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THE SCIENCE

OF

FAIRY TALES

AN INQUIRY INTO FAIRY MYTHOLOGY.


BY
EDWIN SIDNEY HARTLAND,
FELLOW OF THE SOCIETY OF ANTIQUARIES.


LONDON:
WALTER SCOTT,
24, WARWICK LANE, PATERNOSTER ROW.
1891.




PREFACE.


The chief object of this volume is to exhibit, in a manner acceptable to
readers who are not specialists, the application of the principles and
methods which guide investigations into popular traditions to a few of
the most remarkable stories embodying the Fairy superstitions of the
Celtic and Teutonic peoples. Some of the subjects discussed have already
been dealt with by more competent inquirers. But even in these cases I
have sometimes been able to supply additional illustrations of the
conclusions previously arrived at, and occasionally, I hope, to carry
the argument a step or two further than had been done before. I have
thus tried to render the following pages not wholly valueless to
students.

A portion of the book incorporates the substance of some articles which
I contributed to "The Archæological Review" and "Folk-Lore." But these
have been to a considerable extent re-written; and it is hoped that in
the process wider and more accurate generalizations have been attained.

My hearty thanks are due to the various friends whose generous
assistance has been recorded in the footnotes, and especially to
Professor Dr. George Stephens, the veteran antiquary of the North, and
Mr. W. G. Fretton, who have not measured their pains on behalf of one
whose only claim on them was a common desire to pry into the recesses of
the past. I am under still deeper obligations to Mr. G. L. Gomme,
F.S.A., who has so readily acceded to my request that he would read the
proof-sheets, and whose suggestions have repeatedly been of the greatest
value; and to Mr. Havelock Ellis for the counsel and suggestions which
his experience has more than once enabled him to give as the book was
passing through the press.

I have been anxious to enable the reader who cares to do so to verify
every statement made; but some of them no doubt have escaped reference.
Many books are cited again and again, and in similar cases the reader's
time is frequently wasted in searching for the first mention of a book,
so as to ascertain its title and other particulars. To avoid the trouble
I have so many times experienced in this way, I have put together in an
Appendix a list of the principal authorities made use of, indicating
them by the short title by which they are cited in the footnotes, and
giving sufficient bibliographical details to enable them to be
identified. Classics and works which are in every one's hands I have not
thought it necessary to include in the list.

E. S. H.

BARNWOOD COURT, GLOUCESTER,

_24th October, 1890._


[Transcriber's Note: Any transcriber's notes are abbreviated in the
text as TN: The caret (^) is used to indicate superscript.]




CONTENTS.


                                                                 Page
   CHAPTER I.
   THE ART OF STORY-TELLING                                         1

   CHAPTER II.
   SAVAGE IDEAS                                                    22

   CHAPTER III.
   FAIRY BIRTHS AND HUMAN MIDWIVES                                 37

   CHAPTER IV.
   FAIRY BIRTHS AND HUMAN MIDWIVES (_continued_)                   59

   CHAPTER V.
   CHANGELINGS                                                     93

   CHAPTER VI.
   ROBBERIES FROM FAIRYLAND                                       135

   CHAPTER VII.
   THE SUPERNATURAL LAPSE OF TIME IN FAIRYLAND                    161

   CHAPTER VIII.
   THE SUPERNATURAL LAPSE OF TIME IN FAIRYLAND (_continued_)      196

   CHAPTER IX.
   THE SUPERNATURAL LAPSE OF TIME IN FAIRYLAND (_continued_)      222

   CHAPTER X.
   SWAN-MAIDENS                                                   255

   CHAPTER XI.
   SWAN-MAIDENS (_continued_)                                     283

   CHAPTER XII.
   CONCLUSION                                                     333

   APPENDIX                                                       353

   INDEX                                                          367




THE SCIENCE OF FAIRY TALES.




CHAPTER I.

THE ART OF STORY-TELLING.

     The art of story-telling--Unity of human imagination--Definition
     of Fairy Tales--Variable value of Tradition--Story-telling and
     the story-teller among various peoples--The connection of
     folk-tales with folk-songs--Continuity of Tradition--Need of
     accuracy and good faith in reporting stories.


The art of story-telling has been cultivated in all ages and among all
nations of which we have any record; it is the outcome of an instinct
implanted universally in the human mind. By means of a story the savage
philosopher accounts for his own existence and that of all the phenomena
which surround him. With a story the mothers of the wildest tribes awe
their little ones into silence, or rouse them into delight. And the
weary hunters beguile the long silence of a desert night with the mirth
and wonders of a tale. The imagination is not less fruitful in the
higher races; and, passing through forms sometimes more, sometimes less,
serious, the art of story-telling unites with the kindred arts of dance
and song to form the epic or the drama, or develops under the complex
influences of modern life into the prose romance and the novel. These in
their various ways are its ultimate expression; and the loftiest genius
has found no fitter vehicle to convey its lessons of truth and beauty.

But even in the most refined products of the imagination the same
substances are found which compose the rudest. Something has, of course,
been dropped in the process; and where we can examine the process stage
by stage, we can discern the point whereat each successive portion has
been purged away. But much has also been gained. To change the figure,
it is like the continuous development of living things, amorphous at
first, by and by shooting out into monstrous growths, unwieldy and
half-organized, anon settling into compact and beautiful shapes of
subtlest power and most divine suggestion. But the last state contains
nothing more than was either obvious or latent in the first. Man's
imagination, like every other known power, works by fixed laws, the
existence and operation of which it is possible to trace; and it works
upon the same material,--the external universe, the mental and moral
constitution of man and his social relations. Hence, diverse as may seem
at first sight the results among the cultured Europeans and the debased
Hottentots, the philosophical Hindoos and the Red Indians of the Far
West, they present, on a close examination, features absolutely
identical. The outlines of a story-plot among savage races are wilder
and more unconfined; they are often a vast unhidebound corpse, but one
that bears no distant resemblance to forms we think more reasonable only
because we find it difficult to let ourselves down to the level of
savage ignorance, and to lay aside the data of thought which have been
won for us by the painful efforts of civilization. The incidents, making
all due allowance for these differences and those of climate and
physical surroundings, are not merely alike; they are often
indistinguishable. It cannot, of course, be expected that the characters
of the actors in these stories will be drawn with skill, or indeed that
any attention will be paid to them. Character-study is a late
development. True: we ought not to overlook the fact that we have to do
with barbarous ideals. In a rudimentary state of civilization the
passions, like the arts, are distinguished not by subtlety and
complexity, but by simplicity and violence of contrast. This may account
to some extent for what seems to us repulsive, inconsistent or
impossible. But we must above all things beware of crediting the
story-teller with that degree of conscious art which is only possible in
an advanced culture and under literary influences. Indeed, the
researches which are constantly extending the history of human
civilization into a remoter and remoter past, go everywhere to show that
story-telling is an inevitable and wholly unconscious growth, probably
arising, as we shall see in the next chapter, out of narratives believed
to record actual events.

I need not stop now to illustrate this position, which is no new one,
and the main lines of which I hope will be rendered apparent in the
course of this volume. But it is necessary, perhaps, to point out that,
although these are the premises from which I start, the limitations
imposed by a work of the size and pretensions of this one will not allow
me to traverse more than a very small corner of the field here opened to
view. It is, therefore, not my intention to attempt any formal proof of
the foregoing generalizations. Rather I hope that if any reader deem it
proper to require the complete evidence on which they rest, he will be
led to further investigations on his own behalf. His feet, I can promise
him, will wander along flowery paths, where every winding will bring him
fresh surprises, and every step discover new sources of enjoyment.

The stories with which we shall deal in the following pages are vaguely
called Fairy Tales. These we may define to be: Traditionary narratives
not in their present form relating to beings held to be divine, nor to
cosmological or national events, but in which the supernatural plays an
essential part. It will be seen that literary tales, such as those of
Hans Andersen and Lord Brabourne, based though they often are upon
tradition, are excluded from Fairy Tales as thus defined. Much no doubt
might be said both interesting and instructive concerning these
brilliant works. But it would be literary criticism, a thing widely
different from the scientific treatment of Fairy Tales. The Science of
Fairy Tales is concerned with tradition, and not with literature. It
finds its subjects in the stories which have descended from mouth to
mouth from an unknown past; and if reference be occasionally made to
works of conscious literary art, the value of such works is not in the
art they display, but the evidence they yield of the existence of given
tales in certain forms at periods and places approximately capable of
determination: evidence, in a word, which appropriates and fixes a
pre-existing tradition. But even in this they are inferior in importance
to historical or topographical works, where we frequently meet with
records of the utmost importance in considering the origin and meaning
of Folk-tales.

Literature, in short, of whatever kind, is of no value to the student of
Fairy Tales, as that phrase is here used, save as a witness to
Tradition. Tradition itself, however, is variable in value, if regard be
had alone to purity and originality. For a tribe may conceivably be so
isolated that it is improbable that any outside influence can have
affected its traditions for a long series of generations; or on the
other hand it may be in the highway of nations. It may be physically of
a type unique and unalloyed by foreign blood; or it may be the progeny
of a mingling of all the races on the earth. Now it is obvious that if
we desire to reason concerning the wide distribution, or the innate and
necessary character of any idea, or of any story, the testimony of a
given tribe or class of men will vary in proportion to its segregation
from other tribes and classes: where we can with most probability
exclude outside influence as a factor in its mental evolution, there we
shall gather evidence of the greatest value for the purpose of our
argument.

Again: some nations have developed the art of story-telling more highly
than others, since some stages of civilization are more favourable to
this development than others, and all nations are not in the same stage.
The further question may, therefore, be put whether these various stages
of development may not produce differences of manner in
story-telling--differences which may indicate, if they do not cause,
deep-seated differences in the value of the traditions themselves. To
make my meaning clear: a people which requires its story-tellers to
relate their stories in the very words in which they have been conveyed
from time immemorial, and allows no deviation, will preserve its
traditions with the least possible blemish and the least possible
change. In proportion as latitude in repetition is permitted and
invention is allowed to atone for want of memory, tradition will change
and become uncertain. Such latitude may be differently encouraged by
different social states. A social state is part of, and inseparable
from, the sum total of arts, knowledge, organization and customs which
we call the _civilization_, or the _stage of civilization_, of a people.
It may be worth while to spend a short time in examining the mode of
story-telling and the requirements of a story-teller among nations in
different stages of civilization. We shall thus endeavour to appreciate
the differences in the manner of telling, and to ascertain in general
terms how far these differences affect the value of the traditions.

If we turn first to some of the Celtic nations, we find a social state
in which the art of story-telling has received a high degree of
attention. The late Mr. J. F. Campbell, to whom the science of Folklore
owes an incalculable debt, describes a condition of things in the
Western Highlands extremely favourable to the cultivation of
folk-tales. Quoting from one of his most assiduous collectors, he says
that most of the inhabitants of Barra and South Uist are Roman
Catholics, unable to speak English or to read or write. Hence it is
improbable that they can have borrowed much from the literature of other
nations. Among these people in the long winter nights the recitation of
tales is very common. They gather in crowds at the houses of those who
are reputed to be good tale-tellers. Their stories frequently relate to
the exploits of the Ossianic heroes, of whose existence they are as much
convinced as ordinary English folk are of the existence and deeds of the
British army in its most recent wars. During the tales "the emotions of
the reciters are occasionally very strongly excited, and so also are
those of the listeners, almost shedding tears at one time, and giving
way to loud laughter at another. A good many of them firmly believe in
all the extravagance of these stories." Another of his collectors, a
self-educated workman in the employ of the Duke of Argyll, writing more
than thirty years ago to him, speaks of what used to take place about
Loch Lomond upwards of fifty years before--that is to say, about the
beginning of the present century. The old people then would pass the
winter evenings telling each other traditional stories. These chiefly
concerned freebooters, and tribal raids and quarrels, and included
descriptions of the manners, dress and weapons of their ancestors and
the hardships they had to endure. The youngsters also would gather, and
amuse themselves with games or the telling of tales of a more romantic
cast. But the chief story-tellers appear to have been the tailors and
shoemakers, who were literally journeymen, going from house to house in
search of work. As they travelled about, they picked up great numbers of
tales, which they repeated; "and as the country people made the telling
of these tales, and listening to hear them, their winter night's
amusement, scarcely any part of them would be lost." In these tales
Gaelic words were often used which had dropped out of ordinary
parlance, giving proof of careful adherence to the ancient forms; and
the writer records that the previous year he had heard a story told
identical with one he had heard forty years before from a different man
thirty miles away; and this story contained old Gaelic words the meaning
of which the teller did not know. A gamekeeper from Ross-shire also
testified to similar customs at his native place: the assemblies of the
young to hear their elders repeat, on winter nights, the tales they had
learned from their fathers before them, and the renown of the travelling
tailor and shoemaker. When a stranger came to the village it was the
signal for a general gathering at the house where he stayed, to listen
to his tales. The goodman of the house usually began with some favourite
tale, and the stranger was expected to do the rest. It was a common
saying: "The first tale by the goodman, and tales to daylight by the
guest." The minister, however, came to the village in 1830, and the
schoolmaster soon followed, with the inevitable result of putting an end
to these delightful times.[1]

Not very different is the account given by M. Luzel of the _Veillées_ in
which he has often taken part in Brittany. In the lonely farmhouse after
the evening meal prayers are said, and the life in Breton of the saint
of the day read, all the family assemble with the servants and labourers
around the old-fashioned hearth, where the fire of oaken logs spirts and
blazes, defying the wind and the rain or snow without. The talk is of
the oxen and the horses and the work of the season. The women are at
their wheels; and while they spin they sing love ditties, or ballads of
more tragic or martial tone. The children running about grow tired of
their games, and of the tedious conversation of their elders, and demand
a tale, it matters not what, of giants, or goblins, or witches--nay,
even of ghosts. They are soon gratified; and if an old man, as
frequently happens, be the narrator, he is fortified and rewarded for
the toil by a mug of cider constantly replenished. One such depositary
of tradition is described as a blind beggar, a veritable Homer in wooden
shoon, with an inexhaustible memory of songs and tales of every kind. He
was welcome everywhere, in the well-to-do farmhouse as in the humble
cottage. He stayed as long as he pleased, sometimes for whole weeks; and
it was with reluctance that he was allowed to leave in order to become
for a time the charm of another fireside, where he was always awaited
with impatience.[2]

M. Braga, the Portuguese scholar, quotes an old French writer, Jean le
Chapelain, as recording a custom in Normandy similar to that of
Ross-shire, that the guest was always expected to repay hospitality by
telling tales or singing songs to his host. And he states that the
emigrants from Portugal to Brazil took this custom with them. In Gascony
M. Arnaudin formed his collection of tales a few years ago by assisting
at gatherings like those just described in Brittany, as well as at
marriages and at various agricultural festivals.[3]

Similar customs existed in Wales within living memory, and in remote
districts they probably exist to-day. If they do not now continue in
England, it is at least certain that our forefathers did not differ in
this respect from their neighbours. A writer of the seventeenth century,
in enumerating the causes of upholding "the damnable doctrine of
witchcraft," mentions: "Old wives' fables, who sit talking and chatting
of many false old stories of Witches and Fairies and Robin Goodfellow,
and walking spirits and the dead walking again; all of which lying
fancies people are more naturally inclined to listen after than to the
Scriptures." And if we go further back we find in chapter clv. of the
printed editions of the "Gesta Romanorum" an interesting picture of
domestic life. The whole family is portrayed gathering round the fire in
the winter evenings and beguiling the time by telling stories. Such we
are informed was the custom among the higher classes. It was, indeed,
the custom among all classes, not only in England but on the Continent,
throughout the Middle Ages. The eminent French antiquary, Paul Lacroix,
speaks of wakes, or evening parties, where fairy tales and other
superstitions were propagated, as having a very ancient origin. He
states that they are still (as we have already seen in Brittany and
Gascony) the custom in most of the French provinces, and that they
formed important events in the private lives of the peasants.[4]

It is difficult to sever the occasion and mode of the tale-telling from
the character of the teller; nor would it be wise to do so. And in this
connection it is interesting to pause for a moment on Dr. Pitré's
description of Agatuzza Messia, the old woman from whom he derived so
large a number of the stories in his magnificent collection, and whom he
regarded as a model story-teller. I am tempted to quote his account at
length. "Anything but beautiful," he says, "she has facile speech,
efficacious phrases, an attractive manner of telling, whence you divine
her extraordinary memory and the sallies of her natural wit. Messia
already reckons her seventy years, and is a mother, grandmother, and
great grandmother. As a child, she was told by her grandmother an
infinity of tales which she had learned from her mother, and _she_ in
turn from her grandfather; she had a good memory and never forgot them.
There are women who have heard hundreds of tales and remember none; and
there are others who, though they remember them, have not the grace of
narration. Among her companions of the Borgo, a quarter of Palermo,
Messia enjoyed the reputation of a fine story-teller; and the more one
heard her, the more one desired to hear. Almost half a century ago she
was obliged to go with her husband to Messina, and lived there some
time: a circumstance, this, worthy of note, since our countrywomen never
go away from their own district save from the gravest necessity.
Returning to her native home, she spoke of things of which the gossips
of the neighbourhood could not speak: she spoke of the Citadel, a
fortress which no one could take, not even the Turks themselves; she
spoke of the Pharos of Messina, which was beautiful, but dangerous for
sailors; she spoke of Reggio in Calabria, which, facing the walls of
Messina, seemed to wish to touch hands with them; and she remembered and
mimicked the pronunciation of the Milazzesi, who spoke, Messia said, so
curiously as to make one laugh. All these reminiscences have remained
most vivid in her memory. She cannot read, but she knows so many things
that no one else knows, and repeats them with a propriety of tongue that
is a pleasure to hear. This is a characteristic to which I call my
readers' attention. If the tale turns upon a vessel which has to make a
voyage, she utters, without remarking it, or without seeming to do so,
sailors' phrases, and words which only seamen and those who have to do
with seamen are acquainted with. If the heroine arrives, poor and
desolate, at a baker's and takes a place there, Messia's language is so
completely that of the trade that you would believe that the baking of
bread had been her business, whereas at Palermo this occupation, an
ordinary one in the families of the large and small communes of the
island, is that of professional bakers alone.... As a young woman Messia
was a tailoress; when through toil her sight became weakened, she turned
to sewing winter quilts. But in the midst of this work, whereby she
earns her living, she finds time for the fulfilment of her religious
duties; every day, winter and summer, in rain or snow, in the gloaming
she goes to her prayers. Whatever feast is celebrated in the church, she
is solicitous to attend: Monday, she is at the Ponte dell' Ammiraglio
praying for the Souls of the Beheaded; Wednesday, you find her at San
Giuseppe keeping the festival of the Madonna della Providenza; every
Friday she goes to San Francesco di Paola, reciting by the way her
accustomed beads; and if one Saturday pass when she ought to go to the
Madonna dei Cappuccini, another does not; and there she prays with a
devotion which none can understand who has not experienced it. Messia
witnessed my birth and held me in her arms: hence I have been able to
collect from her mouth the many and beautiful traditions to which her
name is appended. She has repeated to the grown man the tales she had
told to the child thirty years before; nor has her narration lost a
shade of the old sincerity, vivacity, and grace. The reader will only
find the cold and naked words; but Messia's narration consists, more
than in words, in the restless movement of the eyes, in the waving of
the arms, in the gestures of the whole person, which rises, walks around
the room, bends, and is again uplifted, making her voice now soft, now
excited, now fearful, now sweet, now hoarse, as it portrays the voices
of the various personages, and the action which these are
performing."[5]

Such a woman as is here described is a born story-teller; and her art,
as exhibited in the tales attributed to her in Dr. Pitré's collection,
reaches perhaps the highest point possible in tradition. Women are
usually the best narrators of nursery tales. Most of the modern
collections, from that of the brothers Grimm downwards, owe their
choicest treasures to women. In the Panjab, however, Captain Temple
ascribes to children marvellous power of telling tales, which he states
they are not slow to exercise after sunset, when the scanty evening meal
is done and they huddle together in their little beds beneath the
twinkling stars, while the hot air cools, the mosquito sings, and the
village dogs bark at imaginary foes. The Rev. Hinton Knowles' collection
was gathered in Cashmere apparently from men and boys only; but all
classes contributed, from the governor and the pandit down to the barber
and the day-labourer, the only qualification being that they should be
entirely free from European influence.[6]

But nursery tales told simply for amusement are far from being the only
kind of traditional narrative. Savage and barbarous races, to whom the
art of writing is unknown, are dependent upon memory for such records as
they have of their past; and sometimes a professional class arises to
preserve and repeat the stories believed to embody these records. Among
the Maories and their Polynesian kinsmen the priests are the great
depositaries of tradition. It is principally from them that Mr. White
and the Rev. W. W. Gill have obtained their collections. But the orators
and chiefs are also fully conversant with the narratives; and their
speeches are filled with allusions to them, and with quotations from
ancient poems relating the deeds of their forefathers. The difficulty of
following such allusions, and consequently of understanding the meaning
of the chiefs when addressing him on behalf of their fellow-countrymen,
first induced, or compelled, Sir George Grey, when Governor of New
Zealand, to make the inquiries whose results are embodied in his work on
Polynesian Mythology. The Eskimo of Greenland, at the other end of the
world, divide their tales into two classes: the ancient and the modern.
The former may be considered, Dr. Rink says, as more or less the
property of the whole nation, while the latter are limited to certain
parts of the country, or even to certain people who claim to be akin to
one another. The art of telling these tales is "practised by certain
persons specially gifted in this respect; and among a hundred people
there may generally be found one or two particularly favoured with the
art of the _raconteur_, besides several tolerable narrators." It is the
narrators of the ancient tales "who compose the more recent stories by
picking up the occurrences and adventures of their latest ancestors,
handed down occasionally by some old members of the family, and
connecting and embellishing them by a large addition of the
supernatural, for which purpose resort is always had to the same
traditional and mystic elements of the ancient folklore."[7]

But the art of story-telling has not everywhere given rise to a
professional class. When the Malagasy receive friends at their houses,
they themselves recount the deeds of their ancestors, which are handed
down from father to son, and form the principal topic of conversation.
So, too, the savage Ahts of Vancouver Island sit round their fires
singing and chatting; "and the older men, we are told, lying and
bragging after the manner of story-tellers, recount their feats in war,
or the chase, to a listening group." Mr. Im Thurn has drawn an
interesting picture of the habits at night of the Indian tribes of
Guiana. The men, if at home, spend the greater part of the day in their
hammocks, smoking, "and leisurely fashioning arrowheads, or some such
articles of use or of ornament.... When the day has at last come to an
end, and the women have gathered together enough wood for the fires
during the night, they, too, throw themselves into their hammocks; and
all talk together. Till far into the night the men tell endless stories,
sometimes droning them out in a sort of monotonous chant, sometimes
delivering them with a startling amount of emphasis and gesticulation.
The boys and younger men add to the noise by marching round the houses,
blowing horns and playing on flutes. There is but little rest to be
obtained in an Indian settlement by night. These people sleep, as dogs
do, without difficulty, for brief periods, but frequently and
indifferently by day or night as may be convenient. The men, having
slept at intervals during the day, do not need night-rest; the women are
not considered in the matter. At last, in the very middle of their
stories, the party drops off to sleep; and all is quiet for a short
while. Presently some woman gets up to renew the fires, or to see to
some other domestic work. Roused by the noise which she makes, all the
dogs of the settlement break into a chorus of barks and yelps. This
wakes the children, who begin to scream. The men turn in their hammocks,
and immediately resume their stories, apparently from the point at which
they left off, and as if they had never ceased. This time it is but a
short interruption to the silence of the night; and before long
everything again becomes quiet, till some new outbreak is caused, much
as was the last. In the very middle of the night there are perhaps some
hours of quiet. But about an hour before dawn, some of the men having to
go out to hunt, effectually wake everybody about them by playing flutes,
or beating drums, as they go to bathe before leaving the settlement."[8]

But the folk-tale cannot be separated in this inquiry from the folk-song
with which, in its origin and development, it is so closely connected.
In India there are, or were until recent years, everywhere professional
bards; and the stories told in Indian villages are frequently the
substance of the chants of these bards. More than this, the line between
singing and narration is so faintly drawn, that the bards themselves
often interpose great patches of prose between the metrical portions of
their recitations. Fairs, festivals, and marriages all over India are
attended by the bards, who are always ready to perform for pay and
drink. Mr. Leland believes the stories he obtained from the Christian
Algonkins of New England, concerning the ancient heroes of the race and
other mythical personages, to have once been delivered as poems from
generation to generation and always chanted. The deeds of Maori warriors
are handed down in song; just as we find in Beowulf, the story of
Hrothgar's ancestors was sung before his own companions-in-arms by his
gleemen to the accompaniment of some instrument after the mead cup had
gone round. The Roman historian attests the prevalence among the German
tribes of ancient songs, which he expressly mentions as their only kind
of memory or record,--thus showing that all their tales, whether
mythologic or heroic, were for better preservation cast into metrical
form. Some of these, enshrining the deeds of their heroes, were chanted
on going into battle, in order to arouse the warriors' courage. And as
far back as the light of history, or of literature, penetrates, not only
the Teutonic, but also the Celtic nations loved to have their actions
celebrated thus. To a Welsh king his household bard was as necessary as
his domestic chaplain, or his court physician, and in the ancient laws
his duties, his precedence, his perquisites, and even the songs he was
expected to sing, are minutely prescribed. The bards were organized into
a regular order, or college, with an official chief. They were not
merely singers or poets, but also tale-tellers; and from the Mabinogion
we gather that listening to songs and tales was one of the habitual, if
not daily pastimes, of a court.[9]

It is needless to follow through the Middle Ages the history of the
troubadour, the minstrel and the jongleur, who played so large part in
the social life of those times. Many of them were retainers of noblemen
and kings; but others roamed about from place to place, singing their
lays and reciting their stories (for they dealt in prose as well as
verse), very much in the manner of the Indian bards just mentioned.
Their stock-in-trade must have been partly traditional and partly of
their own composition. In this respect they were probably less
hide-bound than their Indian brethren are. For the latter, whether
retainers of the native grandees, as many of them are, or members of the
humbler class of wandering minstrels, are expected to repeat their lays
as they have received them. But, although in the main these professional
gentlemen adhere to the traditional words which they know by heart, the
temptation must be very strong to foist at suitable pauses into their
tales impromptu passages--best described in stage language as
"gag"--which they think will be acceptable to their audience. And
whether or not this be actually the case with the Indian bards, we are
expressly told that it is so with the Arab story-teller, and that it
accounts for much of the ribaldry and filth which have become embedded
in the immortal "Nights." A viol having only one string accompanies the
passages in verse with which the stories are interlarded; and a similar
instrument seems to be used for the like purpose among the orthodox
Guslars of Bosnia and Herzegovina.[10] A description given by Sir
Richard Burton of a story-teller at the bazaar at Tangier may stand,
except as to the external details, for that of an Arab reciter
throughout Northern Africa and the Moslem East. "The market people," he
says, "form a ring about the reciter, a stalwart man, affecting little
raiment besides a broad waist-belt into which his lower chiffons are
tucked, and noticeable only for his shock hair, wild eyes, broad grin,
and generally disreputable aspect. He usually handles a short stick;
and, when drummer and piper are absent, he carries a tiny tomtom shaped
like an hour-glass, upon which he taps the periods. This Scealuidhe, as
the Irish call him, opens the drama with an extempore prayer, proving
that he and the audience are good Moslems; he speaks slowly and with
emphasis, varying the diction with breaks of animation, abundant action
and the most comical grimace: he advances, retires, and wheels about,
illustrating every point with pantomime; and his features, voice and
gestures are so expressive that even Europeans who cannot understand a
word of Arabic, divine the meaning of his tale. The audience stands
breathless and motionless, surprising strangers by the ingenuousness and
freshness of feeling hidden under their hard and savage exterior. The
performance usually ends with the embryo actor going round for alms, and
flourishing in the air every silver bit, the usual honorarium being a
few _f'lús_, that marvellous money of Barbary, big coppers worth
one-twelfth of a penny." Another writer, who has published modern Arab
folk-tales, obtained eleven out of twelve from his cook, a man who could
neither read nor write, but possessed an excellent memory. His stories
were derived from his mother and aunts, and from old women who
frequented his early home. The remaining tale was dictated by a sheikh
with some, though small, pretensions to education, and this tale, though
at bottom a genuine folk-tale, presented traces of literary
manipulation.[11]

The literary touches here spoken of were probably not impromptu. But it
must be admitted that the tendency to insert local colouring and "gag"
is almost irresistible amongst the Arabs. Dr. Steere notices it as a
characteristic of the story-tellers of the Swahili, a people of mixed
Arab and Negro descent at Zanzibar;[12] and it is perhaps inevitable in
a professional reciter whose audience, like himself, is restless and
vivacious in so high a degree. The only case in which any restraint
would be certain to be felt is where a narrative believed to be of
religious import is given. Under the influence of religious feeling the
most mobile of races become conservative; and traditions of a sacred
character are the most likely of all to be handed down unchanged from
father to son. Directly we get outside the charmed circle of religious
custom, precept, and story, the awe which has the most powerful effect
in preserving tradition intact ceases to work; and we are left to a
somewhat less conservative force of habit to retain the old form of
words and the time-honoured ceremonies. Still this force is powerful;
the dislike of voluntary change forbids amendment even of formularies
which have long ceased to be understood, and have often become
ridiculous because their meaning has been lost. It is by no means an
uncommon thing for the rustic story-teller to be unable to explain
expressions, and indeed whole episodes, in any other way than Uncle
Remus, when called upon to say who Miss Meadows was: "She wuz in de
tale, Miss Meadows en de gals wuz, en de tale I give you like hi't wer'
gun ter me." Dr. Steere, speaking of a collection of Swahili tales by M.
Jablonsky which I think has never been published, tells us that almost
all of the tales had "sung parts," and of some of these even they who
sang them could scarcely explain the meaning. Here we may observe the
connection with the folk-song; and it is a strong evidence of adherence
to ancient tradition. Frequently in Dr. Steere's own experience the
skeleton of the story seemed to be contained in these snatches of song,
which were connected together by an account, apparently extemporized, of
the intervening history. In these latter portions, if the hypothesis of
extemporization were correct, the words of course would be different,
but the substance might remain untouched. I suspect, however, that the
extemporization was nothing like so complete as the learned writer
imagined, but rather that the tale, as told with song and narrative
mingled, was in a state of gradual decay or transition from verse to
prose, and that the prose portions were, to almost as great an extent as
the verse, traditional.

