Group Terms for Dragons

Velcanondil

New Member
I have been catching up on the podcast for about 2 years now, but I am finally almost through the backlog of episodes. I have never posted before, so I don't know if this is the right place, but I hope it is. However, I was chuckling over the discussion on group terms for dragons and thought I would put in my two cents. I have no linguistic precedent for this, but strangely enough I have actually thought about this question a number of times. The best I have ever come up with is one of two (very similar) options: a "Summer" of dragons or a "Simmer" of dragons.
 
If you google it, you will find that the most common collectives for Dragons are: a flight of dragons; a weyr of dragons; a school of dragons; or a wing of dragons.

Yours are more imaginative.

Robin Hobb (fantasy author) once called a group of dragons a catastrophe of dragons, which I think is pretty good.

JRRT, in The Silmarillion calls calls the onset of the winged dragons in the War of Wrath, "that dreadful fleet', so a fleet of dragons.

He also says that Earendil slew Ancalagon the Black, 'the mightiest of the dragon-host.' So, that implies a host of dragons.

I think that there is no settled collective, so we are free to invent our own.
 
I mentioned it in the chat at the time but it got buried quickly. One collective noun for worms is a "clew" of worms. I feel like that would be good for dragons.
 
Velcanondil, I was searching for information on the collective noun for dragons because of this sentence from Beowulf: The Monsters and the Critics, "...one dragon, however hot, does not make a summer, or a host..." (MC p. 12). When I googled the question, the responses cited by Flammifer were also what came up, but I was wondering if 1) you were familiar with his essay on Beowulf and had perhaps subconsciously associated the plural dragons with summer through reading them in such close proximity there, and/or if 2) Tolkien was using a plural form that was popular in the past but not greatly used now?
 
Velcanondil, I was searching for information on the collective noun for dragons because of this sentence from Beowulf: The Monsters and the Critics, "...one dragon, however hot, does not make a summer, or a host..." (MC p. 12). When I googled the question, the responses cited by Flammifer were also what came up, but I was wondering if 1) you were familiar with his essay on Beowulf and had perhaps subconsciously associated the plural dragons with summer through reading them in such close proximity there, and/or if 2) Tolkien was using a plural form that was popular in the past but not greatly used now?
I do not believe the "summer" in the dragon context refers to a group noun but to a modified saying "one swallow does not a summer make" where the "swallow" is simply replaced by "dragon"...
 
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