When you or I read “The Hobbit,” or “The Dragon Riders of Pern,” or even perhaps “The Apocalypse of John,” it’s rather unlikely that we think of the dragons depicted therein as objectively real creatures – either in the distant past or in the present (well, at least it is for me). That’s because in our post-modern world, we divide the things we can prove or at least think can be proven from those that we deem to exist exclusively in human imagination. However for those living in the British Isles a millennium ago – give or take a few centuries – such creatures as dragons were unquestionably as real as the person sitting next to you in the mead hall.