Be this as it may, the tenacity with which the illiterate story-teller
generally adheres to the substance and to the very words of his
narrative is remarkable--and this in spite of the freedom sometimes
taken of dramatic illustration, and the license to introduce occasional
local and personal allusions and "gag." These are easily separable from
the genuine tale. What Dr. Rink says of the Eskimo story-telling holds
good, more or less, all over the world. "The art," he states, "requires
the ancient tales to be related as nearly as possible in the very words
of the original version, with only a few arbitrary reiterations, and
otherwise only varied according to the individual talents of the
narrator, as to the mode of recitation, gesture, &c. The only real
discretionary power allowed by the audience to the narrator is the
insertion of a few peculiar passages from other traditions; but even in
that case no alteration of these original or elementary materials used
in the composition of tales is admissible. Generally, even the smallest
deviation from the original version will be taken notice of and
corrected, if any intelligent person happens to be present. This
circumstance," he adds, "accounts for their existence in an unaltered
shape through ages; for had there been the slightest tendency to
variation on the part of the narrator, or relish for it on that of the
audience, every similarity of these tales, told in such widely-separated
countries, would certainly have been lost in the course of centuries."
Here the audience, wedded to the accustomed formularies, is represented
as controlling any inclination to variation on the reciter's part. How
far such an attitude of mind may have been produced by previous
repetitions in the same words we need not inquire. Certain it is that
accuracy would be likely to generate the love of accuracy, and _that_
again to react so as to compel adherence to the form of words which the
ear had been led to expect. Readers of Grimm will remember the anxiety
betrayed by a peasant woman of Niederzwehr, near Cassel, that her very
words and expressions should be taken down. They who have studied the
records collectors have made of the methods they have adopted, and the
assistance they have received from narrators who have understood and
sympathized with their purpose, will not find anything exceptional in
this woman's conduct.[13]

Nor must we overlook the effect of dramatic and pantomimic action. At
first sight action, like that of Messia or the Arab reciter, might seem
to make for freedom in narration. But it may well be questioned if this
be so to any great extent. For in a short time certain attitudes, looks,
and gestures become inseparably wedded, not only in the actor's mind,
but also in the minds of the audience who have grown accustomed to them,
with the passages and the very words to which they are appropriate. The
eye as well as the ear learns what to expect, with results proportioned
to the comparative values of those two senses as avenues of knowledge.
The history of the stage, the observation of our own nurseries, will
show with how much suspicion any innovation on the mode of interpreting
an old favourite is viewed.

To sum up: it would appear that national differences in the manner of
story-telling are for the most part superficial. Whether told by men to
men in the bazaar or the coffee-house of the East, or by old men or
women to children in the sacred recesses of the European home, or by men
to a mixed assembly during the endless nights of the Arctic Circle, or
in the huts of the tropical forest, and notwithstanding the license
often taken by a professional reciter, the endeavour to render to the
audience just that which the speaker has himself received from his
predecessors is paramount. The faithful delivery of the tradition is the
principle underlying all variation of manner; and it is not confined to
any one race or people. It is not denied that changes do take place as
the story passes from one to another. This indeed is the inevitable
result of the play of the two counteracting forces just described--the
conservative tendency and the tendency to variation. It is the condition
of development; it is what makes a science of Folk-tales both necessary
and possible. Nor can it be denied that some changes are voluntary. But
the voluntary changes are rare; and the involuntary changes are only
such as are natural and unavoidable if the story is to continue its
existence in the midst of the ever-shifting social organism of humanity.
The student must, therefore, know something of the habits, the natural
and social surroundings, and the modes of the thought of the people
whose stories he examines. But this known, it is not difficult to
decipher the documents.

There is, however, one caution--namely, to be assured that the documents
are gathered direct from the lips of the illiterate story-teller, and
set down with accuracy and good faith. Every turn of phrase, awkward or
coarse though it may seem to cultured ears, must be unrelentingly
reported; and every grotesquery, each strange word, or incomprehensible
or silly incident, must be given without flinching. Any attempt to
soften down inconsistencies, vulgarities or stupidities, detracts from
the value of the text, and may hide or destroy something from which the
student may be able to make a discovery of importance to science.
Happily the collectors of the present day are fully alive to this need.
The pains they take to ensure correctness are great, and their
experiences in so doing are often very interesting. Happily, too, the
student soon learns to distinguish the collections whose sincerity is
certain from those furbished up by literary art. The latter may have
purposes of amusement to serve, but beyond that they are of
comparatively little use.


FOOTNOTES:

[1] Campbell, vol. i. pp. xii. xiv. lvii.

[2] Luzel, "Veillées," _passim_.

[3] Introduction to Romero, p. x.; Arnaudin, p. 5.

[4] Thomas Ady, "A Candle in the Dark" (1656) (_Cf._ Aubrey, "Remaines,"
p. 67); "Gesta Romanorum," Introd., p. xxv. (E.E.T.S.); Lacroix, p. 100.

[5] Pitré, vol. iv. p. xvii.

[6] "Wide-awake Stories," p. 1; Knowles, p. ix.

[7] White, vol. i. p. vi.; Sir G. Grey, p. vii.; Gill, p. xx.; Rink, pp.
83, 85.

[8] Ellis, "History of Madagascar," vol. i. p. 264; Sproat, "Scenes and
Studies of Savage Life," p. 51; Im Thurn, pp. 215, 216.

[9] Temple, "Legends of the Panjab," vol. i. p. v.; Thorburn, p. 172;
Leland, p. 12; Taylor, p. 306; "Beowulf," lay 16; Tacitus, "Germania,"
cc., 2, 3; "Ancient Laws and Institutions of Wales" (Public Record
Commission, 1841), pp. 15, 35, &c.

[10] Burton, "Nights," vol. x. p. 163; "Revue des Trad. Pop." vol. iv.
p. 6. In Greece and Albania, however, the viol would seem not to be
used. Women are the chief reciters. Von Hahn, vol. i. p. ix.

[11] Spitta Bey, p. viii.

[12] Steere, pp. v., vii.

[13] Rink, p. 85; Grimm, "Märchen," p. vii.




CHAPTER II.

SAVAGE IDEAS.

     Sagas and _Märchen_--Fairy Tales based upon ideas familiar to
     savages--The Doctrine of Spirits--The Doctrine of
     Transformation--Totemism--Death--Witchcraft--The predominance of
     imagination over reason in savages--Method of the inquiry.


Fairy Tales, as defined in the previous chapter, fall under two heads.
Under the first we may place all those stories which relate to definite
supernatural beings, or definite orders of supernatural beings, held
really to exist, and the scenes of which are usually laid in some
specified locality. Stories belonging to this class do not necessarily,
however, deal with the supernatural. Often they are told of historical
heroes, or persons believed to have once lived. For instance, the
legends of Lady Godiva and Whittington and his Cat, which, however
improbable, contain nothing of the supernatural, must be reckoned under
this head equally with the story of the Luck of Edenhall, or the Maori
tale of the Rending asunder of Heaven and Earth. In other words, this
class is by no means confined to Fairy Tales, but includes all stories
which are, or at all events have been up to recent years, and in the
form in which they come to us, looked upon as narratives of actual
occurrences. They are called _Sagas_. The other class of tales consists
of such as are told simply for amusement, like Jack and the Beanstalk,
Cinderella, Beauty and the Beast, and Puss in Boots. They may embody
incidents believed in other countries, or in other stages of
civilization, to be true in fact; but in the form in which we have them
this belief has long since been dropped. In general, the reins are
thrown upon the neck of the imagination; and, marvellous though the
story be, it cannot fail to find acceptance, because nobody asserts that
its events ever took place, and nobody desires to bring down its flights
to the level either of logic or experience. Unlike the saga, it binds
the conscience neither of teller nor of listener; its hero or heroine
has no historical name or fame, either national or local; and being
untrammelled either by history or probability, the one condition the tale
is expected to fulfil is to end happily. Stories of this class are
technically called _Märchen_: we have no better English name for them
than _Nursery Tales_.

If we inquire which of these two species of tales is the earlier in the
history of culture, it seems that the priority must be given to sagas.
The matter, indeed, is not quite free from doubt, because low down in
the scale of civilization, as among the Ainos of Japan, stories are told
which appear to be no more than _märchen_; and because, on the other
hand, it is at all times easier, even for experienced collectors, to
obtain sagas than _märchen_. But among the lower races, a vastly
preponderating number of tales recorded by Europeans who have lived with
them on the terms of the greatest intimacy is told to account for the
phenomena of nature, or their own history and organization. From many
savage peoples we have no other stories at all; and it is not uncommon
to find narratives at bottom identical with some of these told as
_märchen_ among nations that have reached a higher plane. In these
cases, at all events, it looks as if the tales, or tales from which they
had been derived, had been originally believed as true, and, having
ceased to be thus received, had continued to be repeated, in a shape
more or less altered, for mere amusement. If we may venture to affirm
this and to generalize from such cases, this is the way in which
_märchen_ have arisen.

But sagas are not only perhaps the most ancient of tales, they are
certainly the most persistent. By their attachment to places and to
persons, a religious sanction is frequently given to them, a local and
national pride is commonly felt in preserving them. Thus they are
remembered when nursery tales are forgotten; they are more easily
communicated to strangers; they find their way into literature and so
are rendered imperishable.

Fairy Tales of both these classes are compounded of incidents which are
the common property of many nations, and not a few whereof are known all
over the habitable globe. In some instances the whole plot, a more or
less intricate one, is found among races the most diverse in
civilization and character. Where the plot is intricate, or contains
elements of a kind unlikely to have originated independently, we may be
justified in suspecting diffusion from one centre. Then it is that the
history and circumstances of a nation become important factors in the
inquiry; and upon the purity of blood and the isolation from
neighbouring races may depend our decision as to the original or
derivative character of such a tradition. Sometimes the passage of a
story from one country to another can be proved by literary evidence.
This is markedly the case with Apologues and Facetious Tales, two
classes of traditions which do not come within the purview of the
present work. But the story has then passed beyond the traditional
stage, or else such proof could not be given. In tracing the history of
a folk-tale which has entered into literature, the problem is to
ascertain how far the literary variations we meet with may have been
influenced by pre-existing traditional tales formed upon similar lines.
In general, however, it may be safely said of Fairy Tales (with which we
are more immediately concerned) that the argument in favour of their
propagation from a single centre lacks support. The incidents of which
they are composed are based upon ideas not peculiar to any one people,
ideas familiar to savages everywhere, and only slowly modified and
transformed as savagery gives way to barbarism, and barbarism to modern
civilization and scientific knowledge of the material phenomena of the
universe. The ideas referred to are expressed by races in the lower
culture both in belief and in custom. And many of the tales which now
amuse our children appear to have grown out of myths believed in the
most matter-of-fact way by our remote forefathers; while others enshrine
relics of long-forgotten customs and modes of tribal organization.

There is one habit of thought familiar to savage tribes that to us,
trained through long centuries of progressive knowledge, seems in the
highest degree absurd and even incomprehensible. As a matter of
every-day practice we cannot, if we would, go back to that infantine
state of mind which regards not only our fellow men and women, but all
objects animate and inanimate around us, as instinct with a
consciousness, a personality akin to our own. This, however, is the
savage philosophy of things. To a large proportion of human beings at
the present day beasts and birds, trees and plants, the sea, the
mountains, the wind, the sun, the moon, the clouds and the stars, day
and night, the heaven and the earth, are alive and possessed of the
passions and the cunning and the will they feel within themselves. The
only difference is that these things are vastly cleverer and more
powerful than men. Hence they are to be dreaded, to be appeased--if
possible, to be outwitted--even, sometimes, to be punished. We may
observe this childish habit of thought in our nurseries to-day when one
of our little ones accidentally runs against the table, and forthwith
turns round to beat the senseless wood as if it had voluntarily and
maliciously caused his pain; or when another, looking wistfully out of
window, adjures the rain in the old rhyme:

    "Rain, rain, go away!
    Come again another day!"

Poets, too, and orators in their loftiest moods revert to language and
modes of expression which have no meaning apart from this belief in the
conscious animation of every object in the world. They may move us for
the moment by their utterances; but we never take their raptures
literally. To the savage, however, it is no figure of speech to call
upon the sun to behold some great deed, or to declare that the moon
hides her face; to assert that the ocean smiles, or that the river
swells with rage, and overwhelms a wayfarer who is crossing it, or an
unsuspecting village on its banks. These phrases for him fit the facts
of nature as closely as those which record that the man eats or the boy
runs. Nay, what would seem incredible to him would be to deny that the
sun can see or the moon hide her face, the ocean smile or the river
become enraged. Conscious personality and human emotions are visible to
him everywhere and in all things.

It matters not to the savage that human form and speech are absent.
These are not necessary, or, if they are, they can be assumed either at
will or under certain conditions. For one of the consequences, or at
least one of the accompaniments, of this stage of thought is the belief
in change of form without loss of individual identity. The bear whom the
savage meets in the woods is too cunning to appear and do battle with
him as a man; but he could if he chose. The stars were once men and
women. Sun and moon, the wind and the waters, perform all the functions
of living beings: they speak, they eat, they marry and have children.
Rocks and trees are not always as immovable as they appear: sometimes
they are to be seen as beasts or men, whose shapes they still, it may
be, dimly retain.

It follows that peoples in this stage of thought cannot have, in theory
at all events, the repugnance to a sexual union between man and the
lower animals with which religious training and the growth of
civilization have impressed all the higher races. Such peoples admit
the possibility of a marriage wherein one party may be human and the
other an animal of a different species, or even a tree or plant. If they
do not regard it as an event which can take place in their own time and
neighbourhood, it does not seem entirely incredible as an event of the
past; and sometimes customs are preserved on into a higher degree of
culture--such as that of wedding, for special purposes, a man to a
tree--unmistakably bespeaking former, if not present, beliefs. Moreover,
tribes in the stage of thought here described, hold themselves to be
actually descended from material objects often the most diverse from
human form. These are not only animals (beasts, birds, fishes, reptiles,
and even insects) or vegetables, but occasionally the sun, the sea, the
earth, and other things unendowed with life. Such mythic ancestors are
worshipped as divine. This superstition is called _Totemism_, and the
mythic ancestor is known as the _Totem_. As a people passes gradually
into a higher stage of culture, greater stress is constantly laid on the
human qualities of the Totem, until it becomes at length an
anthropomorphic god. To such deity the object previously reverenced as a
Totem is attached, and a new and modified legend grows up to account for
the connection.

The belief in metamorphosis involves opinions on the subject of death
which are worth a moment's pause. Death is a problem to all men, to the
savage as to the most civilized. Least of any can the savage look upon
it as extinction. He emphatically believes that he has something within
him that survives the dissolution of his outward frame. This is his
spirit, the seat of his consciousness, his real self. As he himself has
a spirit, so every object in the world has a spirit. He peoples the
universe, as he knows it, with spirits akin to his own. It is to their
spirits that all the varied objects around him, all the phenomena
observable by day or by night, owe the consciousness, the personality, I
have already tried to describe. These spirits are separable from the
material form with which they are clad. When the savage sleeps, his
spirit goes forth upon various adventures. These adventures he remembers
as dreams; but they are as veritable as his waking deeds; and he awakes
when his spirit returns to him. In his dreams he sees his friends, his
foes; he kills imaginary bears and venison. He knows therefore that
other men's spirits travel while their bodies sleep and undergo
adventures like his own, and in company often with his spirit. He knows
that the spirits of wild animals range abroad and encounter his spirit.
What is death but the spirit going forth to return no more? Rocks and
rivers perhaps cannot die, or at least their life immeasurably exceeds
that of men. But the trees of the forest may, for he can cut them down
and burn them. Yet, inasmuch as it is the nature of a body to have an
indwelling spirit, death--the permanent severing of body and
spirit--cannot occur naturally: it must be due to the machination of
some enemy, by violence, by poison, or by sorcery.

The spirit that has gone forth for ever is not, by quitting its bodily
tenement, deprived of power offensive and defensive. It is frequently
impelled by hostile motives to injure those yet in the flesh; and it
must, therefore, be appeased, or deceived, or driven away. This is the
end and aim of funeral rites: this is the meaning of many periodical
ceremonies in which the whole tribe takes part. For the same reason,
when the hunter slays a powerful animal, he apologizes and lays the
blame on his arrows or his spear, or on some one else. For the same
reason the woodman, when he cuts down a tree, asks permission to do so
and offers sacrifices, and he provides a green sprig to stick into the
stump as soon as the tree falls, that it may be a new home for the
spirit thus dislodged. For since the spirit is neither slain, nor
deprived of power, by destruction of the body, or by severance from the
body, it may find another to dwell in. Spirits of dead men, like other
spirits, may assume fresh bodies, new forms, and forms not necessarily
human. A favourite form is that of a snake: it was as a snake that the
spirit of Anchises appeared and accepted the offerings made by his pious
son. In their new forms the spirits of the dead are sometimes, as in
this case, kindly, at other times malicious, but always to be treated
with respect, always to be conciliated; for their power is great. They
can in their turn cause disease, misfortune, death.

Another characteristic of the mental condition I am describing must not
be omitted. Connection of thought, even though purely fortuitous, is
taken to indicate actual connection of the things represented in
thought. This connection is, of course, often founded on association of
time or place, and once formed it is not easily broken. For example, any
object once belonging to a man recalls the thought of him. The
connection between him and that object is therefore looked upon as still
existing, and he may be affected by the conduct shown towards it. This
applies with special force to such objects as articles of clothing, and
still more to footprints and to spittle, hair, nail-parings and
excrement. Injury to these with malicious intent will hurt him from whom
they are derived. In the same way a personal name is looked upon as
inseparable from its owner; and savages are frequently careful to guard
the knowledge of their true names from others, being content to be
addressed and spoken of by a nickname, or a substituted epithet. The
reason of this is that the knowledge of another's name confers power
over that other: it is as though he, or at least an essential part of
him, were in the possession of the person who had obtained the knowledge
of his name. It is perhaps not an unfair deduction from the same
premises that endows an image with the properties of its prototype--nay,
identifies it with its prototype. This leads on the one hand to
idol-worship, and on the other hand to the rites of witchcraft wherein
the wizard is said to make a figure of a man, call it by his name, and
then transfix it with nails or thorns, or burn it, with the object of
causing pain and ultimately death to the person represented. Nor is a
very different process of thought discernible in the belief that by
eating human or other flesh the spirit (or at any rate some of the
spiritual qualities) formerly animating it can be transferred to the
eater. So a brave enemy is devoured in the hope of acquiring his
bravery; and a pregnant woman is denied the flesh of hares and other
animals whose qualities it is undesirable her children should have.

To minds guiltless of inductive reasoning an accidental coincidence is a
sure proof of cause and effect. Travellers' tales are full of examples
of misfortunes quite beyond foresight or control, but attributed by the
savages among whom the narrators have sojourned to some perfectly
innocent act on their part, or merely to their presence, or to some
strange article of their equipment. Occasionally the anger of the gods
is aroused by these things; and missionaries, in particular, have
suffered much on this account. But sometimes a more direct causation is
imagined, though it is probably not always easy to distinguish the two
cases. Omens also are founded upon accidental coincidences. The most
lively imagination may fail to trace cause and effect between the
meeting of a magpie at setting out and a fruitless errand following, or
between a certain condition of the entrails of an animal sacrificed and
a victory or defeat thereafter. But the imagination is not to be beaten
thus. If the magpie did not cause failure, at all events it foretold it;
and the look of the entrails was an omen of the gain or loss of the
battle.

Again, a merely fanciful resemblance is a sufficient association to
establish actual connection. Why do the Bushmen kindle great fires in
time of drought, if not because of the similarity in appearance between
smoke and rain-clouds? Such resemblances, to give a familiar instance,
have fastened on certain rocks and stones many legends of transformation
in conformity with the belief already discussed; and they account for a
vast variety of symbolism in the rites and ceremonies of nations all
over the world.

The topic is well nigh endless; but enough has been said to enable the
reader to see how widely pervasive in human affairs is the belief in
real connection founded on nothing more substantial than association of
thought, however occasioned. Nothing, indeed, is too absurd for this
belief. It is one of the most fruitful causes of superstition; and it
only disappears very gradually from the higher civilization as the
reasoning powers become more and more highly trained. In magic, or
witchcraft, we find it developed into a system, with professional
ministers and well-established rules. By these rules its ministers
declare themselves able to perform all the wonders of transformation
referred to above, to command spirits, to bring distant persons and
things into their immediate presence, to inflict injury and death upon
whom they please, to bestow wealth and happiness, and to foretell the
future. The terror they have thus inspired, and the horrors wrought
under the influence of that terror, form one of the saddest chapters of
history.[14]

I do not of course pretend that the foregoing is a complete account of
the mental processes of savage peoples. Still less have I attempted to
trace the history of the various characteristics mentioned, or to show
the order of their evolution. To attempt either of these things would
be beyond the scope of the present work. I have simply enumerated a few
of the elements in the psychology of men in a low state of culture which
it is needful to bear in mind in order to understand the stories we are
about to examine. In those stories we shall find many impossibilities,
many absurdities and many traces of customs repulsive to our modes of
thought and foreign to our manners. The explanation is to be obtained,
not by speculations based on far-fetched metaphors supposed to have
existed in the speech of early races, nor in philological puzzles, but
by soberly inquiring into the facts of barbarian and savage life and
into the psychological phenomena of which the facts are the outcome. The
evidence of these facts and phenomena is to be found scattered up and
down the pages of writers of every age, creed and country. On hardly any
subject have men of such different degrees of learning, such various and
opposite prejudices, left us their testimony--testimony from the nature
of the subject more than ordinarily liable to be affected by prejudice,
and by the limitations of each witness's powers of observation and
opportunities of ascertaining the truth. But after all deductions for
prejudice, mistake, inaccuracy and every other shortcoming, there is
left a strong, an invincible consensus of testimony, honest, independent
and full of undesigned corroborations, to the development of the mind of
all races in the lower culture along the lines here indicated. Nay,
more; the numerous remains of archaic institutions, as well as of
beliefs among the most advanced nations, prove that they too have passed
through the very same stages in which we find the most backward still
lingering--stages which the less enlightened classes even of our own
countrymen at the present day are loth to quit. And the further we
penetrate in these investigations, the more frequent and striking are
the coincidences between the mental phenomena already described which
are still manifested by savage peoples, and those of which the evidence
has not yet disappeared from our own midst.

Nor need we be surprised at this, for the root whence all these
phenomena spring is the predominance of imagination over reason in the
uncivilized. Man, while his experience is limited to a small tract of
earth, and his life is divided between a struggle with nature and his
fellow-man for the permission and the means to live, on the one hand,
and seasons of idleness, empty perforce of every opportunity and every
desire for improving his condition, on the other, cannot acquire the
materials of a real knowledge of his physical environment. His only data
for interpreting the world and the objects it contains, so far as he is
acquainted with them, are his own consciousness and his own emotions.
Upon these his drafts are unbounded; and if he have any curiosity about
the origin and government of things, his hypotheses take the shape of
tales in which the actors, whatever form they bear, are essentially
himself in motive and deed, but magnified and distorted to meet his
wishes or his fears, or the conditions of the problem as presented to
his limited vision. The thought which is the measure of his universe is
as yet hardly disciplined by anything beyond his passions.

Nor does the predominance of the imagination issue only in these tales
and in songs--the two modes of expression we most readily attribute to
the imagination. In practical life it issues in superstitious
observances, and in social and political institutions. Social
institutions are sometimes of great complexity, even in the depth of
savagery. Together with political institutions they supply the model on
which are framed man's ideas of the relationship to one another and to
himself of the supernatural beings whom he creates; and in turn they
reflect and perpetuate those ideas in ceremonial and other observances.
The student of Fairy Tales, therefore, cannot afford to neglect the
study of institutions; for it often throws a light altogether
unexpected on the origin and meaning of a story. Tradition must, indeed,
be studied as a whole. As with other sciences, its division into parts
is natural and necessary; but it should never be forgotten that none of
its parts can be rightly understood without reference to the others. By
Tradition I mean the entire circle of thought and practice, custom as
well as belief, ceremonies, tales, music, songs, dances and other
amusements, the philosophy and the superstitions and the institutions,
delivered by word of mouth and by example from generation to generation
through unremembered ages: in a word, the sum total of the psychological
phenomena of uncivilized man. Every people has its own body of
Tradition, its own Folklore, which comprises a slowly diminishing part,
or the whole, of its mental furniture, according as the art of writing
is, or is not, known. The invention of writing, by enabling records to
be made and thoughts and facts to be communicated with certainty from
one to another, first renders possible the accumulation of true
knowledge and ensures a constantly accelerating advance in civilization.
But in every civilized nation there are backward classes to whom reading
and writing are either quite unknown, or at least unfamiliar; and there
are certain matters in the lives even of the lettered classes which
remain more or less under the dominion of Tradition. Culture, in the
sense of a mode of life guided by reason and utilizing the discoveries
and inventions that are the gift of science, finds its way but slowly
among a people, and filters only sluggishly through its habits, its
institutions and its creeds. Surely, however, though gradually it
advances, like a rising tide which creeps along the beach, here
undermining a heap of sand, there surrounding, isolating, and at last
submerging a rock, here swallowing up a pool brilliant with living
creatures and many-coloured weed, there mingling with and overwhelming a
rivulet that leaps down to its embrace, until all the shore is covered
with its waters. Meanwhile, he who would understand its course must know
the conformation of the coast,--the windings, the crags (their
composition as well as their shape), the hollows, the sands, the
streams; for without these its currents and its force are alike
inexplicable. The analogy must not be pressed too far; but it will help
us to understand why we find a fragment of a custom in one place, a
portion of a tale jumbled up with portions of dissimilar tales in
another place, a segment of a superstition, and again a worn and broken
relic of a once vigorous institution. They are the rocks and the sands
which the flood of civilization is first isolating, then undermining,
and at last overwhelming, and hiding from our view. They are (to change
the figure) survivals of an earlier state of existence, unintelligible
if regarded singly, made to render up their secret only by comparison
with other survivals, and with examples of a like state of existence
elsewhere. Taken collectively, they enable us to trace the evolution of
civilization from a period before history begins, and through more
recent times by channels whereof history gives no account.

These are the premises whence we set out, and the principles which will
guide us, in the study on which we are about to enter. The name of Fairy
Tales is legion; but they are made up of incidents whose number is
comparatively limited. And though it would be impossible to deal
adequately with more than a small fraction of them in a work like the
present, still a selection may be so treated as to convey a reasonably
just notion of the application of the principles laid down and of the
results to be obtained. In making such a selection several interesting
groups of stories, unconnected as between themselves, might be chosen
for consideration. The disadvantage of this course would be the
fragmentary nature of the discussions, and consequently of the
conclusions arrived at. It is not wholly possible to avoid this
disadvantage in any mode of treatment; but it is possible to lessen it.
I propose, therefore, to deal with a few of the most interesting sagas
relative to the Fairy Mythology strictly so called. We shall thus
confine our view to a well-defined area, in the hope that we may obtain
such an idea of it as in its main lines at all events may be taken to be
fairly true to the facts, and that we may learn who really were these
mysterious beings who played so large a part in our fathers'
superstitions. As yet, however, we must not be disappointed if we find
that the state of scientific inquiry will not admit of many conclusions,
and such as we may reach can at present be stated only tentatively and
with caution. Science, like Mr. Fox in the nursery tale, writes up over
all the doors of her palace:

    "Be bold, be bold, but not too bold."

Many a victim has found to his cost what it meant to disregard this
warning.


FOOTNOTES:

[14] I have not thought it necessary to illustrate at length the
characteristics of savage thought enumerated above. They are
exhaustively discussed by Dr. Tylor in "Primitive Culture," Sir John
Lubbock in "The Origin of Civilization," Mr. Andrew Lang in "Myth Ritual
and Religion," and some of them by Mr. J. G. Frazer in "Totemism," and
more recently in "The Golden Bough," published since these pages were
written.




CHAPTER III.

FAIRY BIRTHS AND HUMAN MIDWIVES.

     Stories of midwives who have been summoned to the birth of
     fairies--Human visitors to Fairyland must not eat there--The
     reason--Fairies' gratitude--The conditions of fairy gifts.


