How to Train Your Dragon Dragons: Names and Species

The dragons that matter most in the How to Train Your Dragon films are Toothless, the Light Fury, the Red Death, the Bewilderbeast and the Deathgrippers, because each one decides the outcome of at least one film. The story begins on Berk, a Viking island where dragons raid the village and steal livestock, so the first dragons you meet are enemies before they become friends.

The animated films are How to Train Your Dragon (2010), directed by Chris Sanders and Dean DeBlois, How to Train Your Dragon 2 (2014), directed by Dean DeBlois, and How to Train Your Dragon: The Hidden World (2019), also directed by Dean DeBlois. The live action How to Train Your Dragon (2025), directed by Dean DeBlois, retells the first story with real sets and digital dragons. The live action How to Train Your Dragon 2 (2027) is dated for June 11, 2027.

If you are choosing a film for a family evening, all four released films are rated PG in the US. The dragons' stories run through major plot turns, including a death and the endings of the films.

Toothless is a Night Fury, a rare dragon that Hiccup shoots down with a homemade launcher in the opening act of How to Train Your Dragon (2010). Hiccup finds the injured dragon in the woods, cannot bring himself to kill it, and names it Toothless. In that film the character is voiced by Randy Thom (uncredited).

What makes Toothless the center of the saga is that he cannot fly alone at first. Hiccup builds him a prosthetic tail fin, and the two fly together with Hiccup in a harness. That arrangement is the heart of the first film, and it gives the franchise one of its most direct pictures of trust between a person and an animal.

In How to Train Your Dragon 2 (2014), the freed dragons rally to Toothless and accept him as their new alpha. In How to Train Your Dragon: The Hidden World (2019), he is the alpha of the hidden world, and the hunter Grimmel is determined to use him. In the live action How to Train Your Dragon (2025), Toothless ends the story with a prosthetic fin that matches Hiccup's prosthetic foot.

Toothless's mate is the Light Fury, a dragon introduced in How to Train Your Dragon: The Hidden World (2019). Grimmel uses a female Light Fury as bait to lure Toothless, because the warlords want him as an alpha. The dragons in the films are not shown marrying.

Toothless and the Light Fury meet in the woods and are clearly drawn to one another, but she runs when she senses the humans. Later, Hiccup and Astrid find the Hidden World, the dragon haven, where Toothless is now the alpha and the Light Fury is his mate. Grimmel follows and captures both dragons, and when he drugs the Light Fury and flies off, the chase that follows is the film's final set piece. She rescues Toothless after he is tranquilized and falls.

The ending shows the pair ten years later with three young hybrid dragons, which gives her one of the more complete arcs for a dragon character in the saga.

The Red Death is the colossal dragon at the heart of the hidden nest in How to Train Your Dragon (2010), and it holds power by forcing the other dragons to bring it food.

Toothless is the one who leads Hiccup and Astrid to the place where the dragons live, and that is where they come face to face with it. Things turn when Toothless is captured during Hiccup's final exam. Stoick takes this as proof that his son betrayed the village, disowns him and sails the fleet toward the nest. Hiccup frees Toothless, gathers his friends and brings the training dragons into the battle.

The Red Death ends in a fiery final battle with Hiccup and Toothless, and the win costs Hiccup his left foot. The live action How to Train Your Dragon (2025) gives its giant dragon a different finish: Hiccup and Toothless lure it into the sky and set it ablaze, and it crashes into the volcano and explodes.

A Bewilderbeast is a giant alpha dragon that controls other dragons, and How to Train Your Dragon 2 (2014) shows two of them clashing. One rules the hidden ice sanctuary where Hiccup's mother, Valka, has spent years sheltering dragons.

The warlord Drago Bludvist owns the other. When he strikes the sanctuary, his Bewilderbeast kills the old alpha, and every dragon in sight falls under his command. That control makes Toothless fire at Hiccup, and Stoick dies shielding his son. No other dragon in the saga causes a loss that heavy.

Hiccup then returns to Berk and frees Toothless from the hold, and the freed dragons rally to him. Together they drive Drago's Bewilderbeast back into the sea, and Drago goes with it. The dragons then accept Toothless as their new alpha, which sets up the third film.

The Deathgrippers are hunting dragons that Grimmel brings to capture Toothless in How to Train Your Dragon: The Hidden World (2019). They wreck much of Berk after Grimmel confronts Hiccup and demands Toothless, which is why Hiccup leads the villagers and their dragons away by sea to an island they name New Berk.

