Fridleif the Dragon Slayer

edited by

D. L. Ashliman
© 2009

Fridleif ... set forth on his [courtship] voyage; and his fleet being becalmed, he invaded some villages to look for food; where, being received hospitably by a certain Grubb, and at last winning his daughter in marriage, he begat a son named Olaf. After some time had passed he also won Frogertha; but, while going back to his own country, he had a bad voyage, and was driven on the shores of an unknown island.

A certain man appeared to him in a vision, and instructed him to dig up a treasure that was buried in the ground, and also to attack the dragon that guarded it, covering himself in an ox-hide to escape the poison; teaching him also to meet the envenomed fangs with a hide stretched over his shield. Therefore, to test the vision, he attacked the snake as it rose out of the waves, and for a long time cast spears against its scaly side; in vain, for its hard and shelly body foiled the darts flung at it. But the snake, shaking its mass of coils, uprooted the trees which it brushed past by winding its tail about them. Moreover, by constantly dragging its body, it hollowed the ground down to the solid rock, and had made a sheer bank on either hand, just as in some places we see hills parted by an intervening valley. So Fridleif, seeing that the upper part of the creature was proof against attack, assailed the lower side with his sword, and piercing the groin, drew blood from the quivering beast.

When it was dead, he unearthed the money from the underground chamber and had it taken off in his ships.

• Source: The First Nine Books of the Danish History of Saxo Grammaticus [Gesta Danorum], translated by Oliver Elton (London: David Nutt, 1894), p. 222.

• Saxo Grammaticus lived between about 1150 and 1220.

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Revised December 27, 2009.