A tale, the scene of which is laid near Beddgelert, runs, as translated
by Professor Rhys, in this way:--"Once on a time, when a midwife from
Nanhwynan had newly got to the Hafodydd Brithion to pursue her calling,
a gentleman came to the door on a fine grey steed and bade her come with
him at once. Such was the authority with which he spoke, that the poor
midwife durst not refuse to go, however much it was her duty to stay
where she was. So she mounted behind him, and off they went, like the
flight of a swallow, through Cwmllan, over the Bwlch, down Nant yr Aran,
and over the Gadair to Cwm Hafod Ruffydd before the poor woman had time
even to say Oh! When they got there, she saw before her a magnificent
mansion, splendidly lit up with such lamps as she had never before seen.
They entered the court, and a crowd of servants in expensive liveries
came to meet them, and she was at once led through the great hall into a
bed-chamber, the like of which she had never seen. There the mistress of
the house, to whom she had been fetched, was awaiting her. She got
through her duties successfully, and stayed there until the lady had
completely recovered, nor had she spent any part of her life so merrily;
there was naught but festivity day and night: dancing, singing, and
endless rejoicing reigned there. But merry as it was, she found she
must go, and the nobleman gave her a large purse, with the order not to
open it until she had got into her own house; then he bade one of his
servants escort her the same way she had come. When she reached home she
opened the purse, and, to her great joy, it was full of money; and she
lived happily on those earnings to the end of her life."[15]

It is a long leap from Carnarvonshire to Lapland, where this story is
told with no great variation. A clergyman's wife in Swedish Lappmark,
the cleverest midwife in all Sweden, was summoned one fine summer's
evening to attend a mysterious being of Troll race and great might,
called Vitra. At this unusual call she took counsel with her husband,
who, however, deemed it best for her to go. Her guide led her into a
splendid building, the rooms whereof were as clean and elegant as those
of very illustrious folk; and in a beautiful bed lay a still more
beautiful woman, for whom her services were required, and who was no
other than Vitra herself. Under the midwife's care Vitra speedily gave
birth to a fair girl, and in a few minutes had entirely recovered, and
fetched all sorts of refreshments, which she laid before her
benefactress. The latter refused to eat, in spite of Vitra's reassuring
persuasion, and further refused the money which the Troll-wife pressed
upon her. Vitra then sent her home, bidding her look on the table when
next she entered her cowherd's hut and see what she would find there.
She thought no more of the matter until the following spring, when on
entering the hut she found on the table half a dozen large spoons of
pure silver with her name engraved thereon in neat letters. These spoons
long remained an heirloom in the clergyman's family to testify the truth
of the story. A Swedish book, published in 1775, contains a tale,
narrated in the form of a legal declaration solemnly subscribed on the
12th April 1671 by the fortunate midwife's husband, whose name was Peter
Rahm, and who also seems to have been a clergyman. On the authority of
this declaration we are called on to believe that the event recorded
actually happened in the year 1660. Peter Rahm alleges that he and his
wife were at their farm one evening late when there came a little man,
swart of face and clad in grey, who begged the declarant's wife to come
and help his wife then in labour. The declarant, seeing that they had to
do with a Troll, prayed over his wife, blessed her, and bade her in
God's name go with the stranger. She seemed to be borne along by the
wind. After her task was accomplished she, like the clergyman's wife
just mentioned, refused the food offered her, and was borne home in the
same manner as she had come. The next day she found on a shelf in the
sitting-room a heap of old silver pieces and clippings, which it is to
be supposed the Troll had brought her.[16]

Apart from the need of human aid, common to all the legends with which
we are dealing, the two points emphasized by these Swedish tales are the
midwife's refusal of food and the gratitude of the Troll. In a Swabian
story the Earthman, as he is called, apologizes for omitting to offer
food. In this case the midwife was afraid to go alone with her summoner,
and begged that her husband might accompany her. This was permitted; and
the Earthman showed them the way through the forest with his lantern,
for it was of course night. They came first to a moss door, then to a
wooden door, and lastly to a door of shining metal, whence a staircase
went down into the earth, and led them into a large and splendid chamber
where the Earthwife lay. When the object of their visit was accomplished
the Earthman thanked the woman much, and said: "You do not relish our
meat and drink, wherefore I will bestow something else upon thee." With
these words he gave her a whole apronful of black coals, and taking his
lantern again he lighted the midwife and her husband home. On the way
home she slily threw away one coal after another. The Earthman said
nothing until he was about to take his leave, when he observed merely:
"The less you scattered the more you might have." After he had gone the
woman's husband remonstrated with her, bidding her keep the coals, for
the Earthman appeared in earnest with his gift. When they reached home,
however, she shook out her apron on the hearth, and behold! instead of
coals, glittering true gold pieces. The woman now sought eagerly enough
after the coals she had thrown away, but she found them not.[17]

Confining our attention for the moment to the refusal of food, it would
seem that the Earthman's apology in the foregoing narrative is, as too
many human apologies are, a mere excuse. The real reason for the
midwife's abstention was not that fairy food was distasteful, but that
she durst not touch it, under penalty of never again returning to the
light of day. A Danish tradition tells of a woman who was taken by an
elf on Christmas Eve down into the earth to attend his wife. As soon as
the elfwife was delivered her husband took the child away; for if he
could find two newly married persons in the bridal bed, before they had
repeated their Paternoster, he could, by laying the child between them,
procure for it all the good fortune intended for the newly wedded pair.
During his absence the elfwife took the opportunity of instructing her
helper as to her conduct when he returned; and the first and chief point
of her advice was to eat nothing that was offered her. The elfwife was
herself a Christian woman who had been inveigled down into the dwellings
of the elves; she had eaten, and therefore had never escaped again. On
the elf's return, accordingly, the midwife refused food, and he said:
"They did not strike thee on the mouth who taught thee that." Late
rabbinical writings contain a similar legend of a Mohel, a man whose
office it was to circumcise, who was summoned one winter's night by a
stranger to perform the ceremony upon a child who would be eight days
old the following day. The stranger led him to a lofty mountain, into
the bowels of which they passed, and after descending many flights of
steps found themselves in a great city. Here the Mohel was taken to a
palace, in one of whose apartments was the child's mother lying. When
she saw the Mohel she began to weep, and told him that he was in the
land of the Mazikin, but that she was a human being, a Jewess, who had
been carried away when little from home and brought thither. And she
counselled him to take good heed to refuse everything whether of meat or
drink that might be offered him: "For if thou taste anything of theirs
thou wilt become like one of them, and wilt remain here for ever."[18]

We touch here upon a very ancient and widespread superstition, which we
may pause to illustrate from different parts of the world. A Manx tale,
which can be traced back to Waldron, narrates the night adventure of a
farmer who lost his way in returning home from Peel, and was led by the
sound of music into a large hall where were a great number of little
people feasting. Among them were some faces he seemed to know; but he
took no notice of them until the little folk offered him drink, when one
of them, whose features seemed not unknown to him, plucked him by the
coat and forbade him, whatever he did, to taste anything he saw before
him; "for if you do", he added, "you will be as I am, and return no more
to your family."[19]

It is necessary for the hero of a Picard story to go and seek the devil
in his own abode. The devil of popular imagination, though a terrific
ogre, is not the entirely Evil One of theologians; and one of his good
points in the story referred to is that he has three fair daughters, the
fairest of whom is compelled by the hero to help him in overcoming her
father. She accordingly instructs him to eat no meat and to drink no
wine at the devil's house, otherwise he will be poisoned. This may
remind us of Kan Püdäi, who in the Altaic ballad descends with his steed
to the middle of the earth and encounters various monsters. There the
grass and the water of the mountain forest through which he rode were
poison. In both cases, what is probably meant is, that to eat or drink
is to return no more from these mysterious abodes; and it may be to the
intent to obviate any such consequence that Saint Peter, in sending a
certain king's son down through a black and stinking hole a hundred
toises deep underground, in a Gascon tale, to fetch Saint Peter's own
sword, provides him with just enough bread in his wallet every morning
to prevent his bursting with hunger. An extension of this thought
sometimes even prohibits the hero from accepting a seat or a bed offered
by way of hospitality on the part of the devil, or the sorceress, to
whose dwelling his business may take him, or even to look at the fair
temptress who may seek to entice him to eat.[20]

The meaning of the superstition is not easy to trace, but it should be
remembered that in the lower stages of human civilization no distinction
is drawn between supernatural or spiritual beings who have never been
enclosed in human bodies, and the spirits of the dead. Savage philosophy
mingles them together in one phantasmagoria of grotesquery and horror.
The line which separates fairies and ogres from the souls of men has
gradually grown up through ages of Christian teaching; and, broad as it
may seem to us, it is occasionally hardly visible in these stories.
Every now and then it is ignored, as in the case of the old friends
found among the "little people" by the Manx farmer. Less startling than
these, but quite as much in point, are the women, like some already
mentioned, who are carried off into Fairyland, where they become wives
and mothers. They can never come back to their old life, though they
retain enough of the "mortal mixture" to require the adventurous human
midwife to relieve their pains. Accordingly, we need not be surprised if
the same incidents of story or fibres of superstition attach at one time
to ghosts and at another to the non-human creatures of imagination, or
if Hades and Fairyland are often confounded. Both are equally the realm
of the supernatural. We may therefore inquire whether eating is
forbidden to the chance sojourner in the place of the dead equally as to
the sojourner in Fairyland, if he wish to return to the upper air. And
we shall find that it is.

Proserpine ate seven grains of a pomegranate which grew in the Elysian
Fields, and so was compelled to remain in the Shades, the wife of "the
grisly king." Thus, too, when Morgan the Fay takes measures to get Ogier
the Dane into her power she causes him to be shipwrecked on a loadstone
rock near to Avalon. Escaping from the sea, he comes to an orchard, and
there eats an apple which, it is not too much to say, seals his fate.
Again, when Thomas of Erceldoune is being led down by the Fairy Queen
into her realm, he desires to eat of the fruit of certain trees.

    "He presed to pul the frute with his honde,
    As man for fode was nyhonde feynte;
    She seid, Thomas, lat them stande,
    Or ellis the fiend will the ateynte.
    If thou pulle the sothe to sey,
    Thi soule goeth to the fyre of hell
    Hit cummes never out til doomsday,
    But ther ever in payne to dwelle."

An old story preserved for us by Saxo Grammaticus describes the visit of
some Danish heroes to Guthmund, a giant who rules a delightful land
beyond a certain river crossed by a golden bridge. Thorkill, their
conductor, a Scandinavian Ulysses for cunning, warns his companions of
the various temptations that will be set before them. They must forbear
the food of the country, and be satisfied with that which they had
brought with them; moreover, they must keep apart from the natives,
taking care not so much as to touch them. In spite, however, of
Thorkill's warnings to them, and his excuses in their behalf to the
king, some of the heroes fell and were left behind when their friends
were at last allowed to depart.[21] So far we see that the prohibition
and the danger we found extant in the Fairyland of modern folk-tales
apply also to the classic Hades; and we have traced them back a long way
into the Middle Ages in French, British, and Danish traditions relating
to fairies and other supernatural existences, with a special threat of
Hell in the case of Thomas of Erceldoune.

On the other side of the globe the Banks' islanders believe, like the
Greeks, in an underground kingdom of the dead, which they call Panoi.
Only a few years ago a woman was living who professed to have been down
there. Her object had been to visit her brother, who had recently died.
To do this she perfumed herself with water in which a dead rat had been
steeped, so as to give herself a death-like smell. She then pulled up a
bird's nest and descended through the hole thus made. Her brother, whom
of course she found, cautioned her to eat nothing, and by taking his
advice she was able to return. A similar tale is told of a New Zealand
woman of rank, who was lucky enough to come back from the abode of
departed spirits by the assistance of her father and his repeated
commands to avoid tasting the disgusting food of the dead. Wäinämöinen,
the epic hero of the Finns, determined to penetrate to Manala, the
region of the dead. We need not follow in detail his voyage; it will
suffice to say that on his arrival, after a long parley with the maiden
daughter of Tuoni, the king of the island, beer was brought to him in a
two-eared tankard.

    "Wäinämöinen, old and trusty,
    Gaz'd awhile upon the tankard;
    Lo! within it frogs were spawning,
    Worms about its sides were laying.
    Words in this wise then he utter'd:
    'Not to drink have I come hither
    From the tankard of Manala,
    Not to empty Tuoni's beaker;
    They who drink of beer are drowned,
    Those who drain the can are ruin'd.'"[22]

The hero's concluding words might form a motto for our teetotallers; and
in any case his abstinence enabled him to succeed in his errand and
return. A point is made in the poem of the loathsome character of the
beverage offered him, which thus agrees with the poison referred to in
some of the narratives I have previously cited. The natives of the
Southern Seas universally represent the sustenance of spirits as filthy
and abominable. A most remarkable coincidence with the description of
Tuoni's beer occurs in a curious story told on one of the Hervey
Islands, concerning a Mangaian Dante. Being apparently near death, this
man directed that, as soon as the breath was out of his body, a
cocoa-nut should be cracked, and its kernel disengaged from the shell
and placed upon his stomach under the grave-clothes. Having descended
to the Shades, he beheld Miru, the horrible hag who rules them, and
whose deformities need not now be detailed. She commanded him to draw
near. "The trembling human spirit obeyed, and sat down before Miru.
According to her unvarying practice she set for her intended victim a
bowl of food, and bade him eat it quite up. Miru, with evident anxiety,
waited to see him swallow it. As Tekanae took up the bowl, to his horror
he found it to consist of living centipedes. The quick-witted mortal now
recollected the cocoa-nut kernel at the pit of his stomach, and hidden
from Miru's view by his clothes. With one hand he held the bowl to his
lips, as if about to swallow its contents; with the other he secretly
held the cocoa-nut kernel, and ate it--the bowl concealing the nut from
Miru. It was evident to the goddess that Tekanae was actually swallowing
_something_: what else could it be but the contents of the fatal bowl?
Tekanae craftily contrived whilst eating the nourishing cocoa-nut to
allow the live centipedes to fall on the ground one or two at a time. As
the intended victim was all the time sitting on the ground it was no
difficult achievement in this way to empty the bowl completely by the
time he had finished the cocoa-nut. Miru waited in vain to see her
intended victim writhing in agony and raging with thirst. Her practice
on such occasions was to direct the tortured victim-spirit to dive in a
lake close by, to seek relief. None that dived into that water ever came
up alive; excessive anguish and quenchless thirst so distracting their
thoughts that they were invariably drowned. Miru would afterwards cook
and eat her victims at leisure. Here was a new event in her history: the
bowl of living centipedes had been disposed of, and yet Tekanae
manifested no sign of pain, no intention to leap into the cooling, but
fatal, waters. Long did Miru wait; but in vain. At last she said to her
visitor, 'Return to the upper world' (_i.e._, to life). 'Only remember
this--do not speak against me to mortals. Reveal not my ugly form and
my mode of treating my visitors. Should you be so foolish as to do so,
you will certainly at some future time come back to my domains, and I
will see to it that you do not escape my vengeance a second time!'
Tekanae accordingly left the Shades, and came back to life"; but he, it
is needless to say, carefully disregarded the hag's injunction, or we
should not have had the foregoing veracious account of what happens
below.[23]

The tortures reserved for Miru's victims cast a weird light on the
warning in the Picard story against eating and drinking what the devil
may offer. But whether poisoning in the latter case would have been the
preliminary to a hearty meal to be made off the unlucky youth by his
treacherous host, or no, it is impossible to determine. What the tales
do suggest, however, is that the food buried with the dead by
uncivilized tribes may be meant to provide them against the contingency
of having to partake of the hospitality of the Shades, and so afford
them a chance of escaping back to the upper air. But, putting this
conjecture aside, we have found the supposition that to eat of fairy
food is to return no more, equally applicable to the world of the dead
as to Fairyland. In seeking its meaning, therefore, we must not be
satisfied without an explanation that will fit both. Almost all over the
earth the rite of hospitality has been held to confer obligations on its
recipient, and to unite him by special ties to the giver. And even where
the notion of hospitality does not enter, to join in a common meal has
often been held to symbolize, if not to constitute, union of a very
sacred kind. The formation of blood relationship, or brotherhood, and
formal adoption into a tribe or family (ceremonies well known in the
lower culture), are usually, if not always, cemented in this way. The
modern wedding breakfast, with its bridecake, is a survival from a very
ancient mode of solemnizing the closest tie of all; and when Proserpine
tasted a pomegranate she partook of a fruit of a specially symbolic
character to signify acceptance of her new destiny as her captor's wife.
Hence to partake of food in the land of spirits, whether they are human
dead, or fairies, is to proclaim one's union with them and to renounce
the fellowship of mortals.

The other point emphasized in the Swedish tales quoted just now is the
Troll's gratitude, as evidenced by his gifts to the successful midwife.
Before considering this, however, let us note that these supernatural
beings do not like to be imposed upon. A German midwife who was summoned
by a Waterman, or Nix, to aid a woman in labour, was told by the latter:
"I am a Christian woman as well as you; and I was carried off by a
Waterman, who changed me. When my husband comes in now and offers you
money, take no more from him than you usually get, or else he will twist
your neck. Take good care!" And in another tale, told at Kemnitz of the
Nicker, as he is there called, when he asks the midwife how much he owes
her, she answers that she will take no more from him than from other
people. "That's lucky for thee," he replies; "hadst thou demanded more,
it would have gone ill with thee!" But for all that he gave her an apron
full of gold and brought her safely home.[24]

A Pomeranian story marks the transition to a type of tale wherein one
special characteristic of elfin gifts is presented. For in this case,
when the mannikin asked the midwife what her charge was, she modestly
replied: "Oh, nothing; the little trouble I have had does not call for
any payment." "Now then, lift up thy apron!" answered he; and it was
quickly filled with the rubbish that lay in the corner of the room.
Taking his lantern, the elf then politely guided her home. When she
shook out the contents of her apron, lo! it was no rubbish which fell
on the ground, but pure, shining minted gold. Hitherto she and her
father had been very poor; thenceforth they had no more want their whole
lives long. This gift of an object apparently worthless, which turns
out, on the conditions being observed, of the utmost value, is a
commonplace of fairy transactions. It is one of the most obvious
manifestations of superhuman power; and as such it has always been a
favourite incident in the stories of all nations. We have only to do
here with the gift as it appears in the group under analysis; and in
these cases it presents little variety. In a tale told on the lake of
Zug the dwarf fills the woman's apron with something at which he bids
her on no account look before she is in her own house. Her curiosity,
however, is uncontrollable; and the moment the dwarf vanishes she peeps
into her apron, to find simply black coals. She, in a rage, flings them
away, keeping only two as evidence of the shabby treatment she had met
with; but when she got home these two were nothing less than precious
stones. She at once ran back to where she had shaken out the supposed
coals; but they were all gone. So a recompense of straws, dust, birch
leaves, or shavings becomes, as elsewhere told, pure gold, pure silver,
or thalers. Nor is the story confined to Europe. In Dardistan it is
related that a boy, taken down by a Yatsh, or demon, into an underground
palace, is allowed to be present at a Yatsh wedding. He finds the
Yatshes assembled in great force and in possession of a number of
valuables belonging to the dwellers in his own village. On his return
his guide presents him with a sack full of coals, which he empties as
soon as he is out of sight. One little piece, however, remains, and is
transformed into a gold coin when he reaches home.[25]

Conversely, when the midwife is rewarded with that which seems valuable
it turns out worthless. An Irishwoman, in relating a professional
experience among the Good People, wound up her story as follows: "The
king slipped five guineas into my hand as soon as I was on the ground,
and thanked me, and bade me good-night. I hope I'll never see his face
again. I got into bed, and couldn't sleep for a long time; and when I
examined my five guineas this morning, that I left in the table-drawer
the last thing, I found five withered leaves of oak--bad scran to the
giver!" This incident recalls the Barber's tale of his fourth brother in
the "Arabian Nights." This unlucky man went on selling meat to a
sorcerer for five months, and putting the bright new money in which the
latter paid him into a box by itself; but when he came to open the box
he found in it nothing but a parcel of leaves, or, as Sir Richard Burton
has it, bits of white paper cut round to look like coin. Chinese
folklore is full of similar occurrences, which we cannot now stay to
discuss. But, returning to western traditions, there is a way of
counteracting the elves' transforming magic. The wife of a farmer named
Niels Hansen, of Uglerup, in Denmark, was summoned to attend a
troll-wife, who told her that the troll, her husband, would offer her a
quantity of gold; "but," she said, "unless you cast this knife behind
you when you go out, it will be nothing but coal when you reach home".
The woman followed her patient's advice, and so continued to carry
safely home a costly present of gold.[26]

The objection of supernatural beings to iron, and its power of undoing
their charms, will be considered in a future chapter. The good luck of
Niels Hansen's wife offers meantime another subject of interest; for it
was due to her own kindness of heart. A short time before she had been
raking hay in a field, when she caught a large and fat toad between the
teeth of her rake. She gently released it, saying: "Poor thing! I see
that thou needest help; I will help thee." That toad was the troll-wife,
and as she afterwards attended her she was horrified to see a hideous
serpent hanging down just above her head. Her fright led to explanations
and an expression of gratitude on the part of the troll-wife. This
incident is by no means uncommon; but a very few examples must suffice
here. Generally the woman's terror is attributed to a millstone hanging
over her head. At Grammendorf, in Pomerania, a maid saw, every time she
went to milk the cows, a hateful toad hopping about in the stable. She
determined to kill it, and would have seized it one day had it not, in
the very nick of time, succeeded in creeping into a hole, where she
could not get at it. A few days after, when she was again busy in the
stable, a little Ulk, as the elves there are called, came and invited
her to descend with him into Fairyland. On reaching the bottom of a
staircase with her conductor, she found her services were required for
an Ulkwife, whose time was at hand. Entering the dwelling she was
frightened to observe a huge millstone above her, suspended by a silken
thread; and the Ulk, seeing her terror, told her she had caused him
exactly the same, when she chased the poor toad and attempted to kill
it. The girl was compelled to share in the feast which followed. When it
was over she was given a piece of gold, that she was carefully to
preserve; for so long as she did so she would never be in want of money.
But her guide warned her at parting never to relate her experience,
otherwise the elves would fetch her again, and set her under the
millstone, which would then fall and crush her. Whether this was indeed
the consequence of her narrating this very true story we do not know.
After some of the beliefs we have been considering in the foregoing
pages it is, however, interesting to note that no ill attended her
eating and drinking in Fairyland, and that the gold she received did not
turn to dross, though it possessed other miraculous qualities which
might very well have led her to the bad end threatened by the Ulk.
Perhaps a portion of the story has been lost.[27]

Sometimes a different turn is given to the tale. A Swabian peasant-woman
was once in the fields with her servant-maid, when they saw a big toad.
The woman told her maid to kill it. The latter replied: "No; I won't do
that, and I will stand sponsor for it yet once more." Not long
afterwards she was sent for to become sponsor, and was conducted into
the lake, where she found the toad now in guise of a woman. After the
ceremony was over, the lake-woman rewarded her with a bushel of straw,
and sent by her hand a girdle for her mistress. On the way home the girl
tried the girdle on a tree to see how it would look, and in a moment the
tree was torn into a thousand pieces. This was the punishment devised by
the lake-woman for her mistress, because she had wished to put her to
death while in the form of a toad. The straw was, of course, pure gold;
but the girl foolishly cast it all away except a few stalks which clung
to her dress. So a countryman who accidentally spilt some hot broth on a
witch, disguised as a toad, is presented by her another day with a
girdle for his little son. Suspecting something wrong, he tries it on
his dog, which at once swells up and bursts. This is a Saxon saga from
Transylvania; an Irish saga brings us to the same catastrophe. There a
girl meets a frog which is painfully bloated, and kicks it unfeelingly
aside, with the words: "May you never be delivered till I am midwife to
you!" Now the frog was a water-fairy dwelling in a lake, into which the
girl soon after was conveyed and compelled to become the fairy's
midwife. By way of reward she is presented with a red cloak, which, on
her way home, she hangs up in admiration on a tree. Well was it for her
that she did so, for it set the tree on fire; and had she worn it, as
she meant to do, on the following Sunday at Mass, the chapel itself
would have been in a blaze.[28]

The fairies' revenge here missed its mark, though calculated on no
trifling scale. Indeed, the rewards they bestowed were never nicely
balanced with the good or ill they intended to requite, but were
showered in open-handed fashion as by those who could afford to be
lavish. Of this we have already had several instances; a few more may be
given. At Palermo a tale is told of a midwife who was one day cooking in
her own kitchen when a hand appeared and a voice cried: "Give to me!"
She took a plate and filled it from the food she was preparing.
Presently the hand returned the plate full of golden money. This was
repeated daily; and the woman, seeing the generous payment, became more
and more free with her portions of food. At the end of nine months a
knocking was heard at the door; and, descending, she found two giants,
who caught her up on their shoulders, and unceremoniously ran off with
her. They carried her to a lady who needed her offices, and she assisted
to bring into the world two fine boys. The lady evidently was fully
alive to her own dignity, for she kept the woman a proper human month,
to the distress of her husband, who, not knowing what had become of her,
searched the city night and day, and at last gave her up for dead. Then
the lady (a fairy princess she was) asked her if she wished to go, and
whether she would be paid by blows or pinches. The poor midwife deemed
her last hour was come, and said to herself that if she must die it
would be better to die quickly; so she chose blows. Accordingly the
princess called the two giants, and sent her home with a large sack of
money, which enabled her to relinquish business, set up her carriage,
and become one of the first ladies in Palermo. Ten years passed; and one
day a grand carriage stopped at her door. A lady alighted and entered
her palace. When she had her face to face, the lady said: "Gossip, do
you know me?" "No, madam." "What! do you not remember that I am the lady
to whom you came ten years ago, when these children were born? I, too,
am she who held out her hand and asked for food. I was the fairies'
captive; and if you had not been generous enough to give me to eat, I
should have died in the night. And because you were generous you have
become rich. Now I am freed, and here I am with my sons." The quondam
midwife, with tears in her eyes, looked at her, and blessed the moment
she had done a generous act. So they became lifelong friends.[29]

I have given the foregoing tale almost at full length because it has
not, so far as I know, appeared before in any other than its native
Sicilian dress, and because analogous stories are not common in
collections from Mediterranean countries. This rarity is not, I need
hardly say, from any absence of the mythological material, and perhaps
it may be due to accident in the formation of the collections. If the
story were really wanting elsewhere in Southern Europe, we might be
permitted the conjecture that its presence in Sicily was to be accounted
for by the Norman settlements there. One such story, however, is
recorded from the Island of Kimolos, one of the Cyclades, but without
the human captivity in Elfland, without the acts of charity, and without
the gratitude. The Nereids of the Kimoliote caves are of a grimmer
humour than the kindly-natured underground folk of Celtic and Teutonic
lands, or than the heroine of Palermo. The payment to their human help
is no subject of jest to them. A woman whom they once called in was
roundly told: "If it be a boy you shall be happy; but if it be a girl we
will tear you in four parts, and hang you in this cave." The unhappy
midwife of course determined that it should be a boy; and when a girl
arrived she made believe it was a boy, swaddled it up tightly, and went
home. When, eight days afterwards, the child was unpacked, the Nereids'
rage and disappointment were great; and they sent one of their number to
knock at her door in the hope that she would answer the first summons.
Now to answer the first summons of a Nereid meant madness. Of this the
woman was fully aware; and her cunning cheated them even of their
revenge.[30]

Sometimes these supernatural beings bestow gifts of a more distinctly
divine character than any of the foregoing. A midwife in Strathspey, on
one such occasion, was desired to ask what she would, and it should be
granted if in the power of the fairies. She asked that success might
attend herself and her posterity in all similar operations. The gift was
conferred; and her great-grandson still continued to exercise it when
Mr. Stewart was collecting the materials for his work on the
superstitions of the Highlanders, published in 1823. In like manner the
Mohel, to whose adventure I have already referred, and who was
originally an avaricious man, received the grace of benevolence to the
poor, which caused him to live a long and happy life with his family, a
pattern unto the whole world. The gift was symbolized by the
restoration to him of his own bunch of keys, which he found with many
others in the possession of his uncanny conductor. This personage had
held the keys by virtue of his being lord over the hearts of those who
never at any time do good: in other words, he was the demon of
covetousness. Here we have an instance, more or less conscious, of the
tendency, so marked in Jewish literature, to parable. But the form of
the parable bears striking testimony to its origin in a myth common to
many races. The keys in particular probably indicate that the recompense
at one time took the shape of a palladium. This is not at all uncommon
in the tales. The Countess Von Ranzau was once summoned from her castle
of Breitenburg in Schleswig to the help of a dwarf-woman, and in return
received, according to one account, a large piece of gold to be made
into fifty counters, a herring and two spindles, upon the preservation
of which the fortunes of the family were to depend. The gifts are
variously stated in different versions of the tale, but all the versions
agree in attaching to them blessings on the noble house of Ranzau so
long as they were kept in the family. The Frau Von Hahnen, in a Bohemian
legend, receives for her services to a water-nix three pieces of gold,
with the injunction to take care of them, and never to let them go out
of the hands of her own lineage, else the whole family would fall into
poverty. She bequeathed the treasures to her three sons; but the
youngest son took a wife, who with a light heart gave the fairy gold
away. Misery, of course, resulted from her folly; and the race of Hahnen
speedily came to an end.[31]

It is quite possible that the spoons bestowed by Vitra upon the
clergyman's wife in Lappmark were once reputed to be the subject of a
similar proviso. So common, forsooth, was the stipulation, that in one
way or other it was annexed to well-nigh all fairy gifts: they brought
luck to their possessor for the time being. Examples of this are
endless: one only will content us in this connection; and, like Vitra's
gift, we shall find it in Swedish Lappmark. A peasant who had one day
been unlucky at the chase, was returning disgusted, when he met a fine
gentleman who begged him to come and cure his wife. The peasant
protested in vain that he was not a doctor. The other would take no
denial, insisting that it was no matter, for if he would only put his
hands upon the lady she would be healed. Accordingly the stranger led
him to the very top of a mountain, where was perched a castle he had
never seen before. On entering it he found the walls were mirrors, the
roof overhead of silver, the carpets of gold-embroidered silk, and the
furniture of the purest gold and jewels. The stranger took him into a
room where lay the loveliest of princesses on a golden bed, screaming
with pain. As soon as she saw the peasant she begged him to come and put
his hands upon her. Almost stupefied with astonishment he hesitated to
lay his coarse hands upon so fair a dame. But at length he yielded; and
in a moment her pain ceased, and she was made whole. She stood up and
thanked him, begging him to tarry awhile and eat with them. This,
however, he declined to do, for he feared that if he tasted the food
which was offered him he must remain there. The stranger whom he had
followed then took a leathern purse, filled it with small round pieces
of wood, and gave it to the peasant with these words: "So long as thou
art in possession of this purse money will never fail thee. But if thou
shouldst ever see me again, beware of speaking to me; for if thou speak
thy luck will depart." When the man got home he found the purse filled
with dollars; and by virtue of its magical property he became the
richest man in the parish. As soon as he found the purse always full,
whatever he took out of it, he began to live in a spendthrift manner
and frequented the alehouse. One evening as he sat there he beheld the
stranger with a bottle in his hand going round and gathering the drops
which the guests shook from time to time out of their glasses. The rich
peasant was surprised that one who had given him so much did not seem
able to buy himself a single dram, but was reduced to this means of
getting a drink. Thereupon he went up to him and said: "Thou hast shown
me more kindness than any other man ever did, and I will willingly treat
thee to a little." The words were scarce out of his mouth when he
received such a blow on his head that he fell stunned to the ground; and
when again he came to himself the stranger and his purse were both gone.
From that day forward he became poorer and poorer, until he was reduced
to absolute beggary.[32]

This story exemplifies every point that had had interested us in this
discussion: the need of the Trolls for human help, the refusal of food,
fairy gratitude, and the conditions involved in the acceptance of
supernatural gifts. It mentions one further characteristic of fairy
nature--the objection to be recognized and addressed by men who are
privileged to see them. But the consideration of this requires another
chapter.


