How to train your dragon

How to Train Your Dragon is a children's novel by British author Cressida Cowell, first published in 2003.

The book is built as the memoir of a hero who has to be made rather than introduced. Hiccup is the son of the Viking chieftain Stoick the Vast and is presented at the start as a disappointment by his community's standards: too quiet to be heard over a meal, too weak to beat his rival Snotlout at their school sport, and expected to prove himself by going into a cave full of dragons to find a pet. The test in front of him is a cave full of dragons, where he is expected to find a pet of his own and come out having proved something to a community that has already decided what he is worth.

The stakes are therefore social before they are physical, since his problem is that he does not fit the model of a Viking hero and has to learn to be one anyway. DreamWorks Animation began adapting the series in 2004, and the 2010 film directed by Chris Sanders and Dean DeBlois draws its premise from this first book while changing the relationship between Hiccup and the dragon he finds.