“THE THREE SUITORS OF THE KING’S DAUGHTER”: CHARACTER ROLES IN THE ESTONIAN VERSIONS OF THE DRAGON SLAYER (AT 300)

The first fairy tale type (AT 300) in the Aarne-Thompson type in-dex, the fight of a hero with the mythical dragon, has provided material for both the sacred as well as the profane kind of fabulated stories, for myth as well as fairy tale. The myth of dragon-slaying can be met in all mythologies in which the dragon appears as an independent being. By killing the dragon the hero frees the water it has swallowed, gets hold of a treasure it has guarded, or frees a person, who in most cases is a young maiden that has been kidnapped (MNM: 394). Lutz Rörich (1981: 788) has noted that dragon slaying often marks a certain liminal situation – the creation of an order (a city, a state, an epoch or a religion) or the ending of something. The dragon’s appearance at the beginning or end of the sacral nar-rative, as well as its dimensions ‘that surpass everything ’ show that it is located at an utmost limit and that a fight with it is a fight in the superlative. Thus, fighting the dragon can signify a universal general principle, the overcoming of anything evil by anything good. In Christianity the defeating of the dragon came to symbolize the overcoming of paganism and was employed in saint legends. The honour of defeating the dragon has been attributed to more than sixty different Catholic saints. In the Christian canon it was St. George who, in addition to St. Michael and Ste. Margaret, has gained special fame and has been depicted on most of the iconographic images dedicated to the topic (Röhrich 1981: 795–796, 810–812). If we proceed from the myths and legends to the even “less sacred” material in the realm of fabulated stories, i.e., fairy tales, the fight with the dragon is widely known in here as well; according to the data in ‘Enzyklopädie des Märchens ’ it appears in at least fifteen fairy tale types (ibid.: 798). We are first and foremost interested i