"What the fairy tale provides is a Saint George to kill the dragon." ~ An obscure martyr whose tale became an enduring legend

 

"The baby has known the dragon intimately since he had an imagination.
What the fairy tale provides for him is a Saint George to kill the dragon."
—G. K. Chesterton

April 23 is the feast of Saint George. This legendary saint did indeed exist, though details of his life and martyrdom, probably under Diocletian, have been lost is the mists of time and covered over by a tremendous amount of legendary and fantastical accounts written centuries after his life. He is mentioned in the so-called Gelasian Decretal which contains a list of works which Catholics are encouraged to accept and reject, thought to have been compiled by Pope Gelasius in the late 5th century AD. Though the provenance of the Decretal has problems of its own, St. George (called Georgius) is mentioned in it as an authentic martyr, though his Passio is considered to have been written by heretics and is, therefore, unreliable.

Despite his obscurity, the cult of Saint George took off in the Middle Ages, transforming the nearly unknown Roman soldier martyr into the prototypical medieval knight who slays the dragon and rescues the princess. A very readable and familiar version of this tale may be found in the Golden Legend, originally compiled in the late 13th century AD. It is interesting to note when reading this account that George supposedly met the dragon in Libya where it was consuming the children of that land. It should be recalled that North Africa was the seat the Carthage, a nation which once practiced child sacrifice on a large scale. One wonders how much, if at all, that very ancient memory informed the fable.

The quote featured here from G. K. Chesterton and may be found in his work entitled, Tremendous Trifles, Chapter XVII: The Red Angel. Here is the quote in context:

I find that there really are human beings who think fairy tales bad for children. I do not speak of the man in the green tie, for him I can never count truly human. But a lady has written me an earnest letter saying that fairy tales ought not to be taught to children even if they are true. She says that it is cruel to tell children fairy tales, because it frightens them. You might just as well say that it is cruel to give girls sentimental novels because it makes them cry. All this kind of talk is based on that complete forgetting of what a child is like which has been the firm foundation of so many educational schemes. If you keep bogies and goblins away from children they would make them up for themselves. One small child in the dark can invent more hells than Swedenborg. One small child can imagine monsters too big and black to get into any picture, and give them names too unearthly and cacophonous to have occurred in the cries of any lunatic. The child, to begin with, commonly likes horrors, and he continues to indulge in them even when he does not like them. There is just as much difficulty in saying exactly where pure pain begins in his case, as there is in ours when we walk of our own free will into the torture-chamber of a great tragedy. The fear does not come from fairy tales; the fear comes from the universe of the soul.

The timidity of the child or the savage is entirely reasonable; they are alarmed at this world, because this world is a very alarming place. They dislike being alone because it is verily and indeed an awful idea to be alone. Barbarians fear the unknown for the same reason that Agnostics worship it—because it is a fact. Fairy tales, then, are not responsible for producing in children fear, or any of the shapes of fear; fairy tales do not give the child the idea of the evil or the ugly; that is in the child already, because it is in the world already. Fairy tales do not give the child his first idea of bogey. What fairy tales give the child is his first clear idea of the possible defeat of bogey. The baby has known the dragon intimately ever since he had an imagination. What the fairy tale provides for him is a St. George to kill the dragon.

Exactly what the fairy tale does is this: it accustoms him for a series of clear pictures to the idea that these limitless terrors had a limit, that these shapeless enemies have enemies in the knights of God, that there is something in the universe more mystical than darkness, and stronger than strong fear. When I was a child I have stared at the darkness until the whole black bulk of it turned into one negro giant taller than heaven. If there was one star in the sky it only made him a Cyclops. But fairy tales restored my mental health, for next day I read an authentic account of how a negro giant with one eye, of quite equal dimensions, had been baffled by a little boy like myself (of similar inexperience and even lower social status) by means of a sword, some bad riddles, and a brave heart. Sometimes the sea at night seemed as dreadful as any dragon. But then I was acquainted with many youngest sons and little sailors to whom a dragon or two was as simple as the sea.

And indeed, the legend of of the brave Saint George slaying the dragon—who is certainly a metaphor for the ancient serpent, Satan—has been comforting children and adult Christians for centuries.

The image above is an illumination depicting St. George slaying the dragon which appears in a Book of Hours and Missal created between 1485 and 1490.