"I spent a great deal of time as a child on a tiny, uninhabited island off the west coast of Scotland. The island had no roads, houses or electricity..."

"... just a storm-blown, windy wilderness of sea birds and heather. My family and I would be dropped off like castaways on the island by a local boatman for the summer holidays and picked up again weeks later. While we were staying on the island, we had no way of contacting the outside world. Because there wasn’t any electricity, the house was lit by candlelight.... In the evenings, my father told me and my siblings tales of the Vikings who invaded the island 1,200 years before, of the quarrelsome ancient British tribes who fought each other and of dragons who were supposed to live in the caves in the cliffs of the island. That was when I first started writing stories about dragons and Vikings, way back when I was nine years old, by candlelight on that little island. These were the stories that later turned into 'How to Train Your Dragon.'"

From "To Save the Earth, We Should Teach Children the Magic of Nature/We must give children the opportunity to interact with the wilderness, so that they learn to preserve the natural world" by Cressida Cowell (NYT).