Dragon Slayers of Myth and Legend
When it comes to the mythologies from around the world, no creature has quite the prominence as the Dragon. Bestial creatures, they are almost universally treated in folklore as being evil, greedy, gluttonous predators of man and all he holds dear. However, they do have one redeeming quality. Their existence provides the perfect justification for Dragonslayers to come into being. Heroes of mythic, even divine origin, the classic trope is that these Dragonslayers must kill an evil dragon in order to save a helpless, woman of the upper classes (often a princess) that they might serve justice and receive an equally just reward. Sometimes even the Princess’ hand in marriage.
When the title of Dragonslayer is mentioned, most of you likely first think of the story of Saint George slaying a Dragon (which I discussed in my last article about Dragons in mythology around the world), but there are many other Dragonslayers of note that I was equally interested in learning about.
Erlang Shen
In Chinese mythology, Erlang Shen is a God known to possess an additional eye in the center of his forehead that has a truth-seeing capacity. At the root of several stories, my favorite…
