Y Ddraig Goch (Welsh, “the red dragon”), also known in English as the Welsh Dragon or the Red Dragon of Wales

Region/Culture: Northern Europe
Mythos: Welsh Mythology, Celtic Mythology
Primary Type/Nature: Monsters and Beasts
Mythical Attributes: A great winged red dragon whose shriek can blight a country and whose ancient battle against an invading white dragon was read by Welsh tradition as a prophecy of the Britons’ eventual victory over the Saxons.
Role in Mythos: Originally one of three plagues of Britain in the Mabinogion tale of Lludd and Llefelys, and later the dragon discovered beneath Vortigern’s collapsing fortress in the Historia Brittonum, the red dragon became the prophesied protector of the Welsh people and ultimately their national emblem.
Relation to Humans: In the older tales its airborne combat with the white dragon ruined harvests, killed livestock, and caused miscarriages across Britain until it was trapped with mead and buried under stone at Dinas Emrys. From the Tudor era onward it has lived almost entirely as a heraldic figure of Welsh identity, today flown on the national flag of Wales rather than encountered as a creature in the wild.

The walls would not stand. By daylight the masons of King Vortigern stacked the foundation stones of his new mountain fortress at Dinas Emrys, and by morning the stones were back in the grass, the trenches refilled, the workers staring at one another in cold air thick with the smell of turned earth. The king had come west to escape the Saxons. He needed a stronghold the invaders could not reach. He could not even keep its first courses upright.

His advisors told him to find a boy born without a father, kill him, and mix the blood into the mortar. The boy was found, brought before Vortigern, and proved more dangerous than any sacrifice. He told the king to dig. Beneath the hill, the boy said, lay a hidden pool, and inside the pool two dragons slept. Their nightly battle was what threw down the walls, and the contest had nothing to do with foundations. The white dragon was the Saxon. The red was the people of Britain. The men dug. The pool was there. The dragons rose, and the fatherless child, called Myrddin Emrys in the Welsh telling and reworked centuries later by Geoffrey of Monmouth simply as Merlin, watched them fight and gave the kingdom its first prophecy in his own voice. The white would have the upper hand for a long age. The red would win in the end.

The story is older than Merlin. In the Mabinogion tale of Lludd and Llefelys, written down in the twelfth or thirteenth century but drawing on much older material, the red dragon does not yet stand for anything. It is the second of three plagues afflicting Britain under Lludd’s reign. The shriek that goes up every May Day is the sound of two dragons grappling in the air, one foreign and one native, and the noise is so terrible that pregnant women lose their children, animals fall dead, trees go barren, and the fields refuse to bear. Lludd’s brother Llefelys, ruling in Gaul, sends back the trick. Measure the island until you find its exact centre, dig a pit there, line it with a satin cloth, and set a cauldron of mead beneath. When the dragons fight themselves into exhaustion they will fall through the cloth, shrink to two piglets, drink the mead, and sleep. The centre, by Lludd’s measurement, is Oxford. The trap holds. The sleeping dragons are bound, carried north, and walled into a stone chest beneath the hill at Dinas Emrys, the very hill where Vortigern’s tower will fail centuries later. The story sets one up to explain the other.

What the dragon actually looks like has always been a moving target. The earliest Welsh and Latin sources describe two dragons under a hill or in the air and call one red, one white, without slowing for anatomy. The medieval heraldic tradition is what gave the red dragon its now-standard form: a long-bodied, four-legged beast in profile, wings half-spread, jaws open, foreclaw lifted, tail thrown back over the rump in the heraldic posture called passant. The scales are red. The eye and tongue are conventionally yellow and red. On the modern Welsh flag the dragon walks across a horizontal band of white above and green below. There is no canonical mythological account of its size, scent, or movement, and the older sources are content to leave it as a presence: a great winged shape that screams in the upper air and shakes the foundations of a hill.

Its career as a national symbol began with a Welsh king who never lived to see what he would mean. Cadwaladr ap Cadwallon, who ruled Gwynedd in the seventh century and faced the Saxons through years of plague, is remembered by medieval tradition as one of the last great kings of the Britons. Welsh prophecy held that Cadwaladr’s red dragon banner would return one day to lead the Britons back into their own land. The prophecy waited eight hundred years and found Henry Tudor.

