Princess and dragon is an archetypical premise common to many legends, fairy tales, and chivalric romances.[1] Northrop Frye identified it as a central form of the quest romance.
The story 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.[2] Normally the princess ends up married to the dragonslayer.
The motifs of the hero who finds the princess about to be sacrificed to the dragon and saves her, the false hero who takes his place, and the final revelation of the true hero, are the identifying marks of the Aarne–Thompson folktale type 300, the Dragon-Slayer. They also appear in type 303, the Two Brothers.[3] These two tales have been found, in different variants, in countries all over the world.[4]
The "princess and dragon" scenario is given even more weight in popular imagination than it is in the original tales; the stereotypical hero is envisioned as slaying dragons even though, for instance, the Brothers Grimm had only a few tales of dragon and giant slayers among hundreds of tales.[5]
- ^ Huizinga, Johan (1924). The Autumn of the Middle Ages. p. 83. ISBN 0-226-35992-1.
- ^ Frye, Northrop (1957). Anatomy of Criticism. Canada. p. 189. ISBN 0-691-01298-9.
{{cite book}}: CS1 maint: location missing publisher (link) - ^ Thompson, Stith (1977). The Folktale. Berkeley; Los Angeles; London: University of California Press. pp. 24–25.
- ^ Thompson, Stith (1977). The Folktale. Berkeley; Los Angeles; London: University of California Press. p. 27.
- ^ Tatar, Maria. The Annotated Classic Fairy Tales. p. 282. ISBN 0-393-05163-3.
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