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Where does the idea that dragons hoard gold come from?

I can't think of many myths of dragons hoarding gold. The closest I come up with is the dragon that guarded the Golden Fleece. And even that's a stretch as it wasn't gold specifically.

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  • Kundalini yoga is described as a burning serpent coiling up the spine accumulating some sort of bioenergy in the chakras until it overloads and spills out the head violently like a burning fire. The same symbolism appears in the Bible as a Seraph or a bronze staff with a snake coiled around it, called a Caduceus by the Greeks.
    – Gnarlodious
    Commented Mar 9, 2018 at 5:35

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The Colchian dragon isn't the only dragon protecting treasure in Greek mythology. A couple more examples:

  • Ladon guarded the golden apples in the garden of the Hesperides,
  • Python guarded the centre of the earth at Delphi, and
  • Ares assigned a dragon to protect his sacred spring near Thebes (look up the myths of Cadmus).

However, if you are looking for a dragon protecting gold specifically, then I think the more characteristic examples from European folklore are:

In fact, unless I'm horribly mistaken, the latter one is often credited as the main inspiration behind Smaug, the iconic gold-hoarding dragon in J. R. R. Tolkien's The Hobbit.

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    I'd say that Fafnir likely also was part of the inspiration, as LoTR owes a lot to the Völsunga saga in general. But that is a nitpick.
    – andejons
    Commented Mar 9, 2018 at 10:16
  • @Andejons Actually, the Children of Húrin is the story most like the Volsunga. Think Fafnir->Glaurung instead of Smaug.
    – Spencer
    Commented May 31, 2019 at 18:24
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The earliest appearance in Western history and literature is in Herodotus. The Scythians are famous for their gold art objects. He says that way up north in the Altai mountains where the Scythians mined their gold and made their gold objects, there were gryphons guarding piles of gold. The gryphon was a four footed bird. That mythical creature easily turned into the dragon.

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Serpent Slaying Myth

The story of the dragon slayer is one of the oldest myths we have, and can be traced to the Eurasian steppe circa 3500 BC. The classic text How to Kill a Dragon traces the myth through various Indo-European poetic traditions, attempting to find the "original" story as best as can be reconstructed.

Blocker of Waters

The short version of the serpent slaying myth is:

"The storm-god/hero slays the serpent and releases the Waters."

Where "the Waters" is a stand in for wealth. In the pre-agricultural steppe societies of hunter-gathers or herders, knowing where water existed was a pre-condition for life. The Neolithic and early Bronze Age steppe peoples couldn't live in the deep steppe, as shown by recent research that shows no close genetic link between the upper Volga and upper Dnieper hunter gathers pre-domestication-of-the-horse.

We can see echos the importance of fresh water in Proto-Indo-European culture in the Greek nymphs and Vedic deification of rivers.

So if you buy Water as a stand in for Wealth/Gold, then Dragons have horded gold literally since the beginning, from the oldest dragon story we have.

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  • The linked Wiki article references Greek, Norse, Hittie, Slavic, Persian, and Vedic versions of this story, which was expected, but the Shinto(!) version (PIE > Yamnaya > Vedic > Hindu > Buddhist > Shinto) was surprising to me
    – codeMonkey
    Commented Jul 2 at 15:56
  • To quote Pindar: "Water is best, and gold, like a blazing fire in the night, stands out supreme of all lordly wealth." (Ol. 1)
    – cmw ♦
    Commented Jul 2 at 18:52
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I was impressed that the lore of dragons 'hoarding' the wealth of a town in ancient times was a metaphor for their spiritual or intellectual wealth. This 'wealth' being their specific destinies or abilities to fullfill such. It was the bravest of the sojourners or most knowledgeable who sought this protagonist out, overcoming it, and recovering the gold (opportunity). In the real, I suppose it would symbolize the kundalini energy at the base of the spine which is 'awakened' to fire the energy centers of the body. This took patience and hard work on the part of the practitioner.

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