Princess and dragon

Princess and dragon is a generic premise common to many legends, fairy tales, and chivalric romances.Northrop Frye identified it as a central form of the quest romance.

The story involves an upper class woman, generally a princess or similar high-ranking nobility, saved from a dragon, either a literal dragon or a similar danger, by the virtuous hero (see Damsel in distress). She may be the first woman endangered by the peril, or may be the end of a long succession of women who were not of as high birth as she is, nor as fortunate. Normally the princess ends up married to the dragon-slayer, though sometimes after an imposter has by threats intimidated her into silence, and the dragon-slayer has had to demonstrate the truth.

The motifs of the hero who finds the princess about to be sacrificed to the dragon and saves her, the false hero who takes his place, and the final revelation of the true hero, are the identifying marks of the Aarne-Thompson folktale type 300, the Dragon-Slayer, and appear, with other elements before and after in type 303, the Two Brothers. These two tales have been found, in different variants, in countries all over the world.