A town hung with black crape, a princess offered to a monster, and a hero who climbs the hill to meet it — the fight with the dragon is one of the oldest shapes on the shelf. The witness wired to served text here is the Grimm tale of the two brothers (collected 1812–1857; this English rendering 1884), where a huntsman learns why a whole kingdom is in mourning: on a high hill "dwells a dragon who every year must have a" pure virgin, or it lays the country waste, and now only the King's daughter is left. Many knights have died trying; the King has promised her, and the kingdom after him, to whoever conquers the beast.

The combat itself is spare and total. When the "seven-headed dragon" comes "with loud roaring" and asks his business, the huntsman answers plainly, "I want to fight / with thee". The dragon "breathed fire out of seven jaws", meaning to suffocate him in heat and smoke, but the huntsman's faithful beasts trample out the flames, and he swings his sword until it sings through the air and strikes "off three of his heads". Twice more the monster rears and spits fire; twice more the blade answers, until with his last strength he "smote its tail off" and his animals tear it to pieces.

Stith Thompson (1885–1976), the American folklorist whose motif-index gives this famous address its number, gathers dragon-fights from across the world — Sigurd and Fáfnir, Apollo and Python, Saint George — but on our shelf today none of those curated attestations is wired to served text; only this single Grimm tale surfaces, and it surfaces as a bare candidate rather than a filed witness. Why does the imagination return again and again to the maiden, the hill, and the many-headed thing that must be met with a sword?