serizawa3000

"Jordanus, of course, had never seen a dragon. I think it improbable that any had survived to within a thousand years of his time. Like many another learned man he was copying his story from some other manuscript, perhaps combining two or three sources and trying to make sense of them where they contradicted each other. These sources would also be copies of yet other copies and re-tellings, going back to a time when the tradition lived only in the spoken word, and eventually to some traveller who had actually seen the dragon-flight. Still dragon-lore dies hard, though it may become twisted in the telling. In particular the punctuation of early manuscripts is non-existent, so that it is difficult to tell which bits of the argument really belong together."

--Peter Dickinson, The Flight of Dragons

(There is a movie based very loosely on the book but anyway.)