FOOTNOTES:

[15] "Y Cymmrodor," vol. v. p. 70, translated from "Y Brython," vol. iv.
p. 251.

[16] Poestion, p. 111; Grimm, "Teut. Myth." p. 457, note, quoting at
length the declaration from Hülpher, "Samlingen om Jämtland." A
translation will be found in Keightley, p. 122.

[17] Meier, p. 59.

[18] Thorpe, vol. ii. p. 128, from Thiele, "Danmark's Folkesagn";
Keightley, p. 506.

[19] Waldron, p. 28.

[20] "Mélusine," vol. i. p. 446; Radloff, vol. i. p. 78; Bladé, vol. i.
p. 161; Cosquin, vol. ii. p. 10; Cavallius, p. 281; "Revue des Trad.
Pop." vol. iv. p. 222.

[21] Child, vol. i. p. 319; "Thomas of Erceldoune," p. 11 (Cambridge
Text); Saxo, "Gesta Dan." l. viii.

[22] _Journal of Anthrop. Inst._ vol. x. p. 282; Shortland, p. 150;
"Kalewala," rune xvi. l. 293.

[23] Gill, p. 172.

[24] Keightley, p. 261; Kuhn und Schwartz, p. 93.

[25] Jahn, p. 72; Keightley, p. 275, quoting Müller, "Bilder und Sagen
aus der Schweiz," p. 119; Birlinger, "Volksthümliches," vol. i. p. 42;
Kuhn, p. 82; Thorpe, vol. ii. p. 128; vol. iii. p. 54, quoting
Müllenhoff, "Sagen, &c., der Herzogthümer Schleswig, Holstein und
Lauenburg"; Kuhn und Schwartz, p. 173; Wratislaw, p. 40; Wenzig, p. 198;
Liebrecht, p. 100, citing "Results of a Tour in Dardistan", part iii. p.
3.

[26] Kennedy, p. 106; Thorpe, vol. ii. p. 130, quoting Thiele,
"Danmark's Folkesagn."

[27] Jahn, p. 64; _cf._ p. 74, where there are two maidens, one of whom
had saved the toad when the other desired to kill it. They stand
sponsors for the fairy child, and are rewarded with sweepings which turn
to gold; also Bartsch, vol. i. p. 50, where a sword is suspended.

[28] Meier, p. 69; Müller, p. 140; "N. and Q.," 7th ser. vol. v. p. 501.

[29] Pitré, vol. v. p. 23. The story in its present form does not say
that the human food enabled the lady to return from Fairyland, but only
that it saved her life. Probably, however, an earlier version may have
shown the incident in a more primitive form.

[30] Bent, p. 46.

[31] Keightley, p. 388, citing Stewart; Thorpe, vol. iii. p. 50 _et
seq._, quoting Müllenhoff and Thiele; Grohmann, p. 145; see also Thorpe,
vol. iii. p. 51.

[32] Poestion, p. 119.




CHAPTER IV.

FAIRY BIRTHS AND HUMAN MIDWIVES (_continued_).

     The magical ointment--Human prying punished by fairies, and by
     other supernatural beings--Dame Berchta--Hertha--Lady
     Godiva--Analogous stories in Europe--In the East--Religious
     ceremonies performed by women only--Lady Godiva a pagan goddess.


Before we quit the subject of fairy births, we have a few more stories
to discuss. They resemble in their general tenor those already noticed;
but instead of one or other of the incidents considered in the previous
chapter we are led to a different catastrophe by the introduction of a
new incident--that of the Magical Ointment. The plot no longer hinges
upon fairy gratitude, but upon human curiosity and disobedience.

The typical tale is told, and exceedingly well told--though, alas! not
exactly in the language of the natives--by Mrs. Bray in her Letters to
Southey, of a certain midwife of Tavistock. One midnight, as she was
getting into bed, this good woman was summoned by a strange,
squint-eyed, little, ugly old fellow to follow him straightway, and
attend upon his wife. In spite of her instinctive repulsion she could
not resist the command; and in a moment the little man whisked her, with
himself, upon a large coal-black horse with eyes of fire, which stood
waiting at the door. Ere long she found herself at the door of a neat
cottage; the patient was a decent-looking woman who already had two
children, and all things were prepared for her visit. When the child--a
fine, bouncing babe--was born, its mother gave the midwife some
ointment, with directions to "strike the child's eyes with it." Now the
word _strike_ in the Devonshire dialect means not to give a blow, but to
rub, or touch, gently; and as the woman obeyed she thought the task an
odd one, and in her curiosity tried the effect of the ointment upon one
of her own eyes. At once a change was wrought in the appearance of
everything around her. The new mother appeared no longer as a homely
cottager, but a beautiful lady attired in white; the babe, fairer than
before, but still witnessing with the elvish cast of its eye to its
paternity, was wrapped in swaddling clothes of silvery gauze; while the
elder children, who sat on either side of the bed, were transformed into
flat-nosed imps, who with mops and mows were busied to no end in
scratching their own polls, or in pulling the fairy lady's ears with
their long and hairy paws. The nurse, discreetly silent about what she
had done and the wonderful metamorphoses she beheld around her, got away
from the house of enchantment as quickly as she could; and the
sour-looking old fellow who had brought her carried her back on his
steed much faster than they had come. But the next market-day, when she
sallied forth to sell her eggs, whom should she see but the same
ill-looking scoundrel busied in pilfering sundry articles from stall to
stall. So she went up to him, and with a nonchalant air addressed him,
inquiring after his wife and child, who, she hoped, were both as well as
could be expected. "What!" exclaimed the old pixy thief, "do you _see_
me to-day?" "See you! to be sure I do, as plain as I see the sun in the
skies; and I see you are busy into the bargain," she replied. "Do you
so?" cried he; "pray, with which eye do you see all this?" "With the
right eye, to be sure." "The ointment! the ointment!" exclaimed the old
fellow; "take that for meddling with what did not belong to you: you
shall see me no more." He struck her eye as he spoke, and from that
hour till the day of her death she was blind on the right side, thus
dearly paying for having gratified an idle curiosity in the house of a
pixy.[33]

In this tale the midwife acquired her supernatural vision through
gratifying her curiosity; but perhaps in the larger number of instances
it is acquired by accident. Her eye smarts or itches; and without
thinking, she rubs it with a finger covered with the Magical Ointment.
In a Breton variant, however, a certain stone, perfectly polished, and
in the form of an egg, is given to the woman to rub the fairy child's
eyes. In order to test its virtue she applies it to her own right eye,
thus obtaining the faculty of seeing the elves when they rendered
themselves invisible to ordinary sight. Sometimes, moreover, the
eye-salve is expressly given for the purpose of being used by the nurse
upon her own eyes. This was the case with a doctor who, in a north
country tale, was presented with one kind of ointment before he entered
the fairy realm and another when he left it. The former gave him to
behold a splendid portico in the side of a steep hill, through which he
passed into the fairies' hall within; but on anointing one eye with the
latter ointment, to that eye the hill seemed restored to its natural
shape. Similarly in Nithsdale a fairy rewards the kindness of a young
mother, to whom she had committed her babe to suckle, by taking her on a
visit to Fairyland. A door opened in a green hillside, disclosing a
porch which the nurse and her conductor entered. There the lady dropped
three drops of a precious dew on the nurse's left eyelid, and they were
admitted to a beautiful land watered with meandering rivulets and yellow
with corn, where the trees were laden with fruits which dropped honey.
The nurse was here presented with magical gifts, and when a green dew
had baptized her right eye she was enabled to behold further wonders.
On returning, the fairy passed her hand over the woman's eye and
restored its normal powers; but the woman had sufficient address to
secure the wonder-working balm. By its means she retained for many years
the gift of discerning the earth-visiting spirits; but on one occasion,
happening to meet the fairy lady who had given her the child, she
attempted to shake hands with her. "What ee d' ye see me wi'?" whispered
she. "Wi' them baith," answered the matron. The fairy accordingly
breathed on her eyes; and even the power of the box failed afterwards to
restore their enchanted vision. A Carnarvonshire story, probably
incomplete, makes no mention of the ointment conferring supernatural
sight; but when the midwife is to be dismissed she is told to rub her
eyes with a certain salve, whereupon she at once finds herself sitting
on a tuft of rushes, and not in a palace: baby and all had disappeared.
The sequel, however, shows that by some means she had retained the power
of seeing fairies, at least with one eye; for when she next went to the
town, lo and behold! busily buying was the elf whose wife she had
attended. He betrayed the usual annoyance at being noticed by the woman;
and on learning with which eye she saw him he vanished, never more to be
looked upon by her. A tale from Guernsey attributes the magical faculty
to some of the child's saliva which fell into the nurse's eye. And a
still more extraordinary cause is assigned to it in a tradition from
Lower Brittany, where it is said to be due to the sacred bond formed
between the woman and a masculine elf when she became godmother and he
godfather to the babe.[34]

The effect of the wonder-working salve or water is differently described
in different tales. The fairy maiden Rockflower speaks of it to her
lover, in a Breton tale from Saint Cast, as "clearing his eyes like her
own." And this is evidently to be understood in all cases. Accordingly,
we find the invariable result is that the favoured mortal beholds swarms
of fairies who were invisible before. But their dwellings, their
clothing, and their surroundings in general suffer a transformation by
no means always the same. A hovel or a cavern becomes a palace, whose
inhabitants, however ugly they may be, are attired like princesses and
courtiers, and are served with vessels of silver and gold. On the other
hand a castle is changed by the magical balm into "a big rough cave,
with water oozing over the edges of the stones, and through the clay;
and the lady, and the lord, and the child, weazened, poverty-bitten
crathurs--nothing but skin and bone, and the rich dresses were old
rags." This is an Irish picture; but in the north of England it is much
the same. Instead of a neat cottage the midwife perceives the large
overhanging branches of an ancient oak, whose hollow and moss-grown
trunk she had before mistaken for the fireplace, where glow-worms
supplied the place of lamps. And in North Wales, when Mrs. Gamp
incautiously rubbed an itching eye with the finger she had used to rub
the baby's eyes, "then she saw with that eye that the wife lay on a
bundle of rushes and withered ferns, in a large cave of big stones all
round her, with a little fire in one corner of it; and she also saw that
the lady was only Eilian, her former servant-girl, whilst with the other
eye she beheld the finest place she had ever seen." More terrible still,
in another story, evidently influenced by the Welsh Methodist revival,
the unhappy woman beheld "herself surrounded by fearful flames; the
ladies and gentlemen looked like devils, and the children appeared like
the most hideous imps of hell, though with the other parts of her eyes
all looked grand and beautiful as before."[35]

However disturbing these visions may have been, the nurse was generally
discreet enough to maintain perfect silence upon them until she got back
to the safety of her own home. But it is not very surprising if her
tongue sometimes got the better of her, as in a story obtained by
Professor Rhys at Ystrad Meurig. There the heroine said to the elf-lady
in the evening, as she was dressing the infant: "You have had a great
many visitors to-day." To this the lady sharply replied: "How do you
know that? Have you been putting the ointment to your eyes?" Thereupon
she jumped out of bed, and blew into her eyes, saying: "Now you will see
no more." The woman could never afterwards see the fairies, nor was the
ointment entrusted to her again. So in the Cornish tale of Cherry of
Zennor, that young damsel, being hired by a fairy widower to keep house
for him, has the assurance to fall in love with him. She touches her own
eyes with the unguent kept for anointing the eyes of her master's little
boy, and in consequence catches her master kissing a lovely lady. When
he next attempts to kiss Cherry herself she slaps his face, and, mad
with jealousy, lets slip the secret. No fairy widower with any
self-respect could put up with such conduct as this; and Cherry has to
quit Fairyland. Her parents had supposed her dead; and when she returned
they believed at first it was her ghost. Indeed, it is said she was
never afterwards right in her head; and on moonlight nights, until she
died, she would wander on to the Lady Downs to look for her master.[36]

The earliest writer who mentions a story of this type is Gervase of
Tilbury, marshal of the kingdom of Arles, who wrote about the beginning
of the thirteenth century. He professes to have himself met with a woman
of Arles who was one day washing clothes on the banks of the Rhone, when
a wooden bowl floated by her. In trying to catch it, she got out of her
depth and was seized by a Drac. The Dracs were beings who haunted the
waters of rivers and dwelt in the deep pools, appearing often on the
banks and in the towns in human form. The woman in question was carried
down beneath the stream, and, like Cherry of Zennor, made nurse to her
captor's son. One day the Drac gave her an eel pasty to eat. Her fingers
became greasy with the fat; and she happened to put them to one of her
eyes. Forthwith she acquired a clear and distinct vision under the
water. After some years she was allowed to return to her husband and
family; and going early one morning to the market-place of Beaucaire,
she met the Drac. Recognizing him at once, she saluted him and asked
after the health of his wife and child. "With which eye do you see me?"
inquired the Drac. The woman pointed to the eye she had touched with the
eel-fat; and thrusting his finger into it, the Drac vanished from
sight.[37]

The only punishment suffered in these cases is the deprivation of the
power of seeing fairies, or banishment from their society. This seems
mild enough: much more was generally inflicted. The story first quoted
relates what seems to be the ordinary form of vengeance for disregard of
the prohibition to use the fairy eye-salve, namely, loss of sight in the
offending eye. Spitting or striking is usually the means adopted by the
elves to effect this end. Sometimes, however, the eye is torn from its
socket. Whether there is much to choose between these different ways of
undergoing the punishment is doubtful; but it should be noted that the
last-mentioned mode is a favourite one in Brittany, and follows not so
much on recognition as on denunciation by the virtuous mortal of the
elf's thieving propensities. "See what thieves these fairies are!" cried
a woman who watched one of them putting her hand into the pocket of a
country woman's apron. The fairy instantly turned round and tore out her
eye. "Thieves!" bawled another on a similar occasion, with the same
result. In a Cornish tale a woman is entrusted in her own house with the
care of an elf-child. The child brought remarkable prosperity to the
house, and his foster-mother grew very fond of him. Finding that a
certain water in which she was required to wash his face made it very
bright, she determined to try it on her own, and splashed some of it
into her eye. This conferred the gift of seeing the little people, who
played with her boy, but had hitherto been invisible to her; and one day
she was surprised to meet her nursling's father in the market--stealing.
Recognition followed, and the stranger exclaimed:

    "Water for elf, not water for self,
    You've lost your eye, your child, and yourself."

From that hour she was blind in the right eye. When she got home the boy
was gone; and she and her husband, who had once been so happy, became
poor and wretched.[38]

Here poverty and wretchedness, as well as the loss of an eye, were
inflicted. In a Northumbrian case the foster-parent lost his charge and
both eyes. So in a story from Guernsey, the midwife, on the Saturday
following her attendance on the lady, meets the husband and father in a
shop filling his basket to right and left. She at once comprehends the
plenty that reigned in his mysterious dwelling. "Ah, you wicked thief, I
see you!" she cried. "You see me; how?" he inquired. "With my eyes," she
replied. "In that case I will soon put you out of power to play the
spy," he answered. So saying, he spat in her face, and she became blind
on the spot. A Danish story also relates that a midwife, who had
inadvertently anointed her eyes with the salve handed to her by the
elf-folk for the usual purpose, was going home afterwards and passed by
a rye-field. The field was swarming with elves, who were busy clipping
off the ears of rye. Indignantly she cried out: "What are you doing
there?" The little people thronged round her, and angrily answered: "If
thou canst see us, thus shalt thou be served;" and suiting the action to
the word, they put out her eyes.[39]

Human beings, however, betray their meddling with fairy ointment in
other ways than by speech. The following curious story was related as
current at his native place, by Dr. Carré of St. Jacut-de-la-Mer, to M.
Sébillot. A fisherman from St. Jacut was the last to return one evening
at dusk from the scene of his labours; and as he walked along the wet
sand of the seashore, he suddenly came upon a number of sea-fairies in a
cavern, talking and gesticulating with vivacity, though he could not
hear what they said. He beheld them rub their eyes and bodies with a
sort of pomade, when, lo! their appearance changed, and they were
enabled to walk away in the guise of ordinary women. Hiding carefully
behind a large rock, he watched them out of sight; and then, impelled by
curiosity, he made straight for the cave. There he found what was left
of the pomade, and taking a little on his finger, he smeared it around
his left eye. By this means he found himself able to penetrate the
various disguises assumed by the fairies for the purpose of robbing or
annoying mankind. He recognized as one of that mischievous race a
beggar-woman whom he saw a few days afterwards going from door to door
demanding charity. He saw her casting spells on certain houses, and
peering eagerly into all, as if she were seeking for something to steal.
He distinguished, too, when out in his boat, fish which were real fish
from fish which were in reality "ladies of the sea," employed in
entangling the nets and playing other tricks upon the seamen. Attending
the fair of Ploubalay, he saw several elves who had assumed the shapes
of fortune-tellers, showmen, or gamblers, to deceive the country folk;
and this permitted him to keep clear of their temptations. But as he
smiled to himself at what was going on around him, some of the elves,
who were exhibiting themselves on a platform in front of one of the
booths, caught sight of him; and he saw by the anger in their looks that
they had divined his secret. Before he had time to fly, one of them,
with the rapidity of an arrow, struck his clairvoyant eye with a stick
and burst it. That is what happened to him who would learn the secrets
of the sea-fairies.[40]

Such was the punishment of curiosity; nor is it by fairies alone that
curiosity is punished. Cranmere Pool on Dartmoor is, we are told, a
great penal settlement for refractory spirits. Many of the former
inhabitants of the parish are supposed to be still there expiating their
ghostly pranks. Of the spirit of one old farmer it is related that it
took seven clergymen to secure him. They, however, succeeded at last in
transforming him into a colt, which was given in charge to a servant-boy
with directions to take him to Cranmere Pool, and there on the brink of
the pool to slip off the halter and return instantly without looking
round. He did look round, in spite of the warning, and beheld the colt
in the form of a ball of fire plunge into the water. But as the
mysterious beast plunged he gave the lad a parting kick, which knocked
out one of his eyes, just as the Calender was deprived of his eye in the
"Arabian Nights." Still worse was the fate that overtook a woman, who,
at midnight on New Year's Eve, when all water is turned into wine, was
foolhardy enough to go to a well. As she bent over it to draw, one came
and plucked out her eye, saying:

    "All water is wine,
    And thy two eyes are mine."

A variant of the story relates that the woman herself disappeared, and
gives the rhyme as

    "All water is wine,
    And what is thereby is mine."[41]

At the end of the last chapter we noted as a characteristic of fairy
nature the objection to be recognized and addressed by men who are
privileged to see them. We are now able to carry the generalization a
step further. For, from the instances adduced in the foregoing pages, it
is obviously a common belief that supernatural personages, without
distinction, dislike not merely being recognized and addressed, but even
being seen, or at all events being watched, and are only willing to be
manifested to humanity at their own pleasure and for their own purposes.
In the stories of the Magical Ointment it is not so much the theft as
the contravention of the implicit prohibition against prying into fairy
business that rouses elfin anger. This will appear more clearly from the
fuller consideration of cases like those mentioned in the last
paragraph, in which punishment follows directly upon the act of spying.
In Northamptonshire, we learn that a man whose house was frequented by
fairies, and who had received many favours from them, became smitten
with a violent desire to behold his invisible benefactors. Accordingly,
he one night stationed himself behind a knot in the door which divided
the living-room of his cottage from the sleeping-apartment. True to
their custom, the elves came to disport themselves on his
carefully-swept hearth, and to render to the household their usual good
offices. But no sooner had the man glanced upon them than he became
blind; and so provoked were the fairies at this breach of hospitality
that they deserted his dwelling, and never more returned to it. In
Southern Germany and Switzerland, a mysterious lady known as Dame
Berchta is reputed to be abroad on Twelfth Night. She is admittedly the
relic of a heathen goddess, one of whose attributes was to be a leader
of the souls of the dead; and as such she is followed by a band of
children. For her the peasants on Twelfth Night set a repast, of which,
if she be pleased, she and her troop partake. A servant boy at a
peasant's farm in the Tirol on one such occasion perceived Lady
Berchta's approach, and hid himself behind the kneading-trough to watch
what she would do. She immediately became aware of his presence as he
peeped through a chink, and called to one of her children to go and stop
that chink. The child went and blew into it, and the boy became
stark-blind. Thus he continued for a year, nor could any doctor help
him, until an old experienced man advised him to go to the same place on
the following Twelfth-tide, and falling down on his knees behind the
kneading-trough, to bewail his curiosity. He accordingly did so. Dame
Berchta came again, and taking pity on him, commanded one of her
children to restore his sight. The child went and blew once more through
the chink, and the boy saw. Berchta, however, and her weird troop he saw
not; but the food set out for them had disappeared.[42]

The tradition of the goddess Hertha lingered until recently, and
perchance lingers still, in the island of Rügen. She had her dwelling,
it is believed, in the Herthaburg; and often yet, in the clear
moonlight, out of the forest which enfolds that hill, a fair lady comes
surrounded by her maids to bathe in the lake at its foot. After awhile
they emerge from the waters, and, wrapt again in their long white veils,
they vanish flickering among the trees. But to the belated wanderer, if
any such there be, who looks upon this scene, it is a vision of dread;
for he is drawn by irresistible might to the lake wherein the white lady
is bathing, to be swallowed up in its depths. And it is said that every
year the lady must lure one unhappy mortal into the flood. So in the
classic mythology, if Ovid report aright, Actæon met the fearful fate of
transformation into a stag by "gazing on divinity disrobed," and was
torn in pieces by his own hounds. Hertha was, indeed, according to
Tacitus, more terrible than Diana, since death was the penalty even when
duty called her slaves to the awful sight.[43]

These traditions have led us away from the Magical Ointment, which thus
appears to be only one aspect of the larger theme of the objection on
the part of supernatural beings to human prying. Nor need we regret
having strayed; for we are brought naturally to one of the most
interesting of our national legends, namely, that of Lady Godiva; and it
will well repay a little consideration. As generally told to-day it
bears an unmistakable resemblance to the foregoing stories; but there
seems some difficulty in classing it with them, because Peeping Tom is
wanting in the most ancient version known to us.

Godiva, properly Godgifu, was an undoubted historical personage, the
wife of Leofric, Earl of the Mercians, and mother of the Earls Morcar
and Edwin, and of Edith, wife first of Gruffydd, Prince of North Wales,
and afterwards of King Harold the Second. The earliest mention of her
famous ride through Coventry is by Roger of Wendover, who wrote in the
beginning of the thirteenth century, or a hundred and fifty years or
thereabout after her death. His account of the matter is as follows:
"The countess Godiva, who was a great lover of God's mother, longing to
free the town of Coventry from the oppression of a heavy toll, often
with urgent prayers besought her husband, that from regard to Jesus
Christ and His mother, he would free the town from that service, and
from all other heavy burdens; and when the earl sharply rebuked her for
foolishly asking what was so much to his damage, and always forbade her
evermore to speak to him on the subject; and while she, on the other
hand, with a woman's pertinacity, never ceased to exasperate her husband
on that matter, he at last made her this answer: 'Mount your horse, and
ride naked before all the people, through the market of the town from
one end to the other, and on your return you shall have your request.'
On which Godiva replied: 'But will you give me permission if I am
willing to do it?' 'I will,' said he. Whereupon the countess, beloved of
God, loosed her hair and let down her tresses, which covered the whole
of her body like a veil, and then mounting her horse and attended by two
knights, she rode through the market place without being seen, except
her fair legs; and having completed the journey, she returned with
gladness to her astonished husband, and obtained of him what she had
asked, for Earl Leofric freed the town of Coventry and its inhabitants
from the aforesaid service, and confirmed what he had done by a
charter."[44] According to the more modern version, the inhabitants
were enjoined to remain within doors, and, in the Laureate's words:

        "one low churl, compact of thankless earth,
    The fatal byword of all years to come,
    Boring a little auger-hole in fear,
    Peep'd--but his eyes, before they had their will,
    Were shrivell'd into darkness in his head,
    And dropt before him. So the powers who wait
    On noble deeds, cancell'd a sense misus'd."

It is not my business now to prove that the legend is untrue in fact, or
I should insist, first, that its omission by previous writers, who refer
both to Leofric and Godgifu and their various good deeds, is strong
negative testimony against it; and I should show, from a calculation
made by the late Mr. M. H. Bloxam, and founded on the record of Domesday
Book, that the population of Coventry in Leofric's time could scarcely
have exceeded three hundred and fifty souls, all in a greater or less
degree of servitude, and dwelling probably in wooden hovels each of a
single story, with a door, but no window.[45] There was, therefore, no
market on the scale contemplated by Roger of Wendover,--hardly, indeed,
a town through which Godgifu could have ridden; and a mere toll would
have been a matter of small moment when the people were all serfs. The
tale, in short, in the form given by the chronicler, could not have been
told until after Coventry had risen to wealth and importance by means of
its monastery, whereof Godgifu and her husband were the founders.
Nobody, however, now asserts that Roger of Wendover's narrative is to be
taken seriously. What therefore I want to point out in it is that
Godgifu's bargain was that she should ride naked _before all the
people_. And this is what the historian understands her to have done;
for he states that she rode through the market-place without being
seen, _except her fair legs_, all the rest of her body being covered by
her hair like a veil. He tells us nothing about a proclamation to the
inhabitants to keep within doors; and of course Peeping Tom is an
impossibility in this version of the tale.

Coventry has for generations honoured its benefactress by a periodical
procession, wherein she is represented by a girl dressed as nearly like
the countess on her ride as the manners of the day have permitted. When
this procession was first instituted, is unknown. The earliest mention
of it seems to be in the year 1678. Its object then was to proclaim the
Great Fair, and Lady Godiva was merely an incident in it. The Lansdowne
MSS. in the British Museum contain an account of a visit to Coventry by
the "captain, lieutenant, and ancient" of the military company of
Norwich, who travelled in the Midland Counties in August 1634. These
tourists describe St. Mary's Hall as adorned at the upper end "with rich
hangings, and all about with fayre pictures, one more especially of a
noble lady (the Lady Godiva) whose memory they have cause not to forget,
for that shee purchas'd and redeem'd their lost infringed liberties and
ffreedomes, and obtained remission of heavy tributes impos'd upon them,
by undertaking a hard and unseemly task, w'ch was to ride naked openly
at high noone day through the city on a milk-white steed, w'ch she
willingly performed, according to her lord's strict injunction. It may
be very well discussed heere whether his hatred or her love exceeded.
Her fayre long hayre did much offend the wanton's glancing eye." In this
record we have no additional fact except the mention of "high noone day"
as the time of the journey; for the allusion to "the wanton's glancing
eye" is too vague to be interpreted of Peeping Tom, and the writer does
not refer to any commemorative procession. It has been supposed,
therefore, that the carnival times of Charles the Second both begot the
procession and tacked Peeping Tom to the legend. But it is more likely
that the procession is as old as the fair, which was held under a
charter of Henry the Third, granted in 1217. Such pageants were not
uncommon in municipal life, and were everywhere to the taste of the
people. Whether Lady Godiva was a primitive part of it is another
question. The mention of the procession in 1678 occurs in a manuscript
volume of annals of the city, in a handwriting of the period. The entry
in question is as follows: "31 May 1678 being the great Fair at Coventry
there was an extraordinary" [Here the bottom of the page is reached; and
in turning over the chronicler has omitted a word, for on the top of the
next page we read:] "Divers of the Companies" [_i.e._, the City Guilds]
"set out each a follower, The Mayor Two, and the Sheriffs each one and 2
at the publick charge, there were divers Streamers with the Companies
arms and Ja. Swinnertons Son represented Lady Godiva."[46]

This brief entry is by no means free from ambiguity. Perhaps all that we
are warranted in inferring from it is that the annual procession was,
that year, of unusual splendour. Whether, as has been conjectured, it
was the first time Lady Godiva had ever made her appearance, there
seems more doubt. Apart from any evidence, there is no improbability in
supposing that she may have formed part of earlier processions; though
it may be that during the period of Puritan ascendency the show had been
neglected and the lady in particular had been discountenanced. If this
be so, however, it is difficult to account for the manner in which her
figure is referred to by the writer, unless there were some personal
reason connected with James Swinnerton, or his son, undiscoverable by us
at this distance of time.

