2 thinkers, books, and ideas connected to this field.
American linguist at Harvard, one of the foremost Indo-Europeanists of the 20th century. His monumental How to Kill a Dragon reconstructed Proto-Indo-European poetic formulas — particularly the dragon-slaying formula — from comparative analysis of ancient texts.
Monumental scholarly work by Calvert Watkins (1995). Reconstructs aspects of Proto-Indo-European poetic language and formula, with sustained focus on the dragon-slaying formula as it appears across Vedic, Greek, Hittite, Celtic, Germanic, and other Indo-European traditions.