Medieval Dragon-Slayers of the Near East

In the Shahnameh (“The Book of Kings”), one of Rostam's exploits is to defeat a fire-breathing dragon with the help of his horse Raksch. The motif of the dragon destroying villages and kidnapping young girls to devour them is present in Slavic folklore and Eastern European tales as well as in Persian literature. The entire Indo-European heritage invariably describes a dragon as an adversary, powerful and fearsome, hybrid but bound to the land. This vision, popularized by Tolkien, was able to take hold in fantasy stories of the 1950s to 1980s, in Moorcock or Le Guin, but then changed direction under the effect of other influences.