But whatever doubt may exist as to Godiva's share in the early
processions, there appears no less as to the episode of Peeping Tom.
Looking out of an upper story of the King's Head, at the corner of
Smithford Street, is an oaken figure called by the name of the notorious
tailor. It is in reality a statue of a man in armour, dating no further
back than the reign of Henry the Seventh; and, as a local antiquary
notes, "to favour the posture of his leaning out of window, the arms
have been cut off at the elbows."[47] This statue, now generally
believed to have been intended for St. George, could not have been thus
appropriated and adapted to its present purpose until its original
design had been forgotten and the incongruity of its costume passed
unrecognized. This is said to have been in 1678, when a figure,
identified with the one in question, was put up in Grey Friars Lane by
Alderman Owen.

It must not be overlooked that there may have been from the first more
than one version of the legend, and that a version rejected by, or
perhaps unknown to, Roger of Wendover and the writers who followed him
may have always included the order to the inhabitants to keep within
doors, of which Peeping Tom would seem to be the necessary
accompaniment. Unfortunately, we have no evidence on this point. The
earliest record of such a version appears in one of the manuscript
volumes already alluded to. It has not been hitherto printed; and it is
so much at variance, alike with the legend preserved in the thirteenth
century, and the poem of the nineteenth century, that I quote it
entire:--"The Franchisment and Freedome of Coventry was purchased in
manner Following. Godiva the wife of Leofric Earle of Chester and Duke
of March requesting of her Lord freedome for this That Towne, obtained
the same upon condition that she should ride naked through the same; who
for the Love she bare to the Inhabitants thereof, and the perpetuall
remembrance of her Great Affection thereunto, performed the same as
Followeth. In the forenoone all householders were Commanded to keep in
their Families shutting their doores and windows close whilst the
Dutchess performed this good deed, which done she rode naked through the
midst of the Towne, without any other Coverture save only her hair. But
about the midst of the Citty her horse neighed, whereat one desirous to
see the strange Case lett downe a Window, and looked out, for which fact
or for that the Horse did neigh, as the cause thereof, Though all the
Towne were Franchised, yet horses were not toll-free to this day."[48]

The manuscript in which this passage occurs is copied from an older
manuscript which appears to have been compiled in the sixteenth
century. Unfortunately, however, the latter is imperfect, a leaf having
been torn out at this very point. We cannot, therefore, say with
certainty that the account of the famous ride was ever comprised in it.
But the expressions made use of imply that the windows were closed with
shutters rather than glass, and that they were opened by letting down
the shutters, which were either loose or affixed by a hinge to the
bottom sills. It is a question exactly at what period glass came into
general use for windows in the burgesses' houses at Coventry. Down
almost to the middle of the fifteenth century all glass was imported;
and consequently it was not so common in the midlands as near the coast,
especially the south-eastern coast. We shall probably be on the safe
side if we assume that in the early years of the sixteenth century, at
all events, the ordinary dwelling-house at Coventry was no longer
destitute of this luxury. It would seem, therefore, that the story, in
the form here given, cannot be later, and may be much earlier, than the
latter years of the fifteenth century.

Failing definite evidence to carry us back further, it becomes of
importance to inquire whether there are any traditions in other places
from which we may reason. In the "History of Gloucestershire," printed
by Samuel Rudder of Cirencester in 1779, we read that the parishioners
of St. Briavels, hard by the Forest of Dean, "have a custom of
distributing yearly upon Whitsunday, after divine service, pieces of
bread and cheese to the congregation at church, to defray the expenses
of which every householder in the parish pays a penny to the
churchwardens; and this is said to be for the privilege of cutting and
taking the wood in Hudnolls. The tradition is that the privilege was
obtained of some Earl of Hereford, then lord of the Forest of Dean, at
the instance of his lady, upon the same hard terms that Lady Godiva
obtained the privileges for the citizens of Coventry." It appears that
Rudder, while in the main accurately relating both custom and tradition,
has made the mistake of supposing that the payment was made to the
churchwardens, whereas it was in all probability made to the constable
of the castle of St. Briavels as warden of the Forest of Dean. The
custom is now in a late stage of decadence, and local inquiries have
failed to elicit any further details throwing light on the point under
consideration.[49]

I am not aware of any other European tradition that will bear comparison
with that of Godiva, but Liebrecht relates that he remembers in his
youth, about the year 1820, in a German newspaper, a story according to
which a countess frees her husband's subjects from a heavy punishment
imposed by him. She undertakes to walk a certain course clad only in her
shift, and she performs it, but clad in a shift of iron.[50] The
condition is here eluded rather than fulfilled; and the point of the
story is consequently varied. It would be interesting to have the tale
unearthed from the old newspaper, and to know where its scene was laid,
and whether it was a genuine piece of folklore.

Eastern tales, however, furnish us repeatedly with incidents in which a
lady parades the streets of a city, and during her progress all folk are
bidden to close their shops and withdraw into their houses on pain of
death. The example of the Princess Badroulbadour will occur to every
reader of the "Arabian Nights." This, however, is by no means a solitary
example. In the story of Kamar Al-Zaman and the Jeweller's Wife, one of
the stories of the "Nights" rejected on moral grounds by Lane, but
translated by Burton, a dervish relates that he chanced one Friday to
enter the city of Bassorah, and found the streets deserted. The shops
were open; but neither man nor woman, girl nor boy, dog nor cat was to
be seen. By and by he heard a sound of drums, and hiding himself in a
coffee-house, he looked out through a crevice and saw forty pairs of
slave girls, with uncovered heads and faces displayed, come walking
through the market, and in their midst a lady riding unveiled and
adorned with gold and gems. In front of her was a damsel bearing in
baldric a great sword with haft of emerald and tassels of
jewel-encrusted gold. Pausing close to the dervish, the lady said to her
maidens: "I hear a noise of somewhat within yonder shop; so do ye search
it, lest haply there be one hidden there, with intent to enjoy a look at
us while we have our faces unveiled." Accordingly they searched the shop
opposite the coffee-house, and brought forth a man. At the lady's
command the damsel with the sword smote off his head, and leaving the
corpse lying on the ground, the procession swept on. It turned out that
the lady was the wife of a jeweller to whom the King of Bassorah was
desirous of granting a boon, and at her request the boon obtained was a
proclamation commanding that all the townsfolk should every Friday enter
the mosques two hours before the hour of prayer, so that none might
abide in the town, great or small, unless they were in the mosques or in
the houses with the doors locked upon them; but all the shops were to be
left open. Then the lady had permission to ride with her slave-women
through the heart of the town, and none were to look on her from window
or lattice; and every one whom she found abroad she was at liberty to
kill. A similar incident is related in the life of Kurroglú, the
robber-poet of Persia, where a beautiful princess passes in state
through the bazaars every Friday on her way to the mosque, while all the
men are banished.[51] Here, again, some one was of course found playing
the spy.

A version of the incident, which can be traced further back in literary
form than either of the foregoing, occurs in the "Ardshi-Bordshi." This
book is a Mongolian recension of a Sanskrit collection of stories
concerning Vikramâditya, a monarch who, if he ever lived, seems to have
flourished about the beginning of the Christian era. He was celebrated,
like Solomon, for his wisdom and his might; and his name became the
centre of a vast accretion of legends. Some of these legends were
translated into Mongolian late in the Middle Ages, and formed a small
collection called after Ardshi-Bordshi, the nominal hero. In the story
to which I wish to direct attention, a certain king has a daughter
bearing the name of Sunshine, of whom he was so jealous that if any one
looked upon her his eyes were put out, and the man who entered her
apartments had his legs broken. Naturally, the young lady got tired of
being thus immured, and complained to her father that, as she had no
opportunity of seeing man or beast, the time hung heavily on her hands;
and she begged him to let her go out on the fifteenth of the month and
look about her. The king agreed to this; but, the sly old rascal!
nothing was further from his intention than to gratify his daughter's
longing for masculine converse. Wherefore he issued a decree that all
objects for sale were to be exposed openly to the view, all cattle to be
left indoors, the men and women were to withdraw into their houses and
close their doors and windows, and if any one came forth he should be
severely punished. On the appointed day, Sunshine, surrounded by her
ladies, and seated in a brand-new chariot, drove through the town, and
viewed the merchandise and goods exposed for sale. The king had a
minister, named Moon, who could not restrain his curiosity; and he
peeped at her from a balcony. The princess, as he did so, caught sight
of him and made signs to him, which were interpreted by the penetration
of his wife to be an invitation to meet her clandestinely. The wife
hardly displayed what most ladies would deem "a proper spirit" in
advising compliance; and the consequence of taking that advice would
have been serious trouble both to himself and to the princess, had it
not been for the ready wit of the two women, who got over the difficulty
by contriving an ingenious equivocation not unknown in other stories, by
which the princess cleared herself and her lover on oath.[52]

It is true that in these tales the lady who rides forth is not naked;
but to ride openly and unveiled would be thought almost as immodest in
countries where strict seclusion is imposed upon women. All these tales
include the Peeping Tom incident; and it appears, indeed, so obvious a
corollary to the central thought of Lady Godiva's adventure that it is
hardly likely to have required centuries for its evolution. From some
traditions, however, it is absent. A story belonging to the Cinderella
cycle, found at Smyrna, relates that when a certain king desired to
marry his own daughter, the maiden, by the advice of her Fate, demanded
as the price of compliance three magnificent dresses. Having obtained
these, she asked permission to go unseen (like Badroulbadour) to the
bath. The king, to gratify her, forbade his subjects on pain of death to
open their shops or to show themselves in the streets while she passed
by. She thus got an opportunity of escaping from the city, of which she
did not fail to make use,--greatly, no doubt, to her unnatural father's
disgust. An Indian tradition also tells us that the inhabitants of
Chamba were under the necessity of digging a canal for irrigation, but
when it was dug, owing to the enchantments of an evil spirit, not a
drop of water could be got to flow along its course. A magician at last
found out that the spell could be dissolved if the beautiful and
virtuous young princess of Chamba would consent to traverse a given
distance of the plain entirely naked, in full view of the populace, and
to lose her head when the journey was accomplished. After much
hesitation, her compassion triumphed over her shame; and she undertook
the task. But lo! as she advanced, a thick line of young trees arose to
right and left, completely hiding her from cynical eyes. And the shady
canal is shown to-day by the good people of Chamba as one of the most
authentic monuments of their history.[53]

So far the stories. Concerning which it must be observed that they are
evidence that the myth of Lady Godiva is widely diffused in the East,
and that the spy is usually, though not always, part of the tale. The
Smyrnoean version must probably be thrown out of the reckoning. It is, as
I have already mentioned, a variant of the Cinderella cycle. The problem
of the plot is how to get the heroine unseen out of her father's
clutches. This is commonly effected by the simple mechanism of a
disguise and a night escape. Other methods, I need not now detail, are,
however, sometimes adopted; and the excuse of going to the bath, with
the order to the people to close their shops and keep within doors,
would seem to reveal nothing more than the unconscious influence of
Aladdin or some other of the Eastern stories. Throwing this out, then,
as accidental, an overwhelming proportion of the analogues cited
contains the spy. It would be dangerous to reason on the supposition
that the proportions of all the Asiatic variants extant correspond with
those of the variants cited; but we are at liberty to assume that a
large number, if not the majority, comprise the incident of Peeping
Tom. None of them was known in Europe until Galland published his
translation of the "Arabian Nights" in the year 1704--upwards of two
centuries later than the latest period at which the story as given in
the Coventry manuscript can have come into existence.

But the stories, though they may go a little way to help us in regard to
the incident of Peeping Tom, throw no light on the origin of the legend,
or of the procession. Let us therefore turn to one or two curious
religious ceremonies, which may have some bearing upon it. A potent
spell to bring rain was reported as actually practised during the
Gorakhpur famine of 1873-4. It consisted of a gang of women stripping
themselves perfectly naked, and going out by night to drag the plough
across a field. The men were kept carefully out of the way, as it was
believed that peeping by them would not only vitiate the spell, but
bring trouble on the village. It would not be a long step from this
belief to a story in which peeping was alleged to have taken place with
disastrous effects, either to the village, or (by favour of the deities
intended to be propitiated) to the culprit himself. At the festival of
the local goddess in the village of Serúr, in the Southern Mahratta
country, the third and fourth days are devoted to private offerings.
Many women, we are told, on these days walk naked to the temple in
fulfilment of vows, "but they were covered with leaves and boughs of
trees, and surrounded by their female relations and friends."[54]

The performance of religious rites by women alone, when men are required
under heavy penalties to absent themselves, is, indeed, not very
uncommon in savage life. Nor is it confined to savage life. When Rome
was at the height of her civilization and her triumphs, the festival of
the Bona Dea was rendered notorious by the divorce of Cæsar's wife and
by legal proceedings against an aristocratic scoundrel, who, for the
purposes of an intrigue with her, had violated the sacred ceremonies.
The Bona Dea, or Good Goddess, was a woodland deity, the daughter and
wife of Faunus. Her worship had descended from a remote antiquity; and
her annual festival was held in the month of December, and was attended
only by women. The matrons of the noblest families of Rome met by night
in the house of the highest official of the state to perform the
traditional ceremonies of the goddess, and to pray for the well-being of
the Roman people. Only women, and those of the most unsullied character,
were permitted to attend; and the breach of this rule by Clodius,
disguised in woman's garb, constituted a heinous offence against the
state, from the penalties of which he only escaped, if we may believe
Cicero, by bribing the judges.[55]

At the village of Southam, not far from Coventry, another procession in
honour of Godiva formerly took place. Very little is known about it now,
save one singular fact, namely, that there were two Godivas in the
cavalcade, and one of them was black. Southam was part of the property
possessed by Earl Leofric; and it has been suggested that this is enough
to account for the commemoration of Godgifu. It would no doubt be an
excellent reason for affixing her renowned name to a periodical ceremony
already performed there. But it would hardly be a reason for
commemorating her extortion of privileges in which the inhabitants of
Southam did not share; and it would leave the black lady unexplained.
She may, indeed, have been a mere travesty, though the hypothesis would
be anything but free from difficulty. Here, again, if we have recourse
to the comparison of ceremonies, we may obtain some light. Among the
tribes of the Gold Coast of Africa the wives of men who have gone to war
make a daily procession through the town. They are stark naked, painted
all over with white, and decorated with beads and charms. Any man who is
found in the town is attacked and driven away. And on the occasion of a
battle the women imitate the actions the men are thought to be
performing, with guns, sticks, and knives. The Gold Coast is a long way
off; but not only do black women there paint themselves white in their
sacred rites, white women in Britain have painted themselves, if not
black, at least a dark blue. Pliny records that both matrons and
unmarried girls among the Britons in the first century of the Christian
era were in the habit of staining themselves all over with the juice of
the woad; and he adds that, thus rivalling the swarthy hue of the
Æthiopians, they go on these occasions in a state of nature. We are
sometimes taught that when the English invaded Britain, the natives whom
they found here were all driven out or massacred. There are, however,
many reasons for doubting that this wholesale destruction was as
complete as has been imagined. The name of Coventry betrays in its
termination a Celtic element; and this could hardly have entered into it
had there not been in the neighbourhood a considerable British-speaking
population. What is more likely than that at Southam this population
continued and preserved its customs, and that one of such customs was
that very religious rite of which Pliny speaks? Unhappily he tells us
nothing about the rite itself, nor the deity in whose honour it was
performed. But it would not involve a great stretch of fancy to suppose
that in the black lady of Southam we have a survival of the performance.
It is not too much to say that this explanation would have the merit of
being intelligible and adequate.[56]

In all countries ceremonies of a special character are usually dramatic.
They represent, or are believed to represent, actions of the divinities
in whose honour they are performed. The rites of the Bona Dea, we know,
were of this kind; and they consequently degenerated into orgies of a
shameful character. The Coventry procession is admittedly a
representation of Godgifu's ride. It is not now, nor has it been so long
as we have any records of it--that is to say for two hundred
years--connected with any professed act of worship; but this is not
incompatible with its being the long-descended relic of some such
observance as those I have described. The introduction of Christianity
did not annihilate the older cults. The new religion incorporated some
of them; and although the rest were no longer regarded as sacred, the
feeling of obligation remained attached to them for centuries. They were
secularized, and ultimately degraded for the most part into burlesque.
Such as were connected with municipal life, or, as we shall see in a
future chapter, with family life, retained a measure of solemnity long
after it had passed away from rites which had been abandoned to an
unorganized mob. This is well illustrated by the contrast between the
ceremonial at Coventry (whatever its origin) and that at St. Briavels.
The stronger hand of a municipality would have a restraining power
wanting to that of a village community, or a parish--especially if the
latter had been governed by a lord, who in later times had been shorn of
his authority, or had ceased to reside among, or take an interest in the
affairs of, his tenantry. Something like this I take to have been the
history of St. Briavels. There does not appear from Rudder's account to
have been, in his time at least, any pageant commemorative of the
achievement of the lady to whom the parishioners reckoned themselves to
owe their privileges; nor have I been able to trace one by local
inquiries. But the tradition is at St. Briavels unmistakably connected
with a religious and social rite. The distribution of food on a day of
high and holy festival in the church to the congregation, and paid for
by a levy upon every householder in the parish, can point to nothing
else than a feast of the whole community as a solemn act of worship. Its
degeneracy in more recent times has been thus described to me by the
Rev. W. Taprell Allen:--"For many years it was customary to bring to the
church on Whitsunday afternoon baskets of the stalest bread and hardest
cheese, cut up into small pieces the size of dice. Immediately after the
service the bread and cheese were scrambled for in the church, and it
was a custom to use them as pellets, the parson coming in for his share
as he left the pulpit. About 1857, or perhaps a year or two later, the
unseemly custom was transferred from the church to the churchyard, the
bread and cheese being thrown down from the church tower. Later on it
was transferred to the road outside the church gates. It now lasts but a
few minutes. A few years ago all the roughs of the Forest used to come
over, and there was much drinking and fighting; but now it is very
different. The custom has in fact been dying out." From these later
stages of decay the Godiva pageant was saved by becoming a municipal
festival. And while at St. Briavels we can watch the progress of
degeneration from a point at which the religious character of the
ceremony had not quite vanished, down to the most unblushing burlesque,
and to its ultimate expulsion from consecrated precincts,--at Coventry
we see but one phase, one moment, at which the rite, if it ever had any
title to that name, seems to have been photographed and rendered
permanent.

It is obvious, however, that a feast is not a dramatic representation of
a ride; and the point requiring elucidation is the intimate relation of
the feast at St. Briavels with a story apparently so irrelevant as that
of the countess' ride. To explain this, we must suppose that the feast
was only part--doubtless the concluding part--of a ceremony, and that
the former portion was a procession, of which the central figure was
identical with that familiar to us at Coventry. But such a procession,
terminating in a sacred feast, would have had no meaning if the naked
lady represented a creature merely of flesh and blood. It is only
explicable on the hypothesis that she was the goddess of a heathen cult,
such as Hertha (or Nerthus), whose periodical progress among her subject
tribes is described in a well-known passage by Tacitus,[57] and yet
survives, as we have seen, in the folklore of Rügen. Now the historian
tells us that Hertha was Mother Earth, the goddess of the soil, whose
yearly celebration would appropriately take place in the spring or early
summer. To her the produce of the land would be ascribed; and in her
name and by her permission would all agricultural operations be
performed. Such a goddess it must be who is honoured by the ceremonies
already noticed in India. Such a goddess, at any rate, was the Bona Dea;
and to such a goddess we may readily believe would be ascribed the
privilege of cutting wood. It is quite consistent with this that the
payment by every household at St. Briavels should be made to the warden
of the forest, and that it should be spent by him on the goddess'
festival. We are left to surmise what were the tolls and burdens at
Coventry, so vaguely referred to by Roger of Wendover. Pigs and horses,
we learn from two different sources, were not included in the exemptions
obtained by the countess; and the reason for this in the latter case is
accounted for by the incident of Peeping Tom.

One other point is worthy of mention: both at St. Briavels and at
Coventry the commemoration takes place nearly at the same time of year.
The Great Fair at Coventry opens on the day after Corpus Christi
Day--that is to say, the Friday after Trinity Sunday. Corpus Christi Day
itself was the day on which the celebrated Coventry Miracle Plays were
performed; and the Fair opened the next morning. At the same time of
year too--namely, on Ascension Day--a custom, for which there is no
explanation in any record, was observed at St. Michael's Church, York,
when ale and bread and cheese were yearly given away in the church to
the poor of the parish.[58] Although Ascension Day is separated by three
weeks from Corpus Christi, the movable character of the feasts would
bridge this gulf without any difficulty; and heathen observances of the
same nature, and referring to the same season, when they had to be
reconciled to the Christian calendar, might easily find places in some
instances on one day and in others on another day. Godgifu and her
husband were honoured as founders of the Benedictine monastery at
Coventry, which rose upon the ruins of an earlier house of Benedictine
nuns founded by Osburg, a lady of the royal house, nearly two hundred
years before. This nunnery had been destroyed in the Danish wars about
the year 1016. Consequently, if any legend, or ceremony, was known or
practised at Coventry in connection with some traditional patroness, the
name of Godgifu was ready to hand to be identified with it. Through the
monastery Coventry first rose to wealth and repute; and the townsfolk on
this score owed a debt of gratitude to the foundress, though there is no
record whether any special day was set apart in her honour.

On the whole, then, there is ground for supposing that the legend and
procession of Lady Godiva are survivals of a pagan belief and worship
located at Coventry; that the legend was concerned with a being awful
and mysterious as Dame Berchta, or Hertha herself; and that the incident
of Peeping Tom was from the first, or at all events from an early date,
part of the story. The evidence upon which these conclusions rest may be
shortly recapitulated thus:--

1. The absence of historical foundation for the tradition.

2. The close resemblance between the tradition and other stories and
superstitions which unquestionably deal with heathen goddesses, such as
Berchta and Hertha.

3. The equally close analogy between the procession and that described
in Eastern stories, which, so far as we know, could not have reached
England at the latest period when the procession could possibly have
been instituted; and between the procession and certain heathen rites
practised not only in the East, but as near home as Rome and
Germany,--nay, in Britain itself.

4. The occurrence of a similar procession at Southam, in the same
county, having the special feature of a black lady, best explained as a
survival of certain rites practised by the ancient Britons.

5. The connection between the analogous legend at St. Briavel's and the
remains of a sacred communal feast that can hardly be anything else than
the degraded remnant of a pagan observance.

The want of historical evidence cannot, of course, be overlooked; but we
must remember that in investigating traditions and traditional
observances we are dealing with a phase of civilization of which history
only yields rare and indirect glimpses. It is the absence of direct
evidence that, not only in the science of Folklore, but also in the
physical sciences, causes resort to the evidence afforded by comparison
of other structures and processes. On the validity of this evidence, and
the reasoning based upon it, nearly all our scientific learning depends.
In spite, therefore, of the defects in the historical evidence, and in
the absence of evidence to the contrary, it can scarcely be denied that
the analogies in both custom and legend here brought together amount to
a fairly strong presumption in favour of the conclusions I have ventured
to draw from them.

If I may formulate my conjecture as to the course of development
actually pursued, it would be something like this. The ceremony at
Coventry is a survival of an annual rite in honour of a heathen goddess,
from which men were excluded. This rite, like all such, would have been
a part of the tribal cult, and intimately associated with the tribal
life and organization. Side by side with it a myth would have been
evolved, accounting for the performance as a dramatic representation of
an event in the goddess' career. This myth would have been similar in
outline to those recited above, and would have comprised an explanation
of the exclusion of men. When Christianity spread through the district
the inhabitants would still cling to their old custom and their old
myth, as we know was done elsewhere, because it was bound up with their
social life. But, if not violently put down by the rulers of the land,
both custom and myth would, little by little, lose their sacred
character as the new religion increased in influence, and would become
transformed into municipal ceremonies. This process would be slow,
centuries being required for its completion; but it would be aided by
the gradual development of the tribe first into a settled village
community, and thence into a mediæval township. With the loss of
sanctity the reason for prohibiting the attendance of men would vanish;
but the tradition of it would be preserved in the incident of the story
which narrated Peeping Tom's treachery.[59]


FOOTNOTES:

[33] Mrs. Bray, vol. i. p. 174.

[34] "Revue Celtique," vol. i. p. 231; Keightley, p. 312, citing "The
Local Historian's Table-Book," by M. A. Richardson. Cromek, p. 242; "Y
Cymmrodor," vol. iv. p. 209; "Revue des Trad. Pop." vol. iii. p. 426;
"Revue Celtique," vol. i. p. 232.

[35] Sébillot, "Contes," vol. ii. p. 34; "Revue des Trad. Pop." vol.
iii. p. 428; Sébillot, "Litt. Orale," p. 21; Kennedy, p. 106; Keightley,
p. 311; "Y Cymmrodor," vol. vi. p. 166; Wirt Sikes, p. 87. This story
purports to be quoted from Howells, p. 349--an impossible reference,
seeing that the volume in question only contains 194 pages. The
peculiarities of Mr. Sikes' authorities, however, need very little
comment.

[36] "Y Cymmrodor," vol. vi. p. 194; Hunt, p. 120.

[37] Gerv. Tilb. _Dcc._ iii. c. 85.

[38] Sébillot, "Contes," vol. ii. p. 42; "Litt. Orale," p. 23; "Trad. et
Super." p. 109. But in these cases the operation was performed
painlessly enough, for the victims were unaware of their loss until they
came to look in the glass. In one of Prof. Rhys' stories the eye is
pricked with a green rush; "Y Cymmrodor," vol. vi. p. 178: Hunt, p. 83.
See also Sébillot, "Contes," vol. i. p. 119.

[39] Keightley, p. 310; "Revue des Trad. Pop." vol. iii. p. 426; Thorpe,
vol. ii. p. 129, quoting Thiele. In another Danish tale given on the
same page, the woman's blindness is attributed to her having divulged
what she had seen in Fairyland.

[40] Sébillot, "Litt. Orale," p. 24.

[41] "Choice Notes," p. 170; Thorpe, vol. iii. p. 8. The latter form of
the story seems more usual. See Gredt, pp. 28, 29, where we are plainly
told that the hapless mortals are fetched away by the devil.

[42] Sternberg, p. 132 (see also Thorpe, vol. ii. p. 12); Von Alpenburg,
p. 63. See a similar story in Grimm, "Teut. Myth." p. 276, from Börner,
"Folk-tales of the Orlagau." In the latter case, however, the punishment
seems to have been inflicted for jeering.

[43] Jahn, p. 177, quoting Temme, "Volkssagen"; Ovid, "Metam." l. iii.
fab. 3; Tacitus, "Germ." c. 40.

[44] Roger of Wendover, "Flowers of History," sub anno 1057. I quote
from Dr. Giles' translation.

[45] See his Presidential Address to the Warwickshire Naturalists' and
Archæologists' Field Club, 1886.

[46] MS. marked D. This entry is an interpolation in a list of mayors
and sheriffs in a different handwriting. There are several such
interpolations in the volume. Coventry possesses a number of MS. volumes
of annals, one of which (see below) seems to date from the latter part
of the sixteenth century, and the rest from the latter part of the
seventeenth. In the MS. marked F. (considered by Mr. W. G. Fretton,
F.S.A., to be in the handwriting of John Tipper, of Bablake, Coventry, a
schoolmaster and local antiquary at the end of the seventeenth and
beginning of the eighteenth centuries), and also in the MS. in the
British Museum (Additional MSS. 11,364), the entry runs simply:--"1678
Michaell Earle (Mercer) Mayor; Francis Clark, George Allatt, Sherriffs.
This year y^e severall Companies had new streamers, and attended y^e
Mayor to proclaim y^e faire, and each company cloathed one boy or two to
augment y^e show." The latter MS. elsewhere speaks of the story of
Godiva's ride as "comonly known, and yearly comemorated by the Mayor,
Aldermen, and y^e severall companies."

[47] This statue used to be decked out on the occasion of the procession
in the long peruke and neckcloth of the reign of Charles II. See T.
Ward, "Collections for the Continuation of Dugdale's Antiquities of
Warwickshire" (2 vols., fol. MS., Brit. Mus., Additional MSS., Nos.
29,264, 29,265), vol. ii. fol. 143.

[48] MS. marked E, Coventry, seventeenth century. A careful examination
of the language of Roger of Wendover, Matthew Paris, John of Brompton,
and Matthew of Westminster, shows that Roger of Wendover's account is
the source of the other three, Matthew Paris copying most closely, and
John of Brompton most freely. John of Brompton and Matthew of
Westminster omit the escort. Their statement as to Godiva's being unseen
refers to the hair which covered her; and the latter informs us, with a
touch of rhetoric, that Leofric regarded it as a miracle.

[49] Rudder, p. 307. The Rev. W. Taprell Allen, M.A., Vicar of St.
Briavels, has been kind enough to supply me with the correction from
local inquiries and intimate acquaintance with the traditions and
affairs of the parish extending over many years. See also "Gent. Mag.
Lib." (Manners and Customs), p. 230.

[50] Liebrecht, p. 104.

[51] Burton, "Nights," vol. ix. p. 255; Burton, "Supp. Nights," vol.
iii. p. 570 (Appendix by Mr. W. A. Clouston). Kurroglú flourished in the
second half of the seventeenth century.

[52] This story is edited by Jülg in Mongolian and German (Innsbruck,
1867). Miss Busk gives a free adaptation rather than a translation of
the German version, "Sagas," p. 315. Prof. De Gubernatis, "Zool. Myth."
vol. i. p. 138, of course interprets it as a sun-myth--an interpretation
to which the names Sunshine and Moon, and the date of the adventure (the
fifteenth of the month), lend themselves.

[53] Von Hahn, vol. ii. p. 225; "Tour du Monde," vol. xxi. p. 342,
quoted by Liebrecht, p. 105.

[54] "Panjab N. and Q." vol. iii. pp. 41, 115; "Journal Ethnol. Soc.
London," N. S., vol. i. p. 98.