In August 1485 a small army landed in Pembrokeshire and marched east under a banner of the red dragon on green and white silk. Henry was a Welsh-born claimant with a thin path to the English throne and an old Welsh prophecy to wrap around his shoulders for the walk to Bosworth Field. He met Richard III on the morning of 22 August. By the end of the afternoon Richard was dead in the mud and Henry was king of England. The banner that had crossed the field with him was carried straight to St Paul’s Cathedral in London and offered there as the standard of his victory. He was the first Tudor monarch, and the dragon went into the royal heraldry of England as a Welsh inheritance.

It dropped out of state use again after the Tudor line ended and spent the next four centuries as a Welsh thing rather than a British one, carried on banners, embroidered onto choir robes, painted on inn signs and pub fronts. In March 1959, after long pressure from the Gorsedd of Bards and from Welsh members of parliament, Queen Elizabeth II decreed that the red dragon on a white and green field would be the official flag of Wales and the only one to fly from government buildings in the country. The design that became official is medieval in spirit and modern in arrangement: the heraldic dragon passant of Cadwaladr and Henry, set onto the livery colours used by Henry himself.

Its powers, in the stories that have powers in them, follow from what it is. The dragon’s voice can blight a country: in the Lludd tale the May Day shriek is the second plague, ruining childbirth and harvest across Britain in a single sound. It can fight in the air against another of its kind without tiring across a long contest, year on year. It outlasts captivity, sleeping under stone for an age without dying, and rises again when the hill above it is broken open. As an emblem it has a stranger power still, which is the power of carrying the loyalty of a people through eight centuries between the king who first raised it and the king who finally won under it.

Its weaknesses are equally specific. It can be tricked. Llefelys defeats it with mead and a satin cloth. It can be bound, and a stone chest under a hill will hold it for hundreds of years. It can be outshouted by its enemy for long stretches of history, as the prophecy openly admits when it tells Vortigern that the white dragon will have the upper hand for an age before the red dragon returns. The red dragon is not the dragon that always wins. It is the dragon that wins last.

Frequently Asked Questions

What is Y Ddraig Goch in Welsh mythology?

Y Ddraig Goch, Welsh for “the red dragon,” is the great winged dragon of Welsh tradition who appears in both the Mabinogion and the ninth-century Historia Brittonum and who today represents Wales on its national flag. In the oldest stories the red dragon battles a white invader dragon, and the Welsh tradition reads the contest as a prophecy of the native Britons’ eventual victory over their conquerors.

What is the story of the red and white dragons under the hill?

In the Historia Brittonum, the fifth-century British king Vortigern’s fortress at Dinas Emrys keeps collapsing because two dragons are fighting in a hidden pool beneath the hill. A fatherless boy, later identified with Merlin, reveals the dragons and prophesies that the red dragon, representing the Britons, will one day defeat the white dragon, representing the Saxons. In the older Mabinogion tale of Lludd and Llefelys the same red dragon is the second of three plagues afflicting Britain and is trapped at Dinas Emrys with a cauldron of mead.

Why is the red dragon on the Welsh flag?

The red dragon stands on the flag of Wales because it was used in medieval Welsh prophecy as the emblem of the native Britons in their long struggle against the Saxons. Cadwaladr of Gwynedd in the seventh century is the earliest king associated with it, Henry Tudor flew it at the Battle of Bosworth Field in 1485, and after centuries of unofficial use it was officially declared the national flag of Wales by Queen Elizabeth II on 11 March 1959.

Where are the red and white dragons of the legend buried?

The dragons are buried beneath Dinas Emrys, a real Iron Age hillfort in Snowdonia in north Wales whose name means “the fortress of Ambrosius.” In the Mabinogion they are walled into a stone chest under the hill after Lludd traps them with mead, and in the Historia Brittonum they are still asleep there when Vortigern’s diggers expose them generations later.

What does Y Ddraig Goch mean?

Y Ddraig Goch is Welsh for “the red dragon.” The phrase appears in medieval Welsh texts as the term for the dragon that fights for the Britons against the invading white dragon, and it is the name used today for the dragon on the Welsh national flag and in the Welsh royal motto Y Ddraig goch ddyry cychwyn, “the red dragon leads the way.”