as flags or banners, to impress the enemies or maybe to signal the position of themselves for the allies to see. They filled the bags with hot air and the bags rose to the sky as contemporary balloons.

Imagine how it looked from the enemy side: an army is approaching and long snake-like things are flying about the mass of people. And you can glimpse some fire at the end that is close to the ground. Could it be a creature that breaths fire? And occasionally these things detached and flew up to the sky. Perfect dragons.

13th warrior?

Upvoted, for doubly-applicable reference.

Pretty much all our mythology and fairy tales, including the Tolkien's world, Harry Potter and many movies are based on what I'd call the "occult records". Those records were made partially public at least two centuries before Tolkien was born, so it can't be a coincidence that so many elements of his world match 1:1 with those records. Whether those records are true is a separate question.

Using occult chronology, Tolkien's world corresponds to the Atlantis period (the same Atlantis described by Plato). Tolkien took most of the interesting bits from different epochs and compressed them into one short story. The tall people (2x taller than us) in his story are the atlanteans, Saruman and Gendalf must be Narad and Asuramaya and orcs are creatures made by the evil faction during the late Atlantis when the civilization was on decline. The records say, though, that the bad guys won at the end and the atmosphere during that final chapter was shown in the Prometheus movie. All movies and books, though, present a rosy version of orcs and other evil stuff from the records - an accurate picture would be unthinkable even in the book format.

You're looking for far-fetched explanations where his academic track record, most notably on Beowulf, provides a completely natural meta-mythological basis for his works.

There's definitely a lot of more modern developments as well, but there's also stories like Jack and the Beanstalk, that can be traced back thousands of years and which has themes similar to those described in the article.

Tolkien, in addition to being the great fantasy writer of the 20th century, he was also an Oxford professor and the century's great scholar of Old English. And in his domain were the myths of northern and central Europe.

He needed no popular book of the occult; he had read all the original myths in their original ancient languages. There is plenty of scholarly work describing his sources, and he wrote his own essay on it, though it's more conceptual than about primary sources: On Fairy-stories.

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