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Eric Hinkle's avatar

I do like the picture of the dancing dragons. From Victorian times, I guess by the look?

I also seem to recall that in Eastern European folklore, dragons, well male dragons, were notorious for their desire for human women. Which was supposedly how some legendary and historical heroes from that part of the world were born, from a woman who made love to a dragon.

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Mary Catelli's avatar

Exactly! H. J. Ford's illustration for *The Yellow Fairy Book*. Bonus points if you can tell which of the fairy tales from the next paragraph it illustrates.

😇

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Eric Hinkle's avatar

I'd have to get my hands on a copy of the Yellow Fairy Book first to learn what fairy tales are in it. I'm wondering if it comes from one that appeared in a collection called 'A Book of Dragons' that I read when I was a boy, which ended with a kindly but lonely dragon who'd befriended the hero dancing with a dragoness who'd been enslaved by an evil witch until the hero made an end of her, and he took the dragoness to meet his dragon friend.

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Mary Catelli's avatar

Really? I didn't give enough clues in that paragraph?

But *The Yellow Fairy Book* is public domain and on the web in lots of places.

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Eric Hinkle's avatar

I know about the 'Color' Fairy Books. They used to be all over the local libraries when I was a boy. Of course now they're all gone and replaced with 'socially relevant' works that you'd expect to find in Eustace Scrubb's school.

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