[55] The information relating to the Bona Dea has been collected by
Preller, "Röm. Myth." vol. i. p. 398; and see the authorities he has
cited.

[56] Ellis, p. 226; Pliny, "Nat. Hist." l. xxii. c. 1. For the
information as to the procession at Southam I am indebted to Mr. W. G.
Fretton, who formerly lived there.

[57] "Germania," c. 40; _cf._ c. 9.

[58] Nicholson, p. 32.

[59] I am indebted to Mr. Samuel Timmins, F.S.A., and to Mr. W. G.
Fretton, F.S.A., for a great amount of local information and other
assistance which they have spared no pains to render me, and to the Town
Clerk of Coventry for permission to inspect the invaluable local
manuscripts belonging to the Corporation.




CHAPTER V.

CHANGELINGS.

     The belief in changelings--Precautions against changing--Motives
     assigned for changing--Attempts frustrated--How changelings may
     be known--Their physical characteristics--Devices to lead them to
     betray themselves--Their subsequent treatment--Journey to
     Fairyland to fetch back the true child--Adult changelings.


A new-born babe, of all human beings the most helpless, has always
roused compassion and care. Nor is it a matter for wonder if its
helplessness against physical dangers have led to the assumption that it
is exposed to spiritual or supernatural evils more than its elders. At
all events it seems a widespread superstition that a babe, when first it
makes its appearance in this world, must be protected not merely against
the natural perils of its condition, but also against enemies of an even
more subtle and fearful description. The shape taken by this
superstition in north-western Europe is the belief in Changelings--a
belief which I propose to examine in the present chapter.[60]

By the belief in changelings I mean a belief that fairies and other
imaginary beings are on the watch for young children, or (as we shall
see hereafter) sometimes even for adults, that they may, if they can
find them unguarded, seize and carry them off, leaving in their place
one of themselves, or a block of wood animated by their enchantments and
made to resemble the stolen person. Wise mothers take precautions
against such thefts. These precautions are tolerably simple, and for the
most part display the same general character. First and foremost among
them is the rite of baptism, whereby the little one is admitted into the
Christian Church. Faith in the efficacy of baptism as a protection from
the powers hostile to man is not less strong among communities nominally
Protestant than among Roman Catholics, and has doubtless operated to
bring many children within the pale of the visible Church who might
otherwise have been long in reaching that sacred enclosure. Examples of
the belief in the power of baptism against the depredations of fairies
could easily be cited from all Protestant countries. Without doing this,
we may just pause to note that baptism was also reckoned a remedy for
disease. This is doubtless a relic of the old creed which refers all
human ailments to witchcraft and other spiritualistic origins. Mr.
Henderson, speaking of the notion prevalent in the north of England that
sickly infants never thrive until they are christened, relates a story
communicated to him by a clergyman, within whose personal knowledge it
had happened. He says: "The infant child of a chimney-sweeper at Thorne,
in the West Riding of Yorkshire, was in a very weak state of health, and
appeared to be pining away. A neighbour looked in, and inquired if the
child had been baptized. On an answer being given in the negative, she
gravely said, 'I would try having it christened.' The counsel was taken,
and I believe with success." The same belief is found both in North and
South Wales. It is also testified to by a Scottish clergyman, who
moreover adduces the following conversation as illustrative of it and of
"an undefinable sort of awe about unbaptized infants, as well as an idea
of uncanniness in having them without baptism in the house," which is
entertained among the labouring classes in the north-east of Scotland.
"Oh, sir," said the wife of a working man to the minister, on asking him
to baptize her child along with others, whose mothers were present,
"this registration's the warst thing the queentry ever saw; it sud be
deen awa' wee athegeethir!" "Why?" asked the minister, in astonishment
at the woman's words and earnestness of manner. "It'll pit oot kirsnin
athegeethir. Ye see the craitirs gets their names, an we jist think that
aneuch, an' we're in nae hurry sennin for you." How far, as this
anecdote dimly suggests, it was the giving of a name which was supposed
to protect a child, I cannot say: more probably it was the dedication to
God involved in baptism. This is countenanced by the precaution said to
have been observed in Nithsdale when a pretty child was born to
consecrate it to God, and sue for its protection by "taking the Beuk"
and other acts of prayer and devotion.[61]

Putting aside such ceremonies as these which may be supposed distinctly
Christian, there were other charms looked upon as efficacious. Thus in
Scotland it was deemed highly judicious to keep an open Bible always
near a child, and even to place the holy volume beneath the head of a
woman in labour. In some parts of Germany it is enough to lay a single
leaf out of a Bible or prayer-book in the cradle, until by the baptism
of the infant the danger of robbery passes away; and a prayer-book is
also placed under the pillow of the newly-made mother, who is at that
time specially liable to fall under the power of the underground folk.
Indeed a prayer-book, or the mere repetition of a Paternoster, is
equally valuable with a Bible for these purposes; and if, by the neglect
of any of these precautions, an opportunity be given to the foe, the
child may yet be saved by the utterance of the name of Jesus Christ at
the moment when the change is being effected. Holy water and the sign of
the cross, in Ireland, or a rosary blessed by a priest, in Picardy,
enjoy a similar reputation.[62]

All these means of prevention are veneered with some sort of
Christianity; but there are others which display Heathenism naked and
unblushing. While a child in Mecklenburg remains unbaptized it is
necessary to burn a light in the chamber. Nor is the superstition
confined to one district: it is common all over Germany and Denmark; it
was once common in England; it is found in Ireland; it is found among
the Lithuanians on the shores of the Baltic; it was practised by the
ancient Romans, and appears to be a relic of the sacred character
anciently imputed to fire. In the island of Lewis fire used to be
carried round women before they were churched and children before they
were christened, both night and morning; and this was held effectual to
preserve both mother and infant from evil spirits, and (in the case of
the infant) from being changed. The Sad Dar, one of the sacred books of
the Parsees, contains directions to keep a continual fire in the house
during a woman's pregnancy, and after the child is born to burn a lamp
for three nights and days--a fire, indeed, is declared to be better--"so
that the demons and fiends may not be able to do any damage and harm."
By way of enforcing this precept we are told that when Zoroaster was
born, a demon came at the head of a hundred and fifty other demons,
every night for three nights, to slay him, but they were put to flight
by seeing the fire, and were consequently unable to hurt him.[63]

Iron or steel, in the shape of needles, a key, a knife, a pair of tongs,
an open pair of scissors, or in any other shape, if placed in the
cradle, secured the desired end. In Bulgaria a reaping-hook is placed in
a corner of the room for the same purpose. I shall not stay now to
discuss the reason why supernatural beings dread and dislike iron. The
open pair of scissors, however, it should be observed, has double power;
for it is not only of the abhorred metal,--it is also in form a cross.
The use of the cross in baptism was probably one of the reasons for the
efficacy of that rite against felonious fairies. At all events, over a
very wide area the cross is thought a potent protection; nor is the
belief by any means confined to Christian lands. Mr. Mitchell-Innes
tells us that the fear of changelings exists in China. "To avert the
calamity of nursing a demon, dried banana-skin is burnt to ashes, which
are then mixed with water. Into this the mother dips her finger and
paints a cross upon the sleeping babe's forehead. In a short time the
demon soul returns--for the soul wanders from the body during sleep and
is free--but, failing to recognize the body thus disguised, flies off.
The true soul, which has been waiting for an opportunity, now approaches
the dormant body, and, if the mark has been washed off in time, takes
possession of it; but if not, it, like the demon, failing to recognize
the body, departs, and the child dies in its sleep."[64] How to hit the
exact moment between the flight of the demon and the advent of the true
soul doubtless puzzles many a Chinese mother fully as much as the cross
puzzles the two competing souls. But when she is successful she baffles
the evil spirit by deceit, of which the cross is made the instrument;
though we may well believe that the child is not disguised in this way
without reference to the cross's inherent sanctity; for it is a
religious symbol among nations who never heard the gospel of the
Crucified.

Spirits whose baleful influences are feared by man are happily easily
tricked. To this guilelessness on their part must be attributed another
strange method of defeating their evil designs on children. It appears
to be enough to lay over the infant, or on the bed beside the mother, a
portion of the father's clothes. A shepherd's wife living near Selkirk
was lying in bed one day with her new-born boy at her side, when she
heard a sound of talking and laughter in the room. Suspecting what
turned out to be the case, she seized in great alarm her husband's
waistcoat, which was lying at the foot of the bed, and flung it over
herself and the child. The fairies, for it was they who were the cause
of the noise, set up a loud scream, crying out: "Auld Luckie has cheated
us o' our bairnie!" Soon afterwards the woman heard something fall down
the chimney, and looking out she saw a waxen effigy of her baby, stuck
full of pins, lying on the hearth. The would-be thieves had meant to
substitute this for the child. When her husband came home he made up a
large fire and threw the doll upon it; but, instead of burning, the
thing flew up the chimney amid shouts of laughter from the unseen
visitors. The suggestion seems to be that the sight of the father's
clothes leads "the good people" to think that he himself is present
watching over his offspring. Some articles of clothing, however, seem to
have special virtue, such as a right shirt-sleeve or a left stocking,
though wherefore is not very clear; and in China, about Canton, a
fisherman's net is employed with as little apparent reason. In Sweden
the babe is wrapped in red cloth, which we may be allowed to conjecture
is intended to cozen the fairies by simulating fire.[65]

Moreover, certain plants are credited with a similar gift. In Germany
orant (whatever that may be), blue marjoram, and black cumin; and in
Denmark garlic--nasty enough surely to keep any beings off--and bread
are used. The Danes, too, place salt in the cradle or over the door. The
Italians fear not only fairies who rob them of their children, but also
witches who tear the faces of unbaptized infants. These are both old
superstitions, dating in one form or other from classic times. To baulk
the witches of their prey it is in some places customary to keep a light
burning in the chamber at night, and to affix at the door of the house
the image of a saint, hanging to it a rosary and an unravelled napkin;
while behind the door are put a jar full of salt and a brush. A twofold
defence is thus built up; for the witch, beholding the image of the
saint and the rosary, will straightway retire; or if these fail to warn
her off, she will on entering be compelled to count the grains of salt,
the broken threads of the napkin, and the twigs of the brush--a task
that will keep her occupied from midnight, when at the earliest she can
dare appear, until dawn, when she must slink away without having been
able to attain her object. Among the Greeks witches are believed to have
great power. They seek new-born babes to suck their blood or to prick
them to death with sharp instruments. Often they inflict such injuries
that a child remains for ever a cripple or an invalid. The Nereids of
the fountains and springs are also on the watch "to exchange one of
their own fractious offspring for a mortal babe." Constant watchfulness,
and baptism as soon as the Church permits it, are therefore necessary.
In England it seems to have been held in former days that witches stole
children from their cradles before baptism to make an oil or unguent by
boiling them to a jelly. A part of this jelly they used to drink, and
with the remainder they rubbed their bodies. This was the orthodox means
of acquiring magical powers. It is a Sicilian belief that the hands of
unbaptized children are used by witches in their sorceries.[66]

As we might expect, the reason why unbaptized babes are held to be so
liable to these attacks is that until the initiatory rite has been
performed they are looked upon as heathen, and therefore peculiarly
under the dominion of evil spirits. In Sicily and in Spain an infant
until baptism is called by the opprobrious epithets of _Pagan_, _Turk_,
_Moor_, _Jew_. Even women will not kiss it, for to kiss a Moor, at all
events in Spain, is sin; though, on the other hand, to kiss an
unbaptized child, if no one else have kissed it, is sovereign against
toothache. By the Greeks these little innocents are regarded not merely
as not Christians, but as really less human than demoniac in their
nature. This is said, indeed, to be the teaching of the Church. The
lower classes, at least (and, presumably therefore, not long ago the
upper classes) believe it firmly; so that an unbaptized babe is called
_Drakos_ (feminine, _Drakoula_), that is to say, serpent or dragon. This
is the same opprobrious title that we found Gervase of Tilbury applying
to the evil spirits infesting the waters of the Rhone; and we cannot
doubt that it is intended to convey an imputation of Satanic nature.[67]
The extent of this superstition would form an interesting subject of
inquiry. If it could be established as existing now or formerly among
other Christian nations (and the superstitions of Sicily and Spain just
cited point to this) it would help to clear up much of the difficulty
surrounding the subject of changelings, especially the motives actuating
both fairies and witches in their depredations. And, as infant baptism
is by no means exclusively a Christian rite, research among heathen
nations would be equally pertinent.

Meanwhile the motive usually assigned to fairies in northern stories is
that of preserving and improving their race, on the one hand by carrying
off human children to be brought up among the elves and to become united
with them, and on the other hand by obtaining the milk and fostering
care of human mothers for their own offspring. Doubts have been
expressed by the German poet and mythologist, Karl Simrock, whether this
was the primitive motive. He suggests that originally these spirits were
looked upon as wholly beneficent, and even the theft of children was
dictated by their care for the best interests of mankind. Nor does he
hesitate to lay it down that the selfish designs just mentioned were
first attributed to them when with growing enlightenment the feeling
manifested itself that the kindly beings were falling into decay.[68]

It might be sufficient to reply that no spiritual existences imagined by
men in a state of civilization such as surrounded our Celtic and
Teutonic forefathers were ever regarded as unswervingly benevolent:
caprice and vindictiveness, if not cruelty, are always elements of their
character. Beyond this general consideration, however, there is a
further and conclusive answer in the fact that there is no warrant in
tradition for the supposition that could we penetrate to the oldest
strata of mythical belief we should not discover selfish designs imputed
to "the good people." The distinguished commentator himself is bound to
admit that the belief in their need of human help is entwined in the
very roots of the Teutonic myths. It is, indeed, nothing but the
mediæval and Teutonic form of tenets common to all the nations upon
earth. The changeling superstition and the classic stories of children
and adults beloved by gods of high and low degree are consistent with
this belief, and inseparable from it. The motive is so far
comprehensible: what is wanted is to know whether any special relations,
such as are pointed at by the Greek epithet _Drakos_, were held to exist
between the mysterious world and newly-born babes which would render the
latter more obnoxious to attack than elder children or adults; or
whether, as I have put it at the beginning of this chapter, their
helplessness alone suggested their exceeding danger. To solve the riddle
we must wait for a larger accumulation of documents.[69]

But in the best regulated families it is not always possible to prevent
the abduction from being attempted, and sometimes accomplished, in spite
of every precaution. One night a Welsh woman, waking in a fright in her
husband's absence, missed her baby. She sought for it and caught it upon
the boards above the bed: the fairies had not succeeded in bearing it
any further away. Another felt her boy being taken from her arms;
whereupon she screamed and held him tightly, and, according to her own
expression, "God and me were too hard for them." The child grew up to
become a famous preacher. A peasant woman in Mecklenburg who ventured to
sleep without a light was attacked by an elf-woman. The stranger seized
the child, but was baffled by the woman's determination; for she
struggled and shrieked for her husband, and when he hurried in with a
light the fairy vanished.[70]

Nor is it always the mother who arrests the theft. A trick frequently
played by the dwarfs in Northern Germany on the birth of a child was to
pinch a cow's ear; and when the animal bellowed and everybody ran out to
know why, a dwarf would slip indoors and effect the change. On one such
occasion the father saw his infant being dragged out of the room. In the
nick of time he grasped it and drew it towards himself. The changeling
left in its place was found in the bed; and this he kept too, defying
the efforts of the underground folk to regain it. At a place in North
Jutland it happened many years ago in a lying-in room that the mother
could get no sleep while the lights were burning. So her husband
resolved to take the child in his arm, in order to keep strict watch
over it so long as it was dark. But, unfortunately, he fell asleep; and
on being awakened by a shake of the arm, he saw a tall woman standing by
the bed, and found that he had an infant in each arm. The woman
instantly vanished; and as he had forgotten in which arm he had held his
child, there he lay without knowing which of the two children was his
own. A boy, who was watching his younger sister while his parents were
both from home, saw a small man and woman come from behind the oven.
They told him to give them the little one; and when he refused they
stepped to the cradle and endeavoured to take the babe by force. The
boy, however, was strong and bold, and laid about him with such
determination that the robbers at length took to flight. On the
Lithuanian coast of the Baltic substantially the same tale is told with
more humour. There a farmer's boy sleeping in the living-room of the
house is awakened by the proceedings of two _laumes_, or elves. They
stealthily fetch out of the bedroom the new-born babe and swathe it in
swaddling clothes of their own, while they wrap in its clothes the
oven-broom. Then they began to quarrel which of them should carry the
broom thus rolled up into the bedroom; and as they were unable to agree
they resolved to carry it together. No sooner had they disappeared into
the inner apartment than the boy leaped out of bed, picked up his
mistress' child and took it into his own bed. When the _laumes_ returned
the infant was not to be found. They were both very angry and began to
scold one another: "It's your fault." "No, it's your fault; didn't I
say, You carry it, while I stay here and keep watch? I said it would be
stolen!" While they wrangled thus, kakary ku! crew the cock, and, foiled
and enraged, they had to make off. The boy had great difficulty in
wakening his mistress, who was in a deep sleep, dreaming a horrible
dream that a stock of wood had been placed on her breast so that she
could hardly breathe. He told her what had happened, but she would not
believe it until she saw that she had _two_ children--one to which she
had given birth, the other fashioned out of the oven-broom.[71]

Prayer and the utterance of a holy name are to the full as effectual as
physical strength. A fisherwoman in the north-east of Scotland was once
left alone in bed with her baby, when in came a little man dressed in
green, and proceeded to lay hold of the child. The woman knew at once
with whom she had to do, and ejaculated: "God be atween you an' me!" Out
rushed the fairy in a moment, and mother and babe were left without
further molestation. A curious tale is told of two Strathspey smugglers
who were one night laying in a stock of whiskey at Glenlivat when they
heard the child in the cradle give a piercing cry, just as if it had
been shot. The mother, of course, blessed it; and the Strathspey lads
took no further notice, and soon afterwards went their way with their
goods. Before they had gone far they found a fine healthy child lying
all alone on the roadside, and recognized it as their friend's. They saw
at once how the affair stood. The fairies had taken away the real infant
and left a stock; but owing to the pious ejaculation of the mother, they
had been forced to drop it. As the urgency of their business did not
admit of their return they took the child with them, and kept it until
they went to Glenlivat again. On their arrival here they said nothing
about the child, which they kept concealed. In the course of
conversation the woman remarked that the disease which had attacked the
little one the last time they were there had never left it, and she had
now scarce any hope of its recovery. As if to confirm her statement, it
continued uttering most piercing cries. The smugglers thereupon produced
the real babe healthy and hearty, and told her how they had found it.
The mother was, of course, pleased to recover it; and the next thing was
to dispose of the changeling. For this purpose the Strathspey lads got
an old creel to put him in and some straw to light under it. Seeing the
serious turn matters were likely to take he resolved not to await the
trial, but flew up the smoke-hole and cried out from the top that but
for the guests events would have gone very differently.[72]

Two pixies of Dartmoor, in the shape of large bundles of rags, led away
one of two children who were following their mother homeward. It was
eventually found, on a search being made by the neighbours with
lanterns, under a certain large oak tree known to be pixy-haunted. This
is hardly a changeling story, as no attempt was made to foist a false
child on the parent. A tale from the Isle of Man contains two similar
incidents of attempted robbery without replacing the stolen child by one
of superhuman birth. The fairies there adopted artifices like those of
the North German dwarfs above mentioned. A few nights after a woman had
been delivered of her first child a cry of fire was raised, and every
one ran out of the house to see whence it proceeded, leaving the
helpless mother alone with her babe. On returning they found the infant
lying on the threshold of the house. The following year, when another
little stranger had presented itself, a noise was heard in an out-house
among the cattle. Again everybody that was stirring, including the
nurse, hurried forth to learn what was the matter, believing that the
cattle had got loose. But finding all safe, they came back, only to
discover that the new-born babe had been taken out of bed, as the former
had been, and on their coming dropped in the middle of the entry. It
might have been supposed that these two warnings would have been enough;
but a third time the trick was played, and then more successfully.
Forgetting what had previously happened, all who were in the house ran
out one night on hearing a noise in the cow-house--all, that is, except
the mother, who could not move, and the nurse, who was sleeping off the
effects of alcohol. The former was lying broad awake and saw her child
lifted from the bed by invisible hands and carried clean away. She
shrieked at once to the nurse, but failed to arouse her; and when her
husband returned, an infant was indeed lying beside her, but a poor,
lean, withered, deformed creature, very different from her own. It lay
quite naked, though the clothes of the true child had been considerately
left for it by the ravishers.[73]

One of the difficulties experienced by the fairies on two of the three
occasions here narrated in making off with the little one occurred at
the door of the house. That they should have tried, repeatedly at all
events, to pass out that way is almost as remarkable as that they should
have been permitted more than once to attempt the theft. For the
threshold is a part of the dwelling which from of old has been held
sacred, and is generally avoided by uncanny beings. Wiser, though still
doomed to failure, were those Irish elves who lifted up a window and
handed the infant out. For it happened that a neighbour who was coming
to pay a visit that moment stopped before the house, and exclaimed: "God
keep all here from harm!" No sooner had she uttered the words than she
saw the child put forth, how, or by whom, she did not know; and without
hesitation she went up and took it away home with her. The next morning
when she called to see how her friend fared great was the moan made to
her over the behaviour of the child--so different from what it had ever
been before--crying all the night and keeping awake its mother, who
could not quiet it by any means. "I'll tell you what you'll do with the
brat," she replied; "whip it well first, and then bring it to the
cross-roads, and leave the fairy in the ditch there for any one to take
that pleases; for I have your child at home safe and sound as he was
handed out of the window last night to me." When the mother heard this,
she just stepped out to get a rod; but before she returned the
changeling had vanished, and no one either saw or heard of it again.[74]

Fairies, however, when bent upon mischief, are not always baulked so
easily. They effect the exchange, sometimes in the house, and sometimes
when the parent is at work in the fields and incautiously puts her
offspring down the while. In these circumstances, grievous as may be the
suspicion arising from the changed conduct of the nursling, it is not
always easy to be sure of what has taken place. Tests, therefore, have
to be applied. Often the appearance is enough. A "mighty big head," or
an abnormally thick head and neck, is in Germany deemed sufficient
credentials from Fairyland; while in a case from Lapland, where the hand
and foot grew so rapidly as to become speedily nearly half an ell in
length and the child was unable to learn to speak, whereas she readily
understood what was said to her, these deviations from the course of
nature were looked upon as conclusive evidence.[75] A reputed changeling
shown to Waldron in the Isle of Man early in the last century is thus
described: "Nothing under heaven could have a more beautiful face; but
though between five and six years old, and seemingly healthy, he was so
far from being able to walk, or stand, that he could not so much as move
any one joint; his limbs were vastly long for his age, but smaller than
an infant's of six months; his complexion was perfectly delicate, and he
had the finest hair in the world; he never spoke, nor cried, eat scarce
anything, and was very seldom seen to smile, but if any one called him a
fairy-elf, he would frown and fix his eyes so earnestly on those who
said it, as if he would look them through. His mother, or at least his
supposed mother, being very poor, frequently went out a-charing, and
left him a whole day together. The neighbours, out of curiosity, have
often looked in at the window to see how he behaved when alone, which,
whenever they did, they were sure to find him laughing and in the utmost
delight. This made them judge that he was not without company more
pleasing to him than any mortal's could be; and what made this
conjecture seem the more reasonable was, that if he were left ever so
dirty, the woman at her return saw him with a clean face, and his hair
combed with the utmost exactness and nicety."[76] Luther tells us that
he saw and touched at Dessau a changed child which was twelve years of
age. The account he gives of the child is that "he had his eyes and all
members like another child; he did nothing but feed, and would eat as
much as two clowns or threshers were able to eat. When one touched it,
then it cried out. When any evil happened in the house, then it laughed
and was joyful; but when all went well, then it cried and was very sad."
So much for the Reformer's testimony of what he saw and was told. His
theories and generalizations are in their way not less interesting than
his testimony: as might have been expected, they are an adaptation of
the ordinary superstitions to his own grim scheme of things. "Such
changelings and killcrops," he goes on to say, "_supponit Satan in locum
verorum filiorum_; for the devil hath this power, that he changeth
children, and instead thereof layeth devils in the cradles, which thrive
not, only they feed and suck: but such changelings live not above
eighteen or nineteen years. It sometimes falleth out that the children
of women in child-bed are thus changed, and Devils laid in their stead,
one of which more fouleth itself than ten other children do, so that
the parents are much therewith disquieted; and the mothers in such sort
are sucked out, that afterwards they are able to give suck no more."[77]

Making allowance for the influence of imagination, there can be no
doubt, on comparison of these passages, that the children to whom the
character of changelings was ascribed were invariably deformed or
diseased. The delightful author of the "Popular Romances of the West of
England" says that some thirty or forty years before the date of writing
he had seen several reputed changelings. And his evidence is express
that "in every case they have been sad examples of the influence of
mesenteric disease." After describing their external symptoms, he adds:
"The wasted frame, with sometimes strumous swellings, and the unnatural
abdominal enlargement which accompanies disease of mesenteric glands,
gives a very sad, and often a most unnatural, appearance to the
sufferer." Professor Rhys' description of a reputed changeling, one
Ellis Bach, of Nant Gwrtheyrn, in Carnarvonshire, is instructive as
showing the kind of being accredited among the Welsh with fairy nature.
The professor is repeating the account given to him of this poor
creature, who died nearly half a century ago. He tells us: "His father
was a farmer, whose children, both boys and girls, were like ordinary
folks, excepting Ellis, who was deformed, his legs being so short that
his body seemed only a few inches from the ground when he walked. His
voice was also small and squeaky. However, he was very sharp, and could
find his way among the rocks pretty well when he went in quest of his
father's sheep and goats, of which there used to be plenty there
formerly. Everybody believed Ellis to have been a changeling, and one
saying of his is well known in that part of the country. When strangers
visited Nant Gwrtheyrn, a thing which did not frequently happen, and
when his parents asked them to their table, and pressed them to eat, he
would squeak out drily: _'B'yta 'nynna b'yta'r cwbwl_,' that is to
say--'Eating--that means eating all.'" A changeling in Monmouthshire,
described by an eye-witness at the beginning of the present century, was
simply an idiot of a forbidding aspect, a dark, tawny complexion, and
much addicted to screaming.[78]

But a changeling was to be known in other ways than by his physical
defects; under careful management he might be led to betray himself in
speech or action. A Kirkcudbrightshire tale represents a child as once
left in charge of a tailor, who "commenced a discourse" with him.
"'Will, hae ye your pipes?' says the tailor. 'They're below my head,'
says the tenant of the cradle. 'Play me a spring,' says the tailor. Like
thought, the little man, jumping from the cradle, played round the room
with great glee. A curious noise was heard meantime outside; and the
tailor asked what it meant. The little elf called out: 'It's my folk
wanting me,' and away he fled up the chimney, leaving the tailor more
dead than alive." In the neighbouring county of Dumfries the story is
told with more gusto. The gudewife goes to the hump-backed tailor, and
says: "Wullie, I maun awa' to Dunse about my wab, and I dinna ken what
to do wi' the bairn till I come back: ye ken it's but a whingin',
screechin', skirlin' wallidreg--but we maun bear wi' dispensations. I
wad wuss ye,' quoth she, 'to tak tent till't till I come hame--ye sall
hae a roosin' ingle, and a blast o' the goodman's tobacco-pipe forbye.'
Wullie was naething laith, and back they gaed the-gither. Wullie sits
down at the fire, and awa' wi' her yarn gaes the wife; but scarce had
she steekit the door, and wan half-way down the close, when the bairn
cocks up on its doup in the cradle, and rounds in Wullie's lug: 'Wullie
Tylor, an' ye winna tell my mither when she comes back, I'se play ye a
bonny spring on the bagpipes.' I wat Wullie's heart was like to loup the
hool--for tylors, ye ken, are aye timorsome--but he thinks to himsel':
'Fair fashions are still best,' an' 'It's better to fleetch fules than
to flyte wi' them'; so he rounds again in the bairn's lug: 'Play up, my
doo, an' I'se tell naebody.' Wi' that the fairy ripes amang the cradle
strae, and pu's oot a pair o' pipes, sic as tylor Wullie ne'er had seen
in a' his days--muntit wi' ivory, and gold, and silver, and dymonts, and
what not. I dinna ken what spring the fairy played, but this I ken weel,
that Wullie had nae great goo o' his performance; so he sits thinkin' to
himsel': 'This maun be a deil's get, Auld Waughorn himsel' may come to
rock his son's cradle, and play me some foul prank;' so he catches the
bairn by the cuff o' the neck, and whupt him into the fire, bagpipes and
a'!"[79]

In Nithsdale the elf-child displays a superhuman power of work. The
mother left it on one occasion in the charge of a servant-girl, who sat
bemoaning herself. "Wer't nae for thy girning face I would knock the
big, winnow the corn, and grun the meal!" "Lowse the cradle band," cried
the child, "and tent the neighbours, an' I'll work yere wark." With that
he started up, the wind arose, the corn was winnowed, the outlyers were
foddered, the hand-mill moved around as by instinct, and the knocking
mell did its work with amazing rapidity. The lass and the elf meanwhile
took their ease, until, on the mistress's return, he was restored to the
cradle and began to yell anew.[80]

Most of the stories of changelings, in fact, assume that, though the
outward characteristics might justify vehement suspicion, yet they were
not absolutely decisive, and that to arrive at certainty the elf must be
brought to betray himself. No great subtlety, however, was needful; for
the stratagem employed varies but little, as the following examples will
show. The child of a married couple in Mecklenburg at two years of age
was no longer than a shoe, but had a mighty big head, and, withal, was
unable to learn to speak. Its parents were led by an old man to suspect
that it had been changed, and their adviser told them: "If you wish to
become certain, take an empty egg-shell, and in the child's presence
pour in new beer and cause it to ferment by means of yeast. If then the
child speak, my conjecture is right." His counsel was followed, and
scarcely had the beer fermented when the child cried out from the
cradle:

    "I am as old
    As Bohemian gold,
    Yet for the first time now I see
    Beer in an egg-shell brew'd to be."

