As the trilogy based on the world she created comes to an end, no one has deeper feelings about saying goodbye to this chapter of Toothless and Hiccup in How to Train Your Dragon: The Hidden World than their creator, author Cressida Cowell.
“It sounds very unlikely, but it’s based on my own childhood,” reflects Cowell, “and the Isle of Berk is a real place where I grew up as a child. Stoick the Vast is based on my relationship with my father. Of course, the ending, ‘There were dragons when I was a boy,’ are the opening words of the books that I wrote 20 years ago when I just had a child. I tell the story from the point of view of the boy growing up, looking back to my own childhood, and Hiccup is a father to Toothless. The themes are so enmeshed with my own life that it’s incredibly bittersweet.”