They return in the climax. Grimmel uses Toothless to take control of Berk's dragons, and Hiccup and the riders use wingsuits to strike back and free him. In the chase that follows, Hiccup and Toothless beat the Deathgrippers, but Toothless is tranquilized and falls.

As a villain's tool the Deathgrippers work differently from the Red Death or the Bewilderbeast. They are hunters rather than rulers, and they give the third film its sense of a persistent threat that follows the heroes across the water.

The hybrid young are the three offspring of Toothless and the Light Fury, shown ten years later at the end of How to Train Your Dragon: The Hidden World (2019). Hiccup and Astrid, now married with children, visit the Hidden World and meet them.

The scene closes the saga with a promise from Hiccup that dragons will stay hidden until the two species can live together in peace. It also shows that Toothless and the Light Fury settled in the Hidden World after the Berkians released their dragons.

How to Train Your Dragon: Homecoming (2019) is a television special rather than a film.

Stormfly, Hookfang, Meatlug, Barf and Belch, Grump and Cloudjumper are the named dragons that fly beside Toothless in the How to Train Your Dragon films, and they matter more as companions than as threats. Each is a smaller story than the Red Death or the Bewilderbeast, but together they show how far Berk has come from the days of raids.

Stormfly is Astrid's dragon. In How to Train Your Dragon 2 (2014), she saves Eret from execution at Drago's camp, which is one of the few moments in the saga where a rider's dragon changes the fate of a person outside the main group.

Hookfang is a Monstrous Nightmare. In the live action How to Train Your Dragon (2025), Hiccup faces Hookfang in his final exam, which puts a species name and a personality on the dragon Hiccup refuses to kill. That scene is where Hiccup's kindness first becomes public, and it is what exposes Toothless.

Meatlug, Barf and Belch, Grump and Cloudjumper round out the roster of named dragons. Deadly Nadder, Gronckle and Hideous Zippleback are among the other dragon species in the franchise, and the same Monstrous Nightmare name covers a whole species rather than one dragon. In my opinion, the fun of these dragons is in how different they look from the sleek Night Fury: the films use them to show that training works with many kinds of dragon, not only the rarest one.

The live action films also change how they are made. Puppets were used on set so the actors had something to perform against, and Framestore's team programmed eight-axis gimbals that the riders sat on during flight scenes. Dean DeBlois has said the animated Toothless is an exaggeration of a real creature, and that approach guided how all the dragons in the live action film were designed.

The live action How to Train Your Dragon (2025) keeps the dragons of How to Train Your Dragon (2010), led by Toothless the Night Fury, and How to Train Your Dragon 2 (2027) is dated for June 11, 2027. Mason Thames plays Hiccup, Nico Parker plays Astrid and Gerard Butler plays Stoick, and the dragons are created digitally around them.

The climax is the same in outline: a giant dragon in the nest is lured into the sky and set ablaze. The ending differs slightly in detail, with Toothless getting a prosthetic fin to match Hiccup's prosthetic foot, and dragons then live alongside the villagers.

How to Train Your Dragon 2 (2027) is in production, with Dean DeBlois writing and directing and Cate Blanchett joining as Valka. Universal dated it at CinemaCon in April 2025, and no move has been reported. If it follows the animated sequel, it would introduce the Bewilderbeast to a live action audience, though no studio has confirmed that plot detail.

The strongest dragon in the How to Train Your Dragon films is the Bewilderbeast, followed by the Red Death, Toothless, the Light Fury and the Deathgrippers. In my opinion, that order is the fairest one: the films never publish a power scale, so it rests on what each dragon actually does on screen.

1. Bewilderbeast. It takes control of every dragon in sight and turns Toothless against Hiccup. Nothing else in the saga removes a character's free will at that scale, and it is the only dragon whose power costs Stoick his life.

2. Red Death. It forces the rest of the dragons to feed it, and it takes a fleet, a fiery duel and Hiccup's left foot to bring it down. It ranks behind the Bewilderbeast only because it commands through fear rather than control.

3. Toothless. He is the Night Fury who becomes an alpha, leads the freed dragons against Drago's Bewilderbeast and beats the Deathgrippers alongside Hiccup. He sits below the Red Death even though he defeats it, because he does so with Hiccup on his back and the ranking judges each dragon's own power. It could be argued he deserves a higher place, since his strength is that others choose to follow him.

4. Light Fury. The third film's climax turns on her, but she acts as a partner to Toothless rather than as a force that shapes a whole film.

5. Deathgrippers. They do real damage to Berk, but they are beaten in the chase, and Grimmel needs them as tools.

If you want the strongest dragon story rather than the strongest dragon, start with How to Train Your Dragon (2010) and watch Toothless take on the Red Death.