The parents determined to fling the babe into the river the following
night; but when at midnight they rose for the purpose they found in the
cradle a strong, blooming child. In a Welsh tale from Radnorshire the
egg-shell is boiled full of pottage in the children's sight (there are
twins in this case) and taken out as a dinner for the reapers who
happened to be cutting the rye and oats. In Glamorganshire the woman
declares she is mixing a pasty for the reapers. An Icelandic legend
makes a woman set a pot containing food to cook on the fire and fasten
twigs end to end in continuation of the handle of a spoon until the
topmost one appears above the chimney, when she puts the bowl in the
pot. Another woman in a Danish tale engaged to drive a changeling out of
the house he troubled; and this is how she set about it. In his
temporary absence she killed a pig and made a black pudding of it, hide,
hair and all. On his return she set it before him, for he was a
prodigious eater. He began gobbling it up as usual; but as he ate his
efforts gradually slackened, and at last he sat quite still, eyeing it
thoughtfully. Then he exclaimed: "A pudding with hide! and a pudding
with hair! a pudding with eyes! and a pudding with bones in it! Thrice
have I seen a young wood spring upon Tiis Lake, but never yet did I see
such a pudding! The devil will stay here no longer!" And so saying he
ran off and never returned.[81]

Of these devices, however, the normal one is that of the egg-shells.
Sometimes one egg-shell only is employed, sometimes two--a dozen--or an
indefinite number. At seaside places, like Normandy and the Channel
Islands, egg-shells are sometimes replaced by shells of shell-fish.[82]
In all the stories the end is the same, namely, to excite the curiosity
and wonder of the imp to such a pitch that he gives expression to it in
language akin to that of the North German or the Danish tale just
quoted. The measure of age given in his exclamation is usually that of
the trees in the forest, or indeed the forest itself. In the instance
from Mecklenburg, Bohemian gold (_Böhmer Gold_) is made the measure, and
this runs through quite a number of Low Dutch stories. There can be
little doubt, however, that it is a corruption, and that the true form
is, as given in a Schleswig-Holstein tale, Bohemian Forest (_Behmer
Woelt_).[83] In Hesse Wester Forest (_Westerwald_) is found, and so on
in other countries, the narrator in each case referring to some wood
well known to his audience. The Lithuanian elf, or _laumes_, says: "I am
so old, I was already in the world before the Kamschtschen Wood was
planted, wherein great trees grew, and _that_ is now laid waste again;
but anything so wonderful I have never seen." In Normandy the changeling
declares: "I have seen the Forest of Ardennes burnt seven times, but I
never saw so many pots boil." The astonishment of a Scandinavian imp
expressed itself even more graphically, for when he saw an egg-shell
boiling on the fire having one end of a measuring rod set in it, he
crept out of the cradle on his hands, leaving his feet still inside, and
stretched himself out longer and longer until he reached right across
the floor and up the chimney, when he exclaimed: "Well! seven times have
I seen the wood fall in Lessö Forest, but never till now have I seen so
big a ladle in so small a pot!" And the Danish story I have cited above
represents the child as saying that he has seen a young wood thrice upon
Tiis Lake.[84] The Welsh fairies are curiously youthful compared with
these hoary infants, which is all the more remarkable when the daring
exaggerations of Cambrian story-tellers are considered. It is a modest
claim only to have seen the acorn before the oak and the egg before the
hen, yet that is all that is put forward. In one of the Lays of Marie de
France the wood of Brézal is indicated as the spot where the oak was
seen.[85] The formula thus variously used would appear to be a common
one to describe great antiquity, and in all probability itself dates
back to a very remote period.

But changelings frequently conform to the more civilized usage of
measuring their age by years. And various are the estimates given us,
from fifteen hundred years in the Emerald Isle down to the computation,
erring perhaps on the other side, of the young gentleman in the English
tale, who remarks: "Seven years old was I before I came to the nurse,
and four years have I lived since, and never saw so many milk-pans
before." A yet more mysterious hint as to her earlier life is dropped by
an imp in Brittany. She has been treated to the sight of milk boiling in
egg-shells, and cries: "I shall soon be a hundred years old, but I never
saw so many shells boiling! I was born in Pif and in Paf, in the country
where cats are made; but I never saw anything like it!"[86] To all
right-minded persons this disclosure contained sufficient warrant for
her reputed mother to repudiate her as a witch, though cats are no less
intimate with fairies than with conjurers.

Simrock, in his work on German mythology already cited, inclines to the
opinion that the object of the ceremony which the suspected child is
made to witness is to produce laughter. He says: "The dwarf is no
over-ripe beauty who must keep her age secret. Rather something
ridiculous must be done to cause him to laugh, because laughter brings
deliverance."[87] The problem set before the heroes of many folk-tales
is to compel laughter, but that does not seem to be intended in these
changeling stories. At least I have only met with it in one, and it
certainly is not common. The confession of age which the ceremony draws
forth is really much more. It is a confession that the apparently human
babe is an imposture, that it belongs in fact to a different race, and
has no claim on the mother's care and tenderness. Therefore it is not
always enough for the fraud to be discovered: active means must
sometimes be taken to rid the family of their supernatural burden and
regain their own little one. In Grimm's story, in which the child
laughs, a host of elves comes suddenly bringing back the true and
carrying away the false one; and in many of the German and Northern
tales the changeling disappears in one way or other immediately after
its exclamation. We are sometimes even told in so many words that the
changeling had betrayed himself, and the underground folk were obliged
to give back the stolen child. And in the Lithuanian story we have cited
the _laumes_ straightway falls sick and dies.[88] Such conduct accords
entirely with the resentment at being recognized which we have in a
previous chapter found to be a characteristic of spiritual existences.
It is much more like the dislike of being found out attributed to beings
who are in the habit of walking invisible, than any mystical effect of
laughter.

If this be so, still less do the stories where it is required actually
to drive the imp away support the learned German's contention. The means
taken in these stories are very various. Sometimes it is enough to let
the child severely alone, as once in the Isle of Man where a woman laid
her child down in the field while she was cutting corn, and a fairy
changed it there and then. The changeling began to scream, but the
mother was prevented by a man who had been a witness to the transaction
from picking it up; and when the fairy found that no notice was taken
the true child was brought back. In the island of Lewis the custom was
to dig a grave in the fields on Quarter Day and lay the goblin in it
until the next morning, by which time it was believed the human babe
would be returned. In the north of Germany one is advised not to touch
the changeling with the hands, but to overturn the cradle so that the
child falls on the floor. The elf must then be swept out of the door
with an old broom, when the dwarfs will come and bring back the stolen
child. Putting it on the dunghill and leaving it there to cry has been
practised successfully in England; but in Ireland this is only one part
of a long and serious ceremony directed by a wizard or "fairy-man." In
dealing with these stories we must always remember that not merely are
we concerned with sagas of something long past, but with a yet living
superstition, and that the practices I am about to mention--even the
most cruel and the most ridiculous of them--so far respond to the actual
beliefs of the people that instances of their occurrence are quite
recent and well authenticated, as we shall presently see. An anonymous
but well-informed writer describes, as if it were by no means an unusual
ceremony, that just referred to; and Kennedy gives the same in the shape
of a legend. It seems to consist in taking a clean shovel and seating
the changeling on its broad iron blade, and thus conveying the creature
to the manure heap. The assistants would then join hands and circle
about the heap thrice while the fairy-man chanted an incantation in the
Irish language. At its conclusion all present would withdraw into the
house, leaving the child where it had been placed, to howl and cry as it
pleased. Says Mr. Kennedy: "They soon felt the air around them sweep
this way and that, as if it was stirred by the motion of wings, but
they remained quiet and silent for about ten minutes. Opening the door,
they then looked out, and saw the bundle of straw on the heap, but
neither child nor fairy. 'Go into your bedroom, Katty,' said the
fairy-man, 'and see if there's anything left on the bed!' She did so,
and they soon heard a cry of joy, and Katty was among them in a moment,
kissing and hugging her own healthy-looking child, who was waking and
rubbing his eyes, and wondering at the lights and all the eager
faces."[89]

Whether it was the noise made by the child or the incantation that drew
the "good people's" attention, we are left in doubt by this story. A
Norman woman was, however, advised to make her child cry lustily "in
order to bring its _real_ mother to it." And this is probably the
meaning of the many tales in which the elf is beaten, or starved and
subjected to other ill-usage, or is threatened with death.[90] In the
Pflöckenstein Lake in Bohemia wild women are believed to dwell, who,
among other attributes common to elves or fairies, are believed to
change infants. In order to compel a re-exchange, directions are given
to bind with a weed growing at the bottom of the lake and to beat with a
rod of the same, calling out therewithal: "Take thine own and bring me
mine." A mother in a Little Russian tale had a baby of extraordinary
habits. When alone, he jumped out of the cradle, no longer a baby but a
bearded old man, gobbled up the food out of the stove, and then lay down
again a screeching babe. A wise woman who was consulted placed him on a
block of wood and began to chop the block under his feet. He screeched
and she chopped; he screeched and she chopped; until he became an old
man again and made the enigmatical confession: "I have transformed
myself not once nor twice only. I was first a fish, then I became a
bird, an ant, and a quadruped, and now I have once more made trial of
being a human being. It isn't better thus than being among the ants; but
among human beings--it isn't worse!" Here the chopping was evidently a
threat to kill. Nor, if we may trust the stories, was this threat always
an empty one. The changeling fashioned out of a broom in the Lithuanian
story already cited, was disposed of, by the parish priest's advice, by
hewing its head off. The reason given by the holy man was that it was
not yet four and twenty hours old, and it would not be really alive
until the expiration of that time. Accordingly when the neck was severed
nothing but a wisp of straw was found inside, though blood flowed as if
there were veins.[91]

But even more truculent methods are represented by the story-tellers as
resorted to free the afflicted household. Nothing short of fire is
often deemed sufficient for the purpose. There were various methods of
applying it. Sometimes we are told of a shovel being made red-hot and
held before the child's face; sometimes he is seated on it and flung out
into the dung-pit, or into the oven; or again, the poker would be heated
to mark the sign of the cross on his forehead, or the tongs to take him
by the nose. Or he is thrown bodily on the fire, or suspended over it in
a creel or a pot; and in the north of Scotland the latter must be hung
from a piece of the branch of a hazel tree. In this case we are told
that if the child screamed it was a changeling, and it was held fast to
prevent its escape. Generally, however, it is related that the elf
flies up the chimney, and when safely at the top he stops to make
uncomplimentary remarks upon his persecutors. In the Nithsdale story
which I have already cited, the servant girl at midnight covers up the
chimney and every other inlet, makes the embers glowing hot, and
undressing the changeling tosses it on them. In answer to its yells the
fairies are heard moaning and rattling at the window boards, the
chimney-head, and the door. "In the name o' God, bring back the bairn,"
she exclaims. In a moment up flew the window, the human child was laid
unharmed on the mother's lap, while its guilty substitute flew up the
chimney with a loud laugh.[92]

Frightful as this cruelty would seem to every one if perpetrated on the
mother's own offspring, it was regarded with equanimity as applied to a
goblin; and it is not more frightful than what has been actually
perpetrated on young children, and that within a very few years, under
the belief that they were beings of a different race. Instances need not
be multiplied; it will be enough to show that one of the horrible
methods of disposing of changelings referred to in the last paragraph
came under judicial notice no longer ago than the month of May 1884. Two
women were reported in the "Daily Telegraph" as having been arrested at
Clonmel on the 17th of that month, charged with cruelly ill-treating a
child three years old. The evidence given was to the effect that the
neighbours fancied that the child, who had not the use of his limbs, was
a changeling. During the mother's absence the prisoners accordingly
entered her house and placed the child naked on a hot shovel, "under the
impression that this would break the charm." As might have been
expected the poor little thing was severely burnt, and, when the women
were apprehended, it was in a precarious condition. The prisoners, on
being remanded, were hooted by an indignant crowd. It might be thought
that this was an indication of the decay of superstition, even in
Ireland, however much to be condemned as an outburst of feeling against
unconvicted and even untried persons. But we must regard it rather as a
protest against the prisoners' inhumanity than against their
superstition: in either case, of course, the product of advancing
civilization. For if we may trust the witness of other sagas we find the
trial by fire commuted to a symbolic act, as though men had begun to be
revolted by the cruelty, even when committed only on a fairy who had
been found out, but were unwilling to abandon their belief in the power
of the exorcism. In the north-east of Scotland, for example, where a
beggar, who had diagnosed a changeling, was allowed to try his hand at
disposing of it, he made a large fire on the hearth and held a black hen
over it till she struggled, and finally escaped from his grasp, flying
out by the "lum." More minute directions are given by the cunning man in
a Glamorganshire tale. After poring over his big book, he told his
distracted client to find a black hen without a single feather of any
other colour. This she was to bake (not living, but dead, as appears by
the sequel) before a fire of wood (not, as usual, of peat), with
feathers and all intact. Every window and opening was to be closed,
except one--presumably the chimney; and she was not to watch the
_crimbil_, or changeling, until the hen had been done enough, which she
would know by the falling off of all her feathers. The more knowing
woman, in an Irish story, attributes the fact of the infant's being
changed to the Evil Eye; and her directions for treatment require the
mother to watch for the woman who has given it the Evil Eye, inveigle
her into the house and cut a piece secretly out of her cloak. This piece
of the cloak was then to be burnt close to the child until the smoke
made him sneeze, when the spell would be broken and her own child
restored. The writer who records this tale mentions the following mode
of proceeding as a common one, namely: to place the babe in the middle
of the cabin and light a fire round it, fully expecting it to be changed
into a sod of turf, but manifestly not intending to do bodily harm to it
independently of any such change. In Carnarvonshire a clergyman is
credited with telling a mother to cover a shovel with salt, mark a cross
in the salt, and burn it in the chamber where the child was, judiciously
opening the window first.[93] It is satisfactory to know that, so far as
the recorded cases go, the ceremony lost nothing of its power by being
thus toned down.

Fire, however, was not the only element efficacious for turning to
flight these troublesome aliens. Water's antagonism to witches is
notorious; and ample use was made of it in the old witch trials. It is
equally obnoxious to fairies and their congeners. In a Welsh story from
Radnorshire, when the mother has been by the egg-shell device convinced
of the exchange of her own twin children, she takes the goblin twins and
flings them into Llyn Ebyr; but their true kinsmen clad in blue trousers
(their usual garb) save them, and the mother receives her own again. In
other tales she drops the twins into the river; but in one case the
witch who has been credited with the change bathes the child at a
mountain spout, or _pistyll_, and exacts a promise from the mother to
duck him in cold water every morning for three months. It is not very
surprising to learn that "at the end of that time there was no finer
infant in the Cwm."[94]

There is an oft-quoted passage in Luther's "Table Talk," in which he
relates that he told the Prince of Anhalt that if he were prince he
would venture _homicidium_ upon a certain changeling with which he had
been brought into contact, and throw it into the river Moldaw. The great
Reformer was only on a level with his countrymen in their superstitions
in reference to changelings, or Killcrops, as they were then called. I
have already quoted his opinion of them as devils; and the test of their
true nature, which he seems to have thought infallible, was their
inordinate appetite; nor did he attach any value to baptism as a means
of exorcism. One excellent tale he tells on the subject concerns a
peasant who lived near Halberstadt, in Saxony. This good man, in
accordance with advice, was taking the child to Halberstadt to be rocked
at the shrine of the Virgin Mary, when in crossing a river another devil
that was below in the river called out "Killcrop! Killcrop!" Then, says
Luther, the child in the basket, that had never before spoken one word,
answered "Ho, ho!" The devil in the water asked, "Whither art thou
going?" and the child replied, "I am going to Halberstadt to our Loving
Mother, to be rocked." In his fright the man threw the basket containing
the child over the bridge into the water, whereupon the two devils flew
away together and cried "Ho, ho, ha!" tumbling themselves one over
another, and so vanished.[95] This may be taken as a type of many a
story current in North Germany and the neighbouring Slavonic lands. It
is not, however, unknown in this country. Mr. Hunt has versified a
Cornish tale in which the mother took her brat to the chapel well to
plunge it at dawn and pass it round slowly three times _against_ the
sun, as she had been advised to do on the first three Wednesdays in the
month of May. Reaching the top of the hill on one of these occasions,
she heard a shrill voice in her ear: "Tredrill, Tredrill! thy wife and
children greet thee well." The little one of course replied, much to her
astonishment, repudiating all concern for his wife and children, and
intimating his enjoyment of the life he was leading, and the spell that
was being wrought in his behalf. In the end she got rid of him by the
homely process of beating and leaving him on the ground near the old
church stile. A Sutherlandshire tradition tells of a child less than a
year old who suddenly addressed his mother in verse as he was being
carried through a wild glen. Translated, the youth's impromptu lines run
thus:--

    "Many is the dun hummel cow
    (Each having a calf)
    In the opposite dun glen,
    Without the aid of dog,
    Or man, or woman, or gillie,
    One man excepted,
    And he grey----"

At that moment his remarks were interrupted by the terrified woman
throwing him down in the plaid which wrapt him, and scampering home,
where to her joy she found her true babe smiling in the cradle.[96]

These verses carry us back to the egg-shell episode, from which the
consideration of the means adopted to drive away the intrusive goblin
has diverted us. They contain a vague assertion of age like those then
before us, but not a hint of laughter. Nor have we found anything
throughout the whole discussion to favour Simrock's suggestion, or to
shake the opinion that the dissolution of the fairy spell was derived
either from the vexation of the supernatural folk at their own
self-betrayal, or from the disclosure to the human foster-parents of
the true state of the facts, and their consequent determination to
exorcise the demon.

It is true we have a few more stories to examine, but we shall find that
they all confirm this conclusion. The cases we have yet to deal with,
except the first, exhibit a different and much more humane treatment of
the changeling than the foregoing. The case excepted is found in
Carnarvonshire, where one infallible method of getting rid of the child
was to place it on the floor and let all present in the house throw a
piece of iron at it. The old woman who mentioned this to Professor Rhys
conjectured that the object was to convince the _Tylwyth Teg_, or fairy
people, of the intention to kill the babe, in order to induce them to
bring the right child back.[97] This would be the same motive as that
which threatened death by fire or other ill-usage, in some of the
instances mentioned above. But we could not thus account for the
requirement that iron, and only iron, was to be used; and here we have,
in fact, a superstition carefully preserved, while its meaning has quite
passed out of memory. In a future chapter we shall examine the attitude
of mythical beings in folklore to metals, and especially to iron; in the
meantime we may content ourselves with noting this addition to the
examples we have already met with of the horror with which they regarded
it.

So far from its being always deemed wise to neglect or injure the
changeling, it was not infrequently supposed to be necessary to take the
greatest care of it, thereby and by other means to propitiate its elvish
tribe. This was the course pursued with the best results by a Devonshire
mother; and a woman at Strassberg, in North Germany, was counselled by
all her gossips to act lovingly, and above all not to beat the imp, lest
her own little one be beaten in turn by the underground folk. So in a
Hessian tale mentioned by Grimm, a _wichtel-wife_ caught almost in the
act of kidnapping refused to give up the babe until the woman had placed
the changed one to her breast, and "nourished it for once with the
generous milk of human kind." In Ireland, even when the child is placed
on a dunghill, the charm recited under the direction of the "fairy-man"
promises kindly entertainment in future for the "gambolling crew," if
they will only undo what they have done. A method in favour in the north
of Scotland is to take the suspected elf to some known haunt of its
race, generally, we are told, some spot where peculiar soughing sounds
are heard, or to some barrow, or stone circle, and lay it down,
repeating certain incantations the while. What the words of these
incantations are we are not informed, but we learn that an offering of
bread, butter, milk, cheese, eggs, and flesh of fowl must accompany the
child. The parents then retire for an hour or two, or until after
midnight; and if on returning these things have disappeared, they
conclude that the offering is accepted and their own child returned.[98]

Neither ill-usage nor kindness, neither neglect nor propitiation, was
sometimes prescribed and acted upon, but--harder than either--a journey
to Fairyland to fetch back the captive. A man on the island of Rügen,
whose carelessness had occasioned the loss of his child, watched until
the underground dwellers sallied forth on another raid, when he hastened
to the mouth of the hole that led into their realm, and went boldly
down. There in the Underworld he found the child, and thus the robbers
were forced to take their own again instead. In a more detailed
narrative from Islay, the father arms himself with a Bible, a dirk, and
a crowing cock, and having found the hill where the "Good People" had
their abode open, and filled with the lights and sounds of festival, he
approached and stuck the dirk into the threshold. The object of this was
to prevent the entrance from closing upon him. Then he steadily
advanced, protected from harm by the Bible at his breast. Within, his
boy (who was thirteen or fourteen years of age) was working at the
forge; but when the man demanded him the elves burst into a loud laugh,
which aroused the cock in his arms. The cock at once leaped upon his
shoulders, flapped his wings, and crowed loud and long. The enraged
elves thereupon cast the man and his son both out of the hill, and flung
the dirk after them; and in an instant all was dark. It should be added
that for a year and a day afterwards the boy did no work, and scarcely
spoke; but he ultimately became a very famous smith, the inventor of a
specially fine and well-tempered sword. The changeling himself in one of
Lady Wilde's tales directs his foster-mother to Fairyland. The way
thither was down a well; and she was led by the portress, an old woman,
into the royal palace. There the queen admits that she stole the child,
"for he was so beautiful," and put her own instead. The re-exchange is
effected, and the good woman is feasted with food which the fairies
cannot touch, because it has been sprinkled with salt. When she found
herself again at home, she fancied she had only been away an hour: it
was three years.[99]

But it was not always necessary to incur the risk of going as far as the
other world. The Glamorganshire woman, whose successful cooking of a
black hen has been already referred to, had first to go at full moon to
a place where four roads met, and hide herself to watch the fairy
procession which passed at midnight. There in the midst of the music and
the _Bendith eu mammau_ she beheld her own dear little child. One of the
most interesting changeling stories was gravely related in the "Irish
Fireside" for the 7th of January 1884, concerning a land-leaguer who
had been imprisoned as a suspect under the then latest Coercion Act.
When this patriot was a boy he had been stolen by the fairies, one of
themselves having been left in his place. The parish priest, however,
interfered; and by a miracle he caused the elf for a moment to
disappear, and the boy to return to tell him the conditions on which his
captivity might be ended. The information given, the goblin again
replaced the true son; but the good priest was now able to deal
effectually with the matter. The imp was accordingly dipped thrice in
Lough Lane (a small lake in the eastern part of Westmeath), when "a curl
came on the water, and up from the deep came the naked form of the boy,
who walked on the water to meet his father on shore. The father wrapped
his overcoat about his son, and commenced his homeward march,
accompanied by a line of soldiers, who also came out of the lake. The
boy's mother was enjoined not to speak until the rescuing party would
reach home. She accidentally spoke; and immediately the son dropped a
tear, and forced himself out of his father's arms, piteously exclaiming:
'Father, father, my mother spoke! You cannot keep me. I must go.' He
disappeared, and, reaching home, the father found the sprite again on
the hearth." The ghostly father's services were called into requisition
a second time; and better luck awaited an effort under his direction
after the performance of a second miracle like the first. For this time
the mother succeeded in holding her tongue, notwithstanding that at
every stream on the way home from the lake the car on which the boy was
carried was upset, and he himself fainted.[100] This is declared to have
happened no longer ago than the year 1869. The writer, apparently a
pious Roman Catholic, who vouches for the fact, probably never heard the
touching tale of Orpheus and Eurydice.

The foregoing story, as well as some of those previously mentioned,
shows that fairy depredations were by no means confined to babes and
young children. Indeed adults were often carried off; and, although this
chapter is already far too long, I cannot close it without briefly
examining a few such cases. Putting aside those, then, in which boys or
young men have been taken, as already sufficiently discussed, all the
other cases of robbery, as distinguished from seduction or illusion, are
concerned with matrons. The elfin race were supposed to be on the watch
for unchurched or unsained mothers to have the benefit of their milk. In
one instance the captive was reputed to have freed herself by promising
in exchange her husband's best mare under milk, which was retained by
the captors until it was exhausted and almost dead. More usually the
story relates that a piece of wood is carved in the likeness of the lady
and laid in her place, the husband and friends being deceived into
believing it to be herself. A man returning home at night overhears the
supernatural beings at work. He listens and catches the words: "Mak' it
red cheekit an' red lippit like the smith o' Bonnykelly's wife."
Mastering the situation he runs off to the smith's house, and sains the
new mother and her babe. And he is only just in time, for hardly has he
finished than a great thud is heard outside. On going out a piece of
bog-fir is found,--the image the fairies intended to substitute for the
smith's wife. In North German and Danish tales it is the husband who
overhears the conspirators at work, and he often has coolness enough to
watch their proceedings on his return home and, bouncing out upon them,
to catch them just as they are about to complete their crime. Thus, one
clever fellow succeeded in retaining both his wife and the image already
put into her bed, which he thrust into the oven to blaze and crackle in
the sight and hearing of his wife's assembled friends, who supposed he
was burning her until he produced her to their astonished gaze. A tale
from Badenoch represents the man as discovering the fraud from finding
his wife, a woman of unruffled temper, suddenly turned a shrew. So he
piles up a great fire and threatens to throw the occupant of the bed
upon it unless she tells him what has become of his own wife. She then
confesses that the latter has been carried off, and she has been
appointed successor; but by his determination he happily succeeds in
recapturing his own at a certain fairy knoll near Inverness.[101]

It happens occasionally that these victims of elfin gallantry are
rescued by other men than their husbands. A smith at work one day hears
a great moaning and sobbing out of doors. Looking out he sees a troll
driving a pregnant woman before him, and crying to her continually: "A
little further yet! a little further yet!" He instantly springs forward
with a red-hot iron in his hand, which he holds between the troll and
his thrall, so that the former has to abandon her and take to flight.
The smith then took the woman under his protection, and the same night
she was delivered of twins. Going to the husband to console him for his
loss, he is surprised to find a woman exactly resembling his friend's
wife in her bed. He saw how the matter stood, and seizing an axe he
killed the witch on the spot, and restored to the husband his real wife
and new-born children. This is a Danish legend; but there is a Highland
one very similar to it. A man meets one night a troop of fairies with a
prize of some sort. Recollecting that fairies are obliged to exchange
whatever they may have with any one who offers them anything, no matter
what its value, for it, he flings his bonnet to them, calling out: "Mine
is yours, and yours is mine!" The prize which they dropped turned out to
be an English lady whom they had carried off, leaving in her place a
stock, which, of course, died and was buried. The Sassenach woman lived
for some years in the Highlander's house, until the captain in command
of an English regiment came to lodge in his house with his son, while
the soldiers were making new roads through the country. There the son
recognized his mother, and the father his wife long mourned as
dead.[102]

The death and burial of changelings, though, as here, occurring in the
tales, are not often alluded to; and there are grounds for thinking them
a special deduction of the Scottish mind. Sometimes the incident is
ghastly enough to satisfy the devoted lover of horrors. The west of
Scotland furnishes an instance in which the exchange was not discovered
until after the child's apparent death. It was buried in due course; but
suspicion having been aroused, the grave and coffin were opened, and not
a corpse but only a wooden figure was found within. A farmer at Kintraw,
in Argyllshire, lost his wife. On the Sunday after the funeral, when he
and his servants returned from church, the children, who had been left
at home, reported that their mother had been to see them, and had combed
and dressed them. The following Sunday they made the same statement, in
spite of the punishment their father had thought proper to inflict for
telling a lie on the first occasion. The next time she came the eldest
child asked her why she came, when she said that she had been carried
off by "the good people," and could only get away for an hour or two on
Sundays, and should her coffin be opened it would be found to contain
nothing but a withered leaf. The minister, however, who ridiculed the
story, refused to allow the coffin to be opened; and when, some little
time after, he was found dead near the Fairies' Hill, above Kintraw, he
was held by many to be a victim to the indignation of the fairy world he
had laughed at. Sir Walter Scott mentions the tale of a farmer's wife
in Lothian, who, after being carried off by the fairies, reappeared
repeatedly on Sunday to her children, and combed their hair. On one of
these occasions the husband met her, and was told that there was one way
to recover her, namely, by lying in wait on Hallowe'en for the
procession of fairies, and stepping boldly out, and seizing her as she
passed among them. At the moment of execution, however, his heart
failed, and he lost his wife for ever. In connection with this, Scott
refers to a real event which happened at the town of North Berwick. A
widower, who was paying addresses with a view to second marriage, was
troubled by dreams of his former wife, to whom he had been tenderly
attached. One morning he declared to the minister that she had appeared
to him the previous night, stating that she was a captive in Fairyland,
and begged him to attempt her deliverance. The mode she prescribed was
to bring the minister and certain others to her grave at midnight to dig
up her body, and recite certain prayers, after which the corpse would
become animated and flee from him. It was to be pursued by the swiftest
runner in the parish, and if he could catch it before it had encircled
the church thrice, the rest were to come to his help and hold it
notwithstanding its struggles, and the shapes into which it might be
transformed. In this way she would be redeemed. The minister, however,
declined to take part in so absurd and indecent a proceeding.[103]

Absurd and indecent it would undoubtedly have been to unearth a dead
body in the expectation of any such result; but it would have been
entirely in harmony with current superstition. The stories and beliefs
examined in the present chapter prove that there has been no
superstition too gross, or too cruel, to survive into the midst of the
civilization of the nineteenth century; and the exhumation of a corpse,
of the two, is less barbarous than the torture by fire of an innocent
child. The flight, struggles, and transformation of a bespelled lady are
found both in _märchen_ and saga: some examples of the latter will come
under our notice in a future chapter.


