Princess and dragon
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Princess and dragon is a generic premise common to many legends and fairy tales. It is not a fairy tale itself, but along with the white horse rider, is a repeated cliché.
The premise involves an upper class woman, generally a princess or similar high-ranking nobility, saved from a dragon, either a literal dragon or a similar danger, by the virtuous hero (see Damsel in distress). She may be the first woman endangered by the peril, or may be the end of a long succession of women who were not of as high birth as she is, nor as fortunate. Normally the princess ends up married to the dragon-slayer, though sometimes after an imposter has by threats intimidated her into silence, and the dragon-slayer has had to demonstrate the truth.
[edit] History
One of the earliest example of the motif comes from the Ancient Greek tale of Perseus, who rescued the princess Andromeda from a sea monster. This was taken up into other Greek myths, such as Heracles, who rescued the princess Hesione of Troy from a similar sea monster.
Most ancient version depicted the dragon as the expression of a god's wrath: in Andromeda's case, because her mother Cassiopea had compared her beauty to that of the sea nymphs, and in Hesione's, because her father had reneged on a bargain with Poseidon. This is less common in fairy tales and other, later versions, where the dragon is frequently acting out of malice.
Another variation is from the tale of Saint George and the Dragon. The tale begins with a dragon making its nest at the spring which provides a city-state with water. Consequently, the citizens had to temporarily remove the dragon from its nest in order to collect water. To do so, they offered the dragon a daily human sacrifice. The victim of the day was chosen by drawing lots. Eventually in this lottery, the lot happened to fall the local princess. The local monarch is occasionally depicted begging for her life with no result. She is offered to the dragon but at this point a traveling Saint George arrives. He faces the dragon, slays it and saves the princess. The grateful citizens then abandon their ancestral paganism and convert to Christianity.
When the tale is not about a dragon but a troll, giant, or ogre, the princess is often a captive rather than about to be eaten, as in The Three Princesses of Whiteland. These princesses are often a vital source of information to their rescuers, telling them how to perform tasks that the captor sets to them, or how to kill the monster, and when she does not know, as in The Giant Who Had No Heart in His Body, she frequently can pry the information from the giant. Despite the hero's helplessness without this information, the princess is incapable of using the knowledge herself.
Again, if a false claimant intimidates her into silence about who actually killed the monster as in the fairy tale The Two Brothers, when the hero appears, she will endorse his story, but she will not tell the truth prior to them; she often agrees to marry the false claimant in the hero's absence.
This dragon-slaying hero appears in medieval romances about knight-errants, such as the Russian Dobrynya Nikitich. In some variants of Tristan and Iseult, Tristan wins Iseult for his uncle, King Mark of Cornwall, by killing a dragon that was devastating her father's kingdom. Ludovico Ariosto took the concept up into Orlando Furioso using it not once but twice: the rescue of Angelica by Ruggiero, and Orlando rescuing Olimpia. The monster that menaced Olimpia reconnected to the Greek myths; although Ariosto described it as a legend to the characters, the story was that the monster sprung from an offense against Proteus. In neither case did he marry the rescued woman to the rescuer. Edmund Spenser depicts St. George in The Faerie Queene, but while Una is a princess who seeks aid against a dragon, and her depiction in the opening with a lamb fits the iconography of St. George pagents, the dragon imperils her parents' kingdom, and not her alone. Many tales of dragons, ending with the dragon-slayer marrying a princess, do not precisely fit this cliché because the princess is in no more danger than the rest of the threatened kingdom.
In many modern fantasy works, the dragon may hold the princess captive instead of eating her. Patricia Wrede spoofed this concept in Dealing with Dragons.
A subversion of the concept for young readers is Robert Munsch's The Paper Bag Princess, in which a princess outwits a dragon to save a prince (her betrothed, whom she proceeds to not marry).
[edit] Tales with princess and dragons
- Andromeda (mythology)
- Hesione
- The Dragon with Seven Heads in Italo Calvino's Italian Folktales
- The Two Brothers, collected by the Brothers Grimm
- The Three Dogs
- The Three Princes and their Beasts
- The Nine Peahens and the Golden Apples
- The Sea-Maiden
- The Thirteenth Son of the King of Erin
- The Bold Knight, the Apples of Youth, and the Water of Life
- The Little Bull-Calf
- Dragonslayer
- King's Quest III: To Heir Is Human
- Sleeping Beauty — in the Disney version only
- Shrek
- Super Mario Bros.
