In a legend, Saint George—a soldier venerated in Christianity—defeats a dragon at Dragon Hill, Uffington. The story goes that the dragon originally extorted tribute from villagers. When they ran out of livestock and trinkets for the dragon, they started giving up a human tribute once a day. And, one day, the princess herself was chosen as the next offering. As she was walking towards the dragon's cave, St.George sees her and asks her why she was crying. The princess tells the saint about the dragon's atrocities and asks him to flee immediately, in fear that he might be killed too. But, the saint refuses to flee, slays the dragon and rescues the princess. The narrative was first set in Cappadocia in the earliest sources of the 11th and 12th centuries, but transferred to Libya in the 13th-century Golden Legend.[1]
The narrative has pre-Christian origins (Jason and Medea, Perseus and Andromeda, Typhon, etc.),[1] and is recorded in various saints' lives prior to its attribution to Saint George specifically. It was particularly attributed to Saint Theodore Tiro in the 9th and 10th centuries, and was first transferred to Saint George in the 11th century. The oldest known record of Saint George slaying a dragon is found in a Georgian text of the 11th century.[2][3]
The legend and iconography spread rapidly through the Byzantine cultural sphere in the 12th century. It reached Western Christian tradition still in the 12th century, via the crusades. The knights of the First Crusade believed that Saint George, along with his fellow soldier-saints Demetrius, Maurice, Theodore and Mercurius, had fought alongside them at Antioch and Jerusalem. The legend was popularised in Western tradition in the 13th century based on its Latin versions in the Speculum Historiale and the Golden Legend. At first limited to the courtly setting of Chivalric romance, the legend was popularised in the 13th century and became a favourite literary and pictorial subject in the Late Middle Ages and Renaissance, and it has become an integral part of the Christian traditions relating to Saint George in both Eastern and Western tradition.
- ^ a b St. George and the Dragon: Introduction in: E. Gordon Whatley, Anne B. Thompson, Robert K. Upchurch (eds.), Saints' Lives in Middle Spanish Collections (2004).
- ^ Privalova, E. L. (1977). Pavnisi (in Russian). Tbilisi: Metsniereba. p. 73.
- ^ Tuite, Kevin (2022). "The Old Georgian Version of the Miracle of St George, the Princess and the Dragon: Text, Commentary and Translation". In Dorfmann-Lazarev, Igor (ed.). Sharing Myths, Texts and Sanctuaries in the South Caucasus: Apocryphal Themes in Literatures, Arts and Cults from Late Antiquity to the Middle Ages (PDF). Leuven: Peeters. pp. 60–94. ISBN 9789042947146.