The book under review explores the premodern roots of the monster we all know so well. Daniel Ogden has already produced two books on the ancient representation of the dragon: a wide-ranging descriptive handbook of serpents in Greek and Roman culture and a companion volume of Greek and Latin sources in translation. One may ask why we need another book by Ogden on premodern dragons. As he explains in his introduction to The Dragon in the West, his earlier works concentrated primarily on the literature of ancient world and its afterlife in medieval Christian hagiography. In this new book, he explores how the ancient representation of the creatures proceeded “to modern notions of dragondom” (p. 1). In doing so, he steps outside of his comfort zone to consider the representation of the dragon in Old Norse and Old English sources from early medieval England and Scandinavia, but otherwise he does not stray very far from the ancient and hagiographical materials already treated at great length in his two previous books.