The Dragons of Pern

According to Anne McCaffrey herself, no artist has ever managed to capture Pernese dragons quite as she sees them. There's a great deal of debate on various aspects of dragon appearance, but these are the basics.

Pernese dragons have six limbs - two wings, two hind legs, and two forelegs or forearms which are shorter than the hind limbs with five-fingered 'hands'. This makes for a very awkward walking gait, although dragons are comfortable sitting upright. They have ridges along the spine - riders sit between the last two ridges at the base of the neck - less prominent between the wings than along the neck and tail. Their tails are forked at the tip.

Their heads are somewhat horse-like in appearance, with 'headknobs' rather than horns or ears (no one is wholly sure what headknobs are - perhaps short, blunt horns would be the best approximation), and prominent eye-ridges. The eyes themselves have no pupils, are faceted like jewels, and change colour depending on the dragon's mood - generally, blue or green shades for contentment, with the red and orange end of the spectrum for anger and agitation.

The five colours of Pernese dragons are green, blue, brown, bronze, and gold. Greens and golds are female; blues, browns, and bronzes male. There can be dramatic difference in shade between dragons of any colour - a blue dragon, for instance, could be anything from duck-egg blue to sea blue to almost navy blue - but not in the hide of any one particular dragon. There are no markings, though dragons may appear to be dappled with a different shade of their own colour.

Dragons have smooth, glossy hides, not scales, and dragon blood (ichor) is green.

One of the biggest ongoing debates concerns the size of Pernese dragons. Various figures have been suggested, putting the largest dragons anywhere from 45 feet to 45 metres in length. Personally, I think of them as somewhere between the two extremes. What is certain is that the greens are smallest and the golden queens almost twice as large.

My approximate mental image puts green dragons at 30-37 feet, blues at 37-45 feet, browns at 45-52 feet, bronzes at 52-57 feet, and queens at 57-63 feet. (This is the x1.5 scale, for anyone who's followed the debate at the Kitchen Table, and makes the most sense to me - but it's just my opinion on the matter!)