Cressida Cowell: Dragon riding represents humanity’s attempt to control the wild

The How to Train Your Dragon author on why despair stops us imagining solutions, how stories make us more empathetic, and what Vikings can teach us about masculinity and leadership today.

A quarter of a century on from How to Train Your Dragon, I’m struck by how many of the themes still feel extraordinarily relevant. Some things have changed enormously, of course. One of the things I was consciously exploring at the beginning was masculinity; what kind of man you are supposed to be. I was writing about Vikings, who are almost a stereotype of masculinity, and I found that fascinating.

At the time, I had just had a baby myself, and I think becoming a parent changes the way you look at everything. You suddenly realise that somebody has let you leave hospital with a child, even though you feel you know absolutely nothing about raising one. So I found myself looking back at my own childhood and asking questions about what it means to bring up a child, what sort of person you hope they become, and what kind of world you are preparing them for.

In that sense, How to Train Your Dragon could almost have been called How to Train Your Baby. It was about leadership and courage and kindness, but it was also about parenting. And perhaps because I was thinking so much about children, I was also thinking very consciously about reading itself. One of the reasons I write for children is because I desperately want to get children reading for fun. That was hardwired into the books from the beginning.

Even 25 years ago, I could already see the challenge. Films and television and digital entertainment were becoming more and more exciting and sophisticated, and books were competing for children’s attention in a completely different landscape from the one I grew up in. I wanted to create something that felt welcoming and child-friendly. At the time, middle-grade books packed with illustrations were less common, especially for older readers. I wanted the book itself to feel inviting; almost to say to children, “Come in, this is fun.” I wanted it to feel playful and alive.

Only one in four children now reads for fun

That challenge has only become harder. The latest figures suggest that only one in four children now reads for fun. It has become tougher and tougher to persuade children to pick up books simply because they enjoy them. So alongside writing stories that children genuinely love, there is also this constant effort to explain why books matter so much in the first place.

But I’m not in the despair business. Despair is one of the great enemies. As soon as you despair, you stop imagining solutions. That is something I feel very strongly about, and it’s a major theme in my books as well. Children are fundamentally hopeful beings. One of the extraordinary things about writing for children is that it forces you to look at the world through hopeful eyes.

Children believe in the impossible. They naturally think beyond limits in a way adults often forget how to do. Einstein said that no problem can be solved with the same mindset that created it, and that imagination encircles the world. Children understand that instinctively. They haven’t yet learned cynicism. They don’t yet assume that impossible things cannot happen.

That matters enormously when we are facing problems that feel overwhelming, whether that is the climate crisis or the reading crisis or any number of other things. Adults often turn away from problems because they feel too huge to confront. Children don’t do that in the same way. They still believe solutions are possible.

That sense of imagination and possibility is deeply connected to reading. We have a habit of separating creativity from science or mathematics, as though they belong to entirely different worlds, but they are all part of the same human capacity. Creativity is not separate from intelligence. Reading develops both.

Books are word-based mediums in a way films and television are not. Films can be magnificent – they have music and movement and spectacle – but books ask something different of us. They require language, and language shapes thought. The more words you have, the more nuanced and sophisticated your thinking becomes.

If we lose reading, if we lose books, we lose access to centuries and centuries of accumulated human wisdom

I remember reading about an extraordinary experiment where scientists placed electrodes on people’s heads while they listened to Shakespeare. Shakespeare uses language in unusual and inventive ways – turning nouns into verbs, inventing words, disrupting patterns – and what researchers discovered was that new neural pathways were being formed as people listened. You could literally see creativity happening in the brain.

That fascinates me because it reveals how reading changes us intellectually. But books also do something else that is just as important: they cultivate empathy. In films, things happen out there on a screen. In books, they happen inside your own mind. When you read, you become somebody else. You are Hiccup. You are inside another consciousness.

That relationship between writer and reader is incredibly intimate. A book is never complete until the reader imagines it into being. That is why people can feel almost possessive about books they love. If a film adaptation differs from what they imagined, they can feel betrayed by it. But no film could ever reproduce millions of different private imaginations. That tension only reveals the extraordinary power of reading.

