St. George “will be not so chivalrous”

One of the many things I’ve had to process in my journey towards Orthodoxy is the relationship between history and legend, and the first conversation I remember having with my priest on this subject took place after a wedding he presided over two years ago. The wedding took place in a church other than our own, and there, I happened to spot an icon of St. George slaying a dragon.

FWIW, my priest and I are both quite happy to put this story in the same category as those poetic but scientifically incorrect references in the liturgy to pelicans feeding their young with blood from their breasts, but the part of me that likes to separate fact from fiction still feels the line here is a tad blurry for my tastes. And it doesn’t help that I have actually come across more fundamentalist types — only online, not in person, thank God! — who have actually insisted on this story’s historicity and said, “How do you know there weren’t any dragons?” Oy vey.

Anyhoo, I was reminded of all that today when I read an item at FilmStew.com, which states that David Auburn, the playwright behind Proof (my review), is now working on a script for a movie called St. George and the Dragon. Apparently this film is the brainstorm of Doug Wick, who saw a painting based on this legend three years ago; the IMDB lists Wick as a producer of Gladiator (2000; my review), Hollow Man (2000), Bewitched (2005) and Stuart Little (1999-2002; my comments), among others.

As one might expect in this day and age, this new film will not be a straightforward telling of the heroic tale. Says Wick: “St. George and the Dragon is the enduring myth of a knight’s struggle to save a feudal princess from a fearsome beast. In Auburn’s retelling, the knight will be not so chivalrous, and the princess not so chaste.” Perhaps the beast will not be so fearsome, either, then?

And FWIW, I say this just one day after seeing Sturla Gunnarsson’s Beowulf & Grendel, which does its part to deconstruct the mythmaking process and the demonization of enemy beasts, and to blame at least part of the mythmaking process on Christianity. More on that later, as the Vancouver film festival approaches.