In the 1981 sword-and-sorcery film Dragonslayer, it is the policy of King Casiodorus to appease the dragon by offering women, chosen by lottery.
Why women? The dragon is an animal. It just wants food. Why not feed it cattle or pigs or sheep?
This was never adequately explained in the legend of St. George, either.
Virgins, not just women.
its part of the sacrifice myth, you ALWAYS sacrifice a virgin.
Whew! Dodged that bullet…
Young women, in the film, but their virginity seems not to have been tested. E.g., Valerian escapes the lottery by pretending to be a boy. Under the system you’re describing, she might have disqualified herself much more easily.
You’re right. That movie about virgin eating dragons, sorcery and pseudo-medievalism was seriously lacking in logic. :rolleyes:
I think the believability of the notion that dragons crave maidens is on a par with the legendary hoarding of gold and treasure by dragons. What the heck is a dragon going to do with gold and treasure? Wear lotsa bling to impress the other dragons?
How do we know it wasn’t tested? Just because they didn’t go through the motions of showing how they determine someone is a virgin doesn’t mean they didn’t check. It might be that they just assumed any woman who wasn’t married was a virgin. Unless she was known to be loose with her favors or something.
This seems like a rather strange nitpick to me. As someone previously mentioned, aren’t virgin sacrifices pretty much the default? Virgins represent purity, no? So you sacrafice something that is pure, or sacred in a way, to appease the monster. Though the dragon consumes the woman I don’t believe he does so out of a desire to slake his hunger, at least not his physical hunger. What he desires is to slake his sexual desires for a virgin, yeah, that’s it, that’s the ticket.
Marc
I remember reading a story one time where the “dragon” was a metaphor for the old king. He wanted gold and jewels to keep himself in the style to which he had become accustomed, and would “devour” young virgins (read: deflower) because he was a horny old goat.
I can’t remember where I read that.
The cynical answer : It’s so whoever is in charge of selecting sacrifices can pressure the girls into having sex with them. I recall a story with that scenario; one of the virgins met the dragon, who complained he was starving because all he got were young, bony virgins. She suggested he widen his diet - to, say, the fat and parasitic priesthood that was doing the sacrificing. It worked.
Dragon : “I don’t think I want a virgin this time.”
High Priest : “Well, ah . . . what DO you want ?”
Dragon : “Something . . .fat.”
Priest < squeaking > : “Fat ?!”
< MUNCH >
If I recall the movie aright, it was implied throughout that Vermithrax Pejorative (what an excellent name for a dragon) had greater than animal intelligence. For example, after it is sealed in its cave by the avalanche, it seeks revenge by destroying a nearby town-- not a reaction one would expect of a mere animal. Fortunately (in my opinion), the filmmakers chose not to hammer this home by having the dragon talk, as might have been expected in a Disney movie. As a result, Vermithrax is a much more convincing threat-- formidably alien and inhuman.
In this light, the maiden sacrifice could be viewed as a symbolic gesture of fealty on the part of the villagers. By offering up one of their children rather than a cow or sheep, the locals show the depth of their fear and respect of the dragon. The pact seems to stipulate that, as long as the villagers demonstrate they know who’s boss, the dragon will tolerate them living in proximity to its lair. Cassiodorus may claim to rule, but Vermithrax is their true tyrant sovereign and everyone knows it.
That was kind of an audacious movie for Disney, wasn’t it? Darker, more adult in tone-- those were experimental times for the studio. Boy, roads not taken, eh?
What an odd statement. There’s no reason why a movie (or any work of fiction) about “dragons, sorcery and pseudo-medievalism” can’t be logical, as long as it uses those elements in a consistent and logical way.
Perhaps you meant to question the movie’s realism, but that’s quite a different matter. If a movie establishes that dragons exist and you then see a dragon in the movie, that’s not a lapse in logic.
That story is in one of Esther Friesner’s Chicks in Chainmail books.
< scratches head > Are you sure ? I thought it was in one of the Marion Zimmer Bradley’s Sword and Sorceress anthologies. Or perhaps it was in both.
After you’ve dealt with a few dragons, some of this stuff makes a little more sense. They collect gold because it looks good, doesn’t tarnish, feels good to rub against, and, according to Morkeleb the black, it echoes their true name in a song that is almost euphoric to sense.
Virgins? I suspect it originally was because young girls were more tender and higher in fat (old fat people are probably kind of gamy) and boys were working the farm from a young age so were also stringy. The virgin thing was partially to prevent the breakup of couples, what everyone else has already said about dirty ol’ kings getting some, and partially because once the first one started getting only virgins, they all wanted only virgins (dragons are funny that way). Pride is really the only reason I can think of that they’d be so picky, since a healthy cow would certainly be more filling.
They want it to sleep on. Apparently dragons find a bed of gold coins, pointy crowns and jewel-encrusted goblets to be very comfy.
Weel, this movie had more than few holes aside from the fantasy setting, although it also had some of the best jokes ever put into a fantasy movie.
It’s established in the movie that dragons are part of a whole realm of magic that’s fading from the world; magic (as people imagine it) tends to be tied to powerfully symbolic things. Virgins symbolize everything pure and precious, so a virgin sacrifice is really significant.
About the only thing I’d change about that movie is the awful incidental music. It had one of my favorite movie villains (I think the character name was Tyrian) – because he wasn’t really a villain; he just consistently did whatever he felt was necessary to protect the realm, including defying his king.
In The Flight of Dragons, Peter Dickinson offered up the following explanation: By the cube-square law, nothing that big should be able to fly, at least, not the way a bird flies. (There’s a reason why the condor is the largest flying animal and not all that good at flying.) But a dragon’s body is mostly empty space – it’s a big hydrogen dirigible. The hydrogen (which also allows the dragon to breathe fire) is generated internally by complex biochemical process with a lot of volatile, corrosive waste products. Dragons like sleeping on gold because, unlike practically anything else they might sleep on, it will neither catch fire nor dissolve.
I still think the Dragon from this movie is the best representation of a dragon out there. (on film)
Well, let’s look at this logically.
It’s not “why do dragons eat young maidens?”, it’s “Why do legends about dragons say that they eat young maidens?”
The dragon in the movie eats young maidens because that’s what dragons of legend do. And why do the legends say dragons eat maidens? Maidens are pure, sure. But if the dragon requires a hero to slay it, the sacrificial maiden is then available for the hero to claim as his reward. This is essentially Perseus and Andromeda, a story over 3000 years old. Since dragons are foiled by heroes the heroes require a manly reward.
Contrast this with witches, which are foiled by children. Therefore witches eat children, and are foiled by the very children they were going to eat, and the children get a reward appropriate for children…like a gingerbread house to eat.