I don't know, but I have hypothesis.
Gary Gygax put colorful dragons in Chainmail and D&D, but why are they colored the way they are?Let us look where Gygax first wrote about them:
"Long prior to the publication of Chainmail, and indeed before Gygax contributed to any fantasy game design, he already demonstrated an interest in the taxonomy of dragons. To the pages of the IFW Diplomacy fanzine Thangorodrim, Gygax contributed a series of articles from 1969 to 1970 on various types of dragons entitled “GRAYTE WOURMES.”"
-I.5.2, Playing at the World, 2E, Volume 2, Jon Peterson, 2025
I found a forum post quoting the articles. Great success!
The Red Dragon seems to been the first one, earlier even than the other dragons written by Gygax. So where did that one come from? Did it also come from Gygax or did someone else call it a "Red Dragon" and Gary invented a bunch of other colors to keep the naming convention going? Maybe. At least a similar thing seems to have happend when Braunstein became Blackmoor became Greyhawk. The color naming convention and the decrease by one letter stuck, that's why I'm playing in Rotfall.
Gary wrote about the White, Black, Green, Blue and Purple Dragons in that order a few months apart. So it is likely he didn't come up with them all simultaniously. The Gold Dragon came even a few years later, while the Purple Worm lost its dragon status.
Where did the colors come from?
1) Toys?
A lot of early D&D monsters had their origin in toy figurines. Fantasy figurines where hard to come by. Maybe Gary had some colorful toy dragons, I do not know, but I don't think that is likely. Later D&D monsters where invented because the referee needed new monsters and used cheap plastic toys in play. Dragons were well established creatures of folklore.
2) Heraldry?
This was my pet theory and the reason I looked into the topic.
Gary, being an medieval buff, knew a
little bit about english heraldry. I mean he designed his own coat of
arms: "argent an axe gules", so a red axe on a silver shield.
(Jon Peterson probably quotes that from Domesday Book Issue #10 (April 1971), The Roll of Arms (by William Linden) I wish I could read that issue, so I could look up Dave Arnesons coat of arms as well.)
There are 7 tinctures used in
classic heraldry, two metals and five colors:
• Yellow, called "or" (gold)
• White, called "argent" (silver)
• Red, called "gules"
• Blue, called "azure"
• Black, called "sable"
• Green, called "vert"
• Purple, called "purpure"
You might see why I got suspicious. Yellow may have been called Gold, but all the dragon colors are represented as is! So maybe Gary got the colors from heraldry, which would mean the colors were all pretty much decided simultaniously. But since the dragons were released one after another, and one even much later, I think the last hypothesis may be more likely.
3) Association with the elements?
If the first dragon was the fire breathing Red Dragon, maybe Gary thought what else would be a dangerous breath weapon.
• Ice seems like the natural progression, cold as opposed to hot. Ice is white.
•Why may Gary have associated "potent caustic enzyme" with the color black? In todays videogames acid damage is often shown as green. Maybe Gary knew that some strong acids, like concentrated sulfuric acid, instantly charr organic matter black.
•Having played war games and read history Gygax certainly knew about deadly chlorine gas in the first world war. And he translated "Draco Chlorinum" to "Green Dragon".
•Lightning is often depicted as yellow, but when air conducts electricity it emitts blue light. The color is called "electric blue".
•Today purple is sometimes associated with poison, but I do not know if that was an association in the US in the early seventies.
•And Gold? I do not know, but the gold dragon was a much later addition.
In the end we don't know where the colors of D&D dragons come from and we may never know, but it was fun to explore and dig a little.
Thanks to Jon Peterson for his great books and Dan Collins for his inspiring blog.
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