Note 59.1 — Chapter XVII · THE RESCUE OF ANDROMEDA IN SAGAS.

Variants in east and west represent the maiden as her own deliverer. In the Golden Legend of à Voragine we read that Saint Margaret was flung into a dungeon, after tortures of the kind that churchmen, with equal piety and delight, ascribed to their martyrs and inflicted on their opponents. In her cell she prayed to the Lord that the Enemy with whom she was fighting might appear to her in visible form. A huge dragon instantly assailed and attempted to devour her; but she made the sign of the cross, and it vanished. It is elsewhere stated, we are told, that the dragon had actually got her into its mouth and was about to swallow her, when she fortified herself with the sign of the cross: the dragon forthwith burst asunder and the virgin came forth unharmed. Here, however, the pious author becomes critical. It was not incredible that the Devil should come in the shape of a dragon and should seek to devour her, nor that she should repulse him unaided save by the sign of the cross. But that he should have got her between his jaws, and that he should have burst asunder, was apocryphal and frivolous.59.1 Obviously it would never have done to let people believe that the Devil had come to an end in this way: it would be killing the goose that laid the golden eggs.