And reading connects us not only to other people now, but to people who lived centuries or even millennia ago. Over the holidays I reread The Odyssey, and it struck me again how miraculous books really are. Through reading, we are speaking to the intelligent dead. We are hearing voices from thousands of years ago. If we lose reading, if we lose books, we lose access to centuries and centuries of accumulated human wisdom.

We are still trying to work out our relationship with nature and our place within it.

That continuity matters profoundly. Human beings themselves have not changed as much as we sometimes imagine. The themes we wrestle with today – leadership, courage, power, our relationship with nature – are the same themes people were wrestling with hundreds and thousands of years ago. Writing about Vikings made me realise that very clearly. Dragons in my books represent the wild. Dragon riding represents humanity’s attempt to control the wild. We are still trying to work out our relationship with nature and our place within it.

Children often understand the urgency of that relationship more instinctively than adults do. If you show a child a factory farm, they immediately respond to it emotionally and morally. They haven’t yet learned to distance themselves from uncomfortable truths. In many ways, children can be the best of us.

That is why it worries me so much when children become disconnected from nature and from language at the same time. Robert Macfarlane writes beautifully about this, about how nature words have disappeared from dictionaries and been replaced by technological language. If children stop playing outdoors, if they stop encountering the natural world directly, and if they simultaneously lose the language to describe it, then we are severing something incredibly important.

When I was a child, we played outdoors unsupervised all the time. Through that freedom, children learn risk and imagination and attachment. They learn to cherish the world around them. Children naturally want to play in nature if we allow them to. They naturally want stories too.

That is why the reading crisis matters so much. This is not simply about literacy in the narrow educational sense, it is about whether children fall in love with reading. That is an entirely different thing.

We need adults to rediscover reading too.

One of the hopeful things happening now is the National Year of Reading*. I think it is enormously important because it recognises that reading is not just a school task. There are practical things people can do – volunteering, supporting libraries, helping schools build reading cultures – but there is also a broader cultural shift that needs to happen. We need adults to rediscover reading too.

People lose the habit of reading. But once you return to it, you remember how transformative it is. Books change the way you see the world. They sharpen your thinking, deepen your empathy and expand your imagination. There is a kind of magic in that process.

That is what I have always tried to bring into my own books. Yes, they are funny adventure stories about dragons, but underneath that, everything is designed to nurture intelligence, creativity and empathy. The made-up Dragonese language is there partly to play with words and stimulate curiosity. The children drawing and inventing their own dragons are engaging creatively with the stories themselves.

Even characters who begin as caricatures evolve in ways that encourage empathy. One of the bully characters in the series starts off drawn in a deliberately cartoonish style, but later in the books I began drawing him more realistically, more vulnerably, because I wanted readers to move beyond seeing him as simply “the bully” and start recognising his humanity.

That, to me, is one of the great powers of storytelling. Stories allow us to enter into somebody else’s inner life. They encourage us to imagine differently. And imagination is not frivolous. It is essential.

Without imagination, we cannot solve problems. Without imagination, we give up. And if we give up, nothing changes.

So yes, there are reasons to feel urgency. We are running out of time in many ways, particularly when it comes to the environment. But urgency is different from hopelessness. Hope is active. Hope is what allows people to keep working towards solutions.

Children understand that instinctively. They still believe things can be changed. Perhaps part of our job as adults is not simply teaching children, but relearning from them – recovering some of that courage and imagination ourselves.

This conversation took place in April 2026 and has been edited and condensed for clarity and flow.

Cressida’s new book, How To Train Your Dragon School: Fight of the Flamestrike, is out in paperback on 4 June 2026. 

Cressida will be speaking at this year’s Hay Festival. 

*The 2026 National Year of Reading is a UK government campaign spearheaded by the Department for Education and the National Literacy Trust to help more people (re)discover the joy of reading and make it part of their everyday lives.