Taming the Dragon
The stories on this page are companions to my writing on Substack
Go to my library of Myth retellings
Not all dragons are the same.
Some dragons are the manifestation of malice and must be slain.
Others are not evil, only lost or misguided.
This collection gathers ancient myths where women meet the dragon.
Each story reveals a different way the feminine transforms the wild, not by slaying it, but by entering into relationship with it.
There are dragons that must be slain.
These are the ones that devour truth and seek only destruction.
They belong to the domain of the hero, whose courage protects life’s fragile boundary.
Then there are those that are misguided, lost, or misunderstood.
They represent instinct, vitality, and power that has simply lost its way.
They do not need a sword, they need a soul.
Wisdom is to know the difference. The maiden’s act of taming does not weaken the hero’s legacy, it completes it.
Saint Martha and the Tarasque (from The Golden Legend)
The legend of St Martha and the Tarasque comes from the Golden Legend (Legenda Aurea), a medieval collection of saints’ lives compiled by Jacobus de Voragine around 1260 CE. It became one of the earliest Christian stories to portray feminine holiness subduing chaos through compassion rather than conquest.
Una and the Lion (from The Faerie Queen)
Una and the Lion appears in Book I of The Faerie Queene by Edmund Spenser, first published in 1590 during the reign of Queen Elizabeth I. The poem is an allegory of virtue and spiritual journey, written in early modern English verse. Una represents Truth and Holiness, while the Lion symbolizes strength brought into right order through purity.
Beauty and the Beast
The earliest written version of Beauty and the Beast (La Belle et la Bête) was published in 1740 by Gabrielle-Suzanne Barbot de Villeneuve, a French novelist of the Enlightenment salons. Her story was long and intricate, rich with the mythic psychology of love and transformation. Sixteen years later, Jeanne-Marie Leprince de Beaumont abridged and moralized the tale for her 1756 children’s collection Le Magasin des Enfants. It was this shorter version, stripped of the politics of the fairy court and the erotic undercurrents of Villeneuve’s text, that became the story we know today.
Vasilisa and Baba Yaga
Vasilisa the Beautiful is a Russian folktale first recorded in the nineteenth century by Alexander Afanasyev, who gathered the oral stories of the Slavic people much as the Brothers Grimm did in Germany. Its heart is older than any written record - a story of feminine initiation that echoes the ancient rites of passage once guiding a girl’s awakening into mature womanhood.
Shamhat and Enkidu (From The Epic of Gilgamesh)
From the Epic of Gilgamesh, one of the oldest surviving works of literature, with roots in Sumerian poems from over four thousand years ago and later Akkadian adaptations. The story of Shamhat and Enkidu emerges in Old Babylonian versions, recorded in cuneiform, and refined in later Babylonian texts.
The Descent of Inanna originates from Sumer in ancient Mesopotamia, with surviving tablets dating to the Old Babylonian period (circa 1900–1600 BCE). It is one of the oldest recorded myths of death and rebirth, likely rooted in an even older oral tradition. The story is preserved in Sumerian cuneiform tablets from Nippur and Ur.
The standard English rendering comes from the Electronic Text Corpus of Sumerian Literature (ETCSL 1.4.1, University of Oxford), with a widely respected literary interpretation by Diane Wolkstein and Samuel Noah Kramer in Inanna, Queen of Heaven and Earth (1983).
Here Inanna, Queen of Heaven, descends into the Great Below to face her sister Ereshkigal, Queen of the Dead. At each of the seven gates she is stripped of her symbols of power, until she enters naked and bowed low. She is judged, killed, and hung upon a hook. Only through compassion, mirroring, and the intervention of liminal beings does she return to life. Her ascent demands a price, and the cycle of descent and return becomes woven into the rhythm of the seasons.
This is one of humanity’s earliest tales of transformation, where power gives way to surrender, death yields to renewal, and the feminine descends not to conquer the darkness but to encounter it, integrate it, and rise changed.