Back in my days with Pern fandom, we had endless discussions of dragon size. There was a set hierarchy, with green dragons the smallest, blue and brown dragons getting bigger, and bronze and golds being largest of all. With this progression in mind, fans tried to determine how big the dragons actually were so our stories would be consistent.
In the Pern novels, their dragons were genetically created from a smaller species, the fire-lizard. They were engineered to become progressively larger until they stopped at a pre-determined size. However, due to circumstances in the novels, the dragons of Benden Weyr became genetically isolated and grew to significantly greater sizes.
Just what was that optimal size? Sources in the books stated that several Benden dragons, including Ramoth, Mnementh and Canth, were larger than the expected size. At 45 meters, Ramoth was the largest Pernese dragon ever known. Other dragons would have scaled progressively smaller.
The debate among fans arose because 45 meters translates to 147.6 feet — the size of a passenger jet! This size seems extreme, even for a fantasy creature. How much would such a dragon eat? What space would it need for its personal weyr, and what would be the required area for a Weyr of 300 or more dragons? How could even a well-intentioned dragon avoid harming the relatively tiny humans around it?
Oddly enough, this issue may have sprung from an editing mishap. Pernese dragon measurements are sometimes given in meters, as common in Europe, but sometimes given in feet, as common in the U. S. However, the number wasn’t changed during editing. So a 45-foot-long Ramoth suddenly ballooned to 147 feet when converted to metric!
Just for fun, here’s a post from the blog Dragon Calling, which estimated the size of various dragons in video games and movies. The author used media dragons because still images give a good idea of comparative sizes between the human and dragon characters.
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