So, today we’re going to head to Scotland to talk about the folk tale “The Nine Maidens of Dundee.” Though that’s kind of a misnomer, since it’s not really about them. It’s more that what happens to them is the story’s inciting incident.

What happens to them is pretty unpleasant, by the way.

We start with this farmer who lives on a farm outside of what was then the village of Dundee. I say village because now Dundee is the fourth largest city in Scotland, so it’s a bit bigger now. But I digress.

Anyway, he lives on this farm with his nine daughters. They have a good day of doing farm stuff, after which the farmer asks his oldest daughter to head out to the local well and get them some water. There’s a bit of a problem when she doesn’t return, though, so he sends out his next oldest daughter. This continues on until he runs out of daughters to send, at which point he starts to get a bit concerned.

Probably should have been concerned when his first daughter didn’t come back, but OK.

At any rate, he does find his daughters. They’re all dead, but he finds them He does have a bit of a bigger, more immediate problem, though: amongst his children’s corpses is a big-ass dragon.

So he gets the fuck out of there, since he can’t really take on a whole dragon by himself, and rouses the town into an angry mob. The mob, by the way, is lead by the town’s blacksmith Martin. Martin was sweet on one of the farmer’s daughters, and is understandably a bit unhappy about the whole girlfriend-killed-by-a-dragon thing.

The mob heads out and finds the dragon who, when faced with an entire pissed off village, decides discretion is the better part of valor. Unfortunately for the dragon, Martin is there and starts beating the shit out of it with a wooden cudgel.

Just as Martin’s about to land the killing blow, the townsfolk shout, “strike, Martin” at him, which ended up giving the place the name of Strike-Martin. This eventually morphed into Strathmartine, which eventually leant its name to a street and a school in modern-day Dundee.

So the moral of this story seems to be don’t make your kids go to the well alone, or a dragon will murder them.

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