FOOTNOTES:

[60] The belief in changelings is not confined to Europe, though the
accounts we have of it elsewhere are meagre. It is found, as we shall
see further on, in China. It is found also among the natives of the
Pacific slopes of North America, where it is death to the mother to
suckle the changeling. Dorman, p. 24, citing Bancroft.

[61] See a curious Scottish ballad given at length, "F. L. Record," vol.
i. p. 235; Henderson, p. 15; "Cymru Fu N. and Q." vol. ii. p. 144;
Gregor, p. 11 (_cf._ Harland and Wilkinson, p. 221); Cromek, p. 247. See
Webster, p. 73, where a witch carries away a child who is not blessed
when it sneezes.

[62] Napier, p. 40; "F. L. Journal," vol. i. p. 56; Kuhn, pp. 365, 196;
Knoop, p. 155; "Zeits. f. Volksk." vol. ii. p. 33; Kennedy, p. 95;
Carnoy, p. 4; "F. L. Journal," vol. ii. p. 257.

[63] Bartsch, vol. i. pp. 64, 89; vol. ii. p. 43; Kuhn, p. 195; Knoop,
_loc. cit._; Jahn, pp. 52, 71; Thorpe, vol. ii. p. 174; "Zeits. f.
Volksk." vol. ii. _loc. cit._ W. Map, Dist. ii. c. 14; Brand, vol. ii.
p. 8, note; Lady Wilde, vol. i. pp. 71, 73; Schleicher, p. 93;
Tertullian, "Adv. Nationes," l. ii. c. 11; Brand, vol. ii. p. 334 note,
quoting Martin, "History of the Western Islands"; Train, vol. ii. p.
132; "Sacred Books of the East," vol. xxiv. p. 277. As to the use of
fire in China, see "F. L. Journal," vol. v. p. 225; and generally as to
the efficacy of fire in driving off evil spirits see Tylor, vol. ii. p.
177.

[64] Grimm, "Teut. Myth." p. 468; Thorpe, vol. ii. p. 2, vol. iii. p.
45; Train, vol. ii. p. 133; Garnett, pp. 231, 315; "F. L. Journal," vol.
v. p. 225. In Eastern Prussia a steel used for striking a light, a
hammer, or anything else that will strike fire, is used. This seems to
combine the dread of steel with that of fire (Lemke, p. 41).

[65] Grimm, "Teut. Myth." _loc. cit._; Train, vol. ii. _loc. cit._;
Henderson, p. 14; "F. L. Journal," vol. v. p. 224; "Zeits. f. Volksk."
vol. ii, p. 33; "N. and Q." 7th ser. vol. x. p. 185.

[66] Henderson, _loc. cit._; Bartsch, vol. ii. p. 192; Pitré, vol. xv.
pp. 154 note, 155; vol. xvii. p. 102, quoting Castelli, "Credenze ed
usi"; Horace, "Ep. ad Pison," v. 340; Dorsa, p. 146; Wright, "Middle
Ages," vol. i. p. 290; Garnett, p. 70; "Mélusine," vol. v. p. 90,
quoting English authorities. Map, Dist. ii. c. 14, gives a story of
babies killed by a witch. St. Augustine records that the god Silvanus
was feared as likely to injure women in child-bed, and that for their
protection three men were employed to go round the house during the
night and to strike the threshold with a hatchet and a pestle and sweep
it with a brush; and he makes merry over the superstition ("De Civ.
Dei," l. vi. c. 9).

[67] Pitré, vol. xii. p. 304, note; vol. xv. p. 154; "F. L. Españ." vol.
ii. p. 51; De Gubernatis, "Usi Natal." p. 219, quoting Bézoles, "Le
Baptême."

[68] Bartsch, vol. i. p. 46; Jahn, p. 89; Grimm, "Teut. Myth." p. 468;
Simrock, p. 418.

[69] There is another motive for the robbery of a human creature,
mentioned only, I think, in the Romance of Thomas the Rhymer, namely,
that at certain seasons the foul fiend fetches his fee, or tribute of a
living soul, from among the underground folk. Several difficulties arise
upon this; but it is needless to discuss them until the motive in
question be found imputed elsewhere than in a literary work of the
fifteenth century, and ballads derived therefrom.

Since the foregoing note was written my attention has been drawn to the
following statement in Lady Wilde, vol. i. p. 70: "Sometimes it is said
the fairies carry off the mortal child for a sacrifice, as they have to
offer one every seven years to the devil in return for the power he
gives them. And beautiful young girls are carried off, also, either for
sacrifice or to be wedded to the fairy king." It is easier to generalize
in this manner than to produce documents in proof. And I think I am
expressing the opinion of all folklore students when I say that, with
all respect for Lady Wilde, I would rather not lay any stress upon her
general statements. Indeed, those of anybody, however great an
authority, need to be checked by the evidence of particular instances. I
await such evidence.

[70] Sikes, p. 62; _cf._ Brand, vol. ii. p. 334 note; Bartsch, vol. i.
p. 46.

[71] Thorpe, vol. ii. p. 175; vol. iii. p. 43; Kuhn, p. 195; Schleicher,
p. 92.

[72] Gregor, p. 61; Keightley, p. 393; Campbell, vol. ii. p. 64.

[73] Hunt, p. 96; Waldron, p. 30. This account was given to the author
by the mother herself.

[74] Croker, p. 81. See a similar tale in Campbell, vol. ii. p. 58.
Gregor, p. 61, mentions the dog-hole as the way by which children are
sometimes carried off.

[75] Bartsch, vol. i. p. 46; Kuhn, p. 196; Grimm, "Teut. Myth." p. 468;
Poestion, p. 114; Grohmann, p. 113.

[76] Waldron, p. 29. The same writer gives a similar account of the
changeling mentioned above, p. 107.

[77] "Colloquia Mensalia," quoted by Southey, "The Doctor" (London,
1848), p. 621. As to the attribute of greed, _cf._ Keightley, p. 125.

[78] Hunt, p. 85; "Y Cymmrodor," vol. vi. p. 175; Rev. Edmund Jones, "A
Relation of Apparitions," quoted by Wirt Sikes, p. 56. Thiele relates a
story in which a wild stallion colt is brought in to smell two babes,
one of which is a changeling. Every time he smells one he is quiet and
licks it; but on smelling the other he is invariably restive and strives
to kick it. The latter, therefore, is the changeling. (Thorpe, vol. ii.
p. 177.) Sir John Maundeville also states that in Sicily is a kind of
serpent whereby men assay the legitimacy of their children. If the
children be illegitimate the serpents bite and kill them; if otherwise
they do them no harm--an easy and off-hand way of getting rid of them!
("Early Trav." p. 155).

[79] Campbell, vol. ii. p. 58; Chambers, p. 70.

[80] Cromek, p. 246.

[81] Bartsch, vol. i. p. 42; Sikes, p. 59, quoting from the "Cambrian
Quarterly," vol. ii. p. 86; "Y Cymmrodor," vol. vi. p. 209; Arnason's
"Icelandic Legends," cited in Kennedy, p. 89; Thorpe, vol. ii. p. 174,
quoting Thiele, "Danmark's Folkesagn samlede." See also Keightley, p.
125.

[82] Fleury, p. 60; "Revue des Trad. Pop." vol. iii. p. 162.

[83] Cf. _Böhmen-Gold_, Bartsch, vol. i. p. 22; _Böhmegold_, ibid. p.
47; _Böhmer Gold_, ibid. pp. 65, 79, and presumably p. 89; _Böhma gold_,
Kuhn und Schwartz, p. 30; _Boehman gold_, ibid. p. 31; _böm un gold_
(timber and gold), ibid. p. 105; _Boem un holt_ (timber and wood), Jahn,
p. 90; _Bernholt in den Wolt_ (firewood in the forest), and _Bremer
Wold_, Müllenhoff, cited Grimm, "Tales," vol. i. p. 388. These
variations while preserving a similar sound are suspicious.

[84] Grimm, "Tales," vol. i. pp. 163, 388; Schleicher, p. 91; Fleury, p.
60; Thorpe, vol. ii. p. 176; quoting Asbjörnsen, "Huldreeventyr," vol.
ii. p. 165. _Cf._ Sébillot, "Contes Pop." vol. ii. p. 78.

[85] Sikes, pp. 58, 59; Howells, p. 138; "Y Cymmrodor," vol. iv. p. 208,
vol. vi. pp. 172, 204; Keightley, p. 436.

[86] Croker, p. 65; "A Pleasant Treatise of Witches," p. 62, quoted in
Hazlitt, "Fairy Tales," p. 372; Sébillot, "Contes," vol. ii. p. 76;
Carnoy, p. 4; Thorpe, vol. iii. p. 157; Campbell, vol. ii. p. 47; "Revue
des Trad. Pop." vol. iii. p. 162. _Cf._ a Basque tale given by Webster,
where the Devil is tricked into telling his age (Webster, p. 58).

[87] Simrock, p. 419.

[88] Jahn, p. 89; Schleicher, p. 91.

[89] "Choice Notes," p. 27; (this seems to have been a common
prescription in Wales: see "Y Cymmrodor," vol. vi, pp. 175, 178; and in
the Western Highlands: see Campbell, vol. ii. p. 64.) Brand, vol. ii. p.
335, note; (this seems also to be the case in some parts of Ireland,
Lady Wilde, vol. i. p. 70.) Thorpe, vol. iii. p. 157; Kennedy, p. 94;
"Irish Folk Lore," p. 45.

[90] _Beaten_--Lay of Marie de France, quoted Keightley, p. 436;
Costello, "Pilgrimage to Auvergne," vol. ii. p. 294, quoted Keightley,
p. 471; Fleury, p. 62, citing Bosquet, "Normandie Romanesque"; Howells,
p. 139; Aubrey, "Remains," p. 30; Jahn, pp. 98, 101; Kuhn und Schwartz,
p. 29; Croker, p. 81. _Starved, beaten, &c._--Croker, p. 77. _Threatened
to be killed_--Sébillot, "Trad. et Super." vol. i. p. 118; "Contes,"
vol. i. p. 28, vol. ii. p. 76; Carnoy, p. 4.

[91] Grohmann, p. 135; Wratislaw, p. 161; Schleicher, p. 92.

[92] "Y Brython," vol. ii. p. 20; Kennedy, p. 90; Thorpe, vol. ii. p.
174; Napier, p. 40; Lady Wilde, vol. i. pp. 72, 171; Keightley, p. 393;
"Revue des Trad. Pop." vol. iii. p. 162; Campbell, vol. ii. pp. 47, 61;
Croker, p. 65; Chambers, p. 70; "F. L. Journal," vol. i. p. 56; Gregor,
pp. 8, 9; Cromek, p. 246.

[93] "Daily Telegraph," 19 May 1884; Gregor, p. 61; Lady Wilde, vol. i.
pp. 38, 173; "Y Cymmrodor," vol. vi. p. 209, vol. v. p. 72.

[94] "Cambrian Quarterly," vol. ii. p. 86, quoted, Sikes, p. 59; "Y
Cymmrodor," vol. iv. p. 208, vol. vi. pp. 172, 203. Mr. Sikes refers to
a case in which the child was bathed in a solution of foxglove as having
actually occurred in Carnarvonshire in 1857, but he gives no authority.

[95] Quoted in Southey, _loc. cit._ Müllenhoff relates a similar tale,
see Thorpe, vol. iii. p. 46; also Grohmann, p. 126; Kuhn und Schwartz,
p. 30. Bowker, p. 73, relates a story embodying a similar episode, but
apparently connected with Wild Hunt legends. See his note, ibid. p. 251.

[96] Hunt, p. 91; "F. L. Journal," vol. vi. p. 182.

[97] "Y Cymmrodor," vol. vi. p. 181.

[98] Mrs. Bray, vol. i. p. 167; Kuhn, p. 196; Grimm, "Teut. Myth." p.
468, note; "Irish F. L." p. 45; Napier, p. 42.

[99] Jahn, p. 52; Campbell, vol. ii. p. 47; Lady Wilde, vol. i. p. 119.

[100] "F. L. Journal," vol. ii. p. 91, quoting the "Irish Fireside."

[101] Gregor, p. 62; Thorpe, vol. ii. p. 139, quoting Thiele; vol. iii.
p. 41, quoting Müllenhoff; Campbell, vol. ii. p. 67; Cromek, p. 244.

[102] Thorpe, vol. ii. p. 133, quoting Thiele; Keightley, p. 391,
quoting Stewart, "The Popular Superstitions of the Highlanders."

[103] Napier, p. 41; Lord A. Campbell, "Waifs and Strays," p. 71;
"Border Minstrelsy," vol. ii. p. 173.




CHAPTER VI.

ROBBERIES FROM FAIRYLAND.

     The tale of Elidorus--Celtic and Teutonic stories of theft from
     supernatural beings--The thief unsuccessful--Cases of successful
     robbery--Robbery from the king of the serpents--Robbery of a
     drinking-cup, or horn--The horn of Oldenburg and similar
     vessels--The Luck of Edenhall--The cup of Ballafletcher--These
     vessels sacrificial and pagan.


The earliest writers who allude to the Welsh fairy traditions are
Giraldus Cambrensis and Walter Map, two members of that constellation of
literary men which rendered brilliant the early years of the Plantagenet
dynasty. Giraldus, with whom alone we have to do in this chapter, lays
the scene of what is perhaps his most famous story near Swansea, and
states that the adventures narrated occurred a short time before his own
days. The story concerns one Elidorus, a priest, upon whose persistent
declarations it is founded. This good man in his youth ran away from the
discipline and frequent stripes of his preceptor, and hid himself under
the hollow bank of a river. There he remained fasting for two days; and
then two men of pigmy stature appeared, and invited him to come with
them, and they would lead him into a country full of delights and
sports. A more powerful temptation could not have been offered to a
runaway schoolboy of twelve years old; and the invitation was speedily
accepted. He accompanied his guides into a subterranean land, where he
found a people of small stature but pure morals. He was brought into the
presence of the king, and by him handed over to his son, who was then a
boy. In that land he dwelt for some time; but he often used to return by
various paths to the upper day, and on one of these occasions he made
himself known to his mother, declaring to her the nature, manners, and
state of the pigmy folk. She desired him to bring her a present of gold,
which was plentiful in that region; and he accordingly stole a golden
ball while at play with the king's son, and ran off with it to his
mother, hotly pursued. Reaching home, his foot stumbled on the
threshold, and, dropping the ball, he fell into the room where his
mother was sitting. The two pigmies who had followed him at once seized
the ball and made off with it, not without expressing their contempt for
the thief who had returned their kindness with such ingratitude; and
Elidorus, though he sought it carefully with penitence and shame, could
never again find the way into the underground realm.[104]

Narratives of the theft of valuables from supernatural beings are found
all the world over. In this way, for example, in the mythology of more
than one nation mankind obtained the blessing of fire. Such tales,
however, throw but little light on this one of Elidorus; and it will
therefore be more profitable in considering it to confine our attention
to those generally resembling it current among Celts and Teutons. They
are very common; and the lesson they usually teach is that honesty is
the best policy--at all events, in regard to beings whose power is not
bounded by the ordinary human limitations. Beginning with South Wales,
we find one of these tales told by the Rev. Edward Davies, a clergyman
in Gloucestershire at the beginning of this century, who was the author
of two curious works on Welsh antiquities, stuffed with useless, because
misdirected, learning. The tale in question relates to a small lake "in
the mountains of Brecknock," concerning which we are informed that every
Mayday a certain door in a rock near the lake was found open. He who
was bold enough to enter was led by a secret passage to a small island,
otherwise invisible, in the middle of the lake. This was a fairy island,
a garden of enchanting beauty, inhabited by the _Tylwyth Teg_ (or Fair
Family), and stored with fruits and flowers. The inhabitants treated
their visitors with lavish hospitality, but permitted nothing to be
carried away. One day this prohibition was violated by a visitor, who
put into his pocket a flower with which he had been presented. The Fair
Family showed no outward resentment. Their guests were dismissed with
the accustomed courtesy; but the moment he who had broken their behest
"touched unhallowed ground" the flower disappeared, and he lost his
senses. Nor has the mysterious door ever been found again.[105]

In both these cases the thief is unsuccessful, and the punishment of his
crime is the loss of fairy intercourse; perhaps the mildest form which
punishment could take. But sometimes the _chevalier d'industrie_ is
lucky enough to secure his spoils. It is related that certain white
ghosts were in the habit of playing by night at skittles on a level
grass-plot on the Lüningsberg, near Aerzen, in North Germany. A
journeyman weaver, who was in love with a miller's daughter, but lacked
the means to marry her, thought there could be no harm in robbing the
ghosts of one of the golden balls with which they used to play. He
accordingly concealed himself one evening; and when the harmless
spectres came out he seized one of their balls, and scampered away with
it, followed by the angry owners. A stream crossed his path, and,
missing the plank bridge which spanned it, he sprang into the water.
This saved him, for the spirits had no power there; and a merry wedding
was the speedy sequel of his adventure. In like manner a fairy, who, in
a Breton saga, was incautious enough to winnow gold in broad daylight in
a field where a man was pruning beeches, excited the latter's attention
by this singular proceeding; and the man possessed himself of the
treasure by simply flinging into it a hallowed rosary. In Germany the
water-nix has the reputation of being a good shoemaker. It is related
that a man, who once saw a nix on the shore of the March busy at his
work, threw a rosary upon it. The nix disappeared, leaving the shoe; and
a variant states that the shoe was so well made that the owner wore out
successively twelve other shoes which he had caused to be made to match
it, without its being any the worse.[106]

We have already seen in the last chapter that the performance of
Christian rites and the exhibition of Christian symbols and sacred books
have a powerful effect against fairies. But further, the invocation, or
indeed the simple utterance, of a sacred name has always been held to
counteract enchantments and the wiles of all supernatural beings who are
not themselves part and parcel of what I may, without offence and for
want of a better term, call the Christian mythology, and who may
therefore at times, if not constantly, be supposed to be hostile to the
Christian powers and to persons under their protection. These beliefs
are, of course, in one form or another part of the machinery of every
religion. The tales just quoted are examples of the potency of a symbol.
A North German story is equally emphatic as to the value of a holy name.
We are told that late one evening a boy saw a great number of hares
dancing and leaping. Now hares are specially witch-possessed animals. As
he stood and watched them one of them sprang towards him and tried to
bite his leg. But he said: "Go away! thou art not of God, but of the
devil." Instantly the whole company vanished; but he heard a doleful
voice exclaiming: "My silver beaker, my silver beaker!" On reaching home
he told his adventure; and his father at once started back with him to
the place, where they found a silver beaker inscribed with a name
neither they nor the goldsmith, to whom they sold the goblet for a large
sum of money, could read. The district whence this story comes furnishes
us also with an account of a man who, being out late one night, came
upon a fire surrounded by a large circle of women sitting at a table. He
ventured to seat himself among them. Each one had brought something for
the meal; and a man-cook went round them asking each what she had got.
When he came to the hero of the story the latter struck him with his
stick, saying: "I have a blow which our Lord God gave the devil."
Thereupon the whole assembly disappeared, leaving nothing behind but the
kettle which hung over the fire, and which the man took and long
preserved to testify the truth of his story. A Cornish fisherman was
scarcely less lucky without the protection of a pious exclamation. For
one night going home he found a crowd of "little people" on the beach.
They were sitting in a semicircle holding their hats towards one of
their number, who was pitching gold pieces from a heap into them. The
fisherman contrived to introduce his hat among them without being
noticed, and having got a share of the money, made off with it. He was
followed by the piskies, but had a good start, and managed to reach home
and shut the door upon them. Yet so narrow was his escape that he left
the tails of his sea-coat in their hands.[107]

Vengeance, however, is sometimes swift and sure upon these robberies. It
is believed in Germany that the king of the snakes is wont to come out
to sun himself at noon; and that he then lays aside his crown, a prize
for any one who can seize it. A horseman, coming at the opportune
moment, did so once; but the serpent-king called forth his subjects and
pursued him. By the help of his good steed the man succeeded in arriving
at home; and, thankful to have escaped the danger, he patted the beast's
neck as he jumped down, saying: "Faithfully hast thou helped me!" At
that instant a snake, which had hidden herself unnoticed in the horse's
tail, bit the man; and little joy had he of his crime. In another story
the girl who steals the crown is deafened by the cries of her victim;
and elsewhere, when the serpent-king is unable to reach the robber, he
batters his own head to pieces in ineffectual rage. Perhaps he deserved
his fate in some of these cases, for it seems he had a foolish liking to
lay down his crown on a white cloth, or a white, or blue, silk
handkerchief,--a predilection which the robber did not fail to provide
him with the opportunity of gratifying, and of repenting.[108]

Other tales represent the thief as compelled to restore the stolen
goods. Thus a man who found the trolls on the Danish isle of Fuur
carrying their treasures out into the air, shot thrice over them, and
thereby forced the owners to quit them. He caught up the gold and silver
and rode off with it, followed by the chief troll. But after he got into
the house and shut the doors there was such a storming and hissing
outside, that the whole house seemed ablaze. Terrified, he flung the bag
wherein he had secured the treasures out into the night. The storm
ceased, and he heard a voice crying: "Thou hast still enough." In the
morning he found a heavy silver cup, which had fallen behind a chest of
drawers. Again, a farm servant of South Kongerslev, in Denmark, who went
at his master's instance, on Christmas Eve, to see what the trolls in a
neighbouring hill were doing, was offered drink from a golden cup. He
took the cup, and casting out its contents, spurred his horse from the
spot, hotly pursued. On the way back he passed the dwelling of a band of
trolls at enmity with those from whom he had stolen the cup. Counselled
by them, he took to the ploughed field, where his pursuers were unable
to follow him, and so escaped. The farmer kept the goblet until the
following Christmas Eve, when his wife imprudently helped a tattered
beggar to beer in it. It is not wonderful that both the cup and the
beggar vanished; but we are to understand that the beggar was a troll.
Perhaps he was. In Thyholm, a district of Denmark, there is a range of
lofty mounds formerly inhabited by trolls. Some peasants who were once
passing by these mounds prayed the trolls to give them some beer. In a
moment a little creature came out and presented a large silver can to
one of the men, who had no sooner grasped it than he set spurs to his
horse, with the intention of keeping it. But the little man of the mound
was too quick for him, for he speedily caught him and compelled him to
return the can. In a Pomeranian story the underground folk forestalled
the intention to rob them on the part of a farmer's boy whose thirst
they had quenched with a can of delicious brown-beer. Having drunk, he
hid the can itself, with the object of taking it home when his day's
work was done, for it was of pure silver; but when he afterwards went to
look for it, it had disappeared.[109]

Moreover, ungrateful mortals are sometimes punished, even when they are
lucky enough to secure their prize. Thus it is told of a man of Zahren,
in Mecklenburg, who was seized with thirst on his way home from Penzlin,
that he heard music in a barrow known to be the haunt of the underground
folk. People were then on familiar terms with the latter; and the man
cried out and asked for a drink. Nor did he ask in vain; for his appeal
was at once answered by the appearance of a little fellow with a flask
of delicious drink. After slaking his thirst the man took the
opportunity to make off with the flask; but he was pursued by the whole
troop of elves, only one of whom, and he had only one leg, succeeded in
keeping up with him. The thief, however, managed to get over a
cross-road where One-leg could not follow him; and the latter then,
making a virtue of necessity, cried out: "Thou mayst keep the flask; and
henceforth always drink thereout, for it will never be empty; but beware
of looking into it." For some years the elf's injunction was observed;
but one day, in a fit of curiosity, the peasant looked into the bottom
of the flask, and there sat a horrid toad! The toad disappeared, and so
did the liquor; and the man in a short time fell miserably sick. In a
Norse tale, a man whose bride is about to be carried off by Huldre-folk,
rescues her by shooting over her head a pistol loaded with a silver
bullet. This has the effect of dissolving the witchery; and he is
forthwith enabled to seize her and gallop off, not unpursued. One of the
trolls, to retard his flight, held out to him a well-filled golden horn.
He took the horn, but cast the liquor away, and rode away with both horn
and girl. The trolls, when they found themselves unable to catch him,
cried after him in their exasperation: "The red cock shall crow over thy
dwelling!" And behold! his house stood in a blaze. Similarly, a Swedish
tradition relates that one of the serving-men of the lady of Liungby, in
Scania, one night of Christmas in the year 1490, rode out to inquire the
cause of the noise at the Magle stone. He found the trolls dancing and
making merry. A fair troll-woman stepped forth and offered him a
drinking-horn and a pipe, praying he would drink the troll-king's health
and blow in the pipe. He snatched the horn and pipe from her, and
spurring back to the mansion, delivered them into his lady's hands. The
trolls followed and begged to have their treasures back, promising
prosperity to the lady's race if she would restore them. She kept them,
however; and they are said to be still preserved at Liungby as memorials
of the adventure. But the serving-man who took them died three days
after, and the horse on the second day; the mansion has been twice
burnt, and the family never prospered after. On the eve of the first of
May the witches of Germany hold high revel. Every year the fields and
farmyards of a certain landowner were so injured by these nocturnal
festivities that one of his servants determined to put a stop to the
mischief. Going to the trysting-place, he found the witches eating and
drinking around a large slab of marble which rested on four golden
pillars; and on the slab lay a golden horn of wondrous form. The
sorceresses invited him to join the feast; but a fellow-servant whom he
met there warned him not to drink, for they only wished to poison him.
Wherefore he flung the proffered beverage away, seized the horn, and
galloped home as hard as he could. All doors and gates had been left
open for him; and the witches consequently were unable to catch him. The
next day a gentleman in fine clothes appeared and begged his master to
restore the horn, promising in return to surround his property with a
wall seven feet high, but threatening, in case of refusal, to burn his
farms down thrice, and that just when he thought himself richest. Three
days were allowed to the landowner for consideration, but he declined to
restore the horn. The next harvest had hardly been housed when his barns
were in flames. Three times did this happen, and the landowner was
reduced to poverty. By the king's kindness he was enabled to rebuild;
and he then made every effort to discover the owner of the horn, sending
it about for that purpose even as far as Constantinople; but no one
could be found to claim it.[110]

Somewhat more courteous was a Danish boy whom an Elf-maiden met and
offered drink from a costly drinking-horn one evening as he rode
homeward late from Ristrup to Siellevskov. He received the horn, but
fearing to drink its contents, poured them out behind him, so that, as
in several of these stories, they fell on the horse's back, and singed
the hair off. The horn he held fast, and the horse probably needed no
second hint to start at the top of its speed. The elf-damsel gave chase
until horse and man reached a running water, across which she could not
follow them. Seeing herself outwitted, she implored the youth to give
her back the horn, promising him in reward the strength of twelve men.
On this assurance he returned the horn to her, and got what she had
promised him. But the exchange was not very profitable; for with the
strength of twelve men he had unfortunately acquired the appetite of
twelve. Here it may well be thought that the supernatural gift only took
its appropriate abatement. In a story from the north of Scotland the cup
was stolen for the purpose of undoing a certain spell, and was
honourably returned when the purpose was accomplished. Uistean, we are
told, was a great slayer of Fuathan, supernatural beings apparently akin
to fairies. He shot one day into a wreath of mist, and a beautiful woman
fell down at his side. He took her home; and she remained in his house
for a year, speechless. On a day at the end of the year he was benighted
in the mountains, and seeing a light in a hill, he drew nigh, and found
the fairies feasting. He entered the hill, and heard the butler, as he
was handing the drink round, say: "It is a year from this night's night
that we lost the daughter of the Earl of Antrim. She has the power of
the draught on her that she does not speak a word till she gets a drink
from the cup that is in my hand." When the butler reached Uistean, he
handed him the cup. The latter, on getting it in his hand, ran off,
pursued by the fairies until the cock crew. When he got home, he gave
the lady in his house to drink out of the cup; and immediately her
speech returned. She then told him she was the Earl of Antrim's
daughter, stolen by the fairies from child-bed. Uistean took back the
cup to the hill whence he had brought it, and then restored the lady to
her father safe and sound, the fairy woman who had been left in her
place vanishing meantime in a flame of fire.[111]

There are also legends in which a hat conferring invisibility, or a
glove, figures; but the stolen article is usually, as in most of the
instances cited above, a cup or a drinking-horn. Many such articles are
still preserved in various parts of Northern Europe. Of these the most
celebrated are the Luck of Edenhall and the Oldenburg horn. But before
discussing these I must refer to some other stories, the material
evidence of which is no longer extant. Gervase of Tilbury relates that
in a forest of Gloucestershire there is a glade in the midst whereof
stands a hillock rising to the height of a man. Knights and hunters were
wont, when fatigued with heat and thirst, to ascend the hillock in
question to obtain relief. This had to be done singly and alone. The
adventurous man then would say: "I thirst," when a cupbearer would
appear and present him with a large drinking-horn adorned with gold and
gems, as, says the writer, was the custom among the most ancient
English, and containing liquor of some unknown but most delicious
flavour. When he had drunk this, all heat and weariness fled from his
body, and the cupbearer presented him with a towel to wipe his mouth
withal; and then having performed his office he disappeared, waiting
neither for recompense nor inquiry. One day an ill-conditioned knight of
the city of Gloucester, having gotten the horn into his hands, contrary
to custom and good manners kept it. But the Earl of Gloucester, having
heard of it, condemned the robber to death, and gave the horn to King
Henry I., lest he should be thought to have approved of such wickedness
if he had added the rapine of another to the store of his own private
property. Gervase of Tilbury wrote near the beginning of the thirteenth
century. His contemporary, William of Newbury, relates a similar story,
but lays its scene in Yorkshire. He says that a peasant coming home late
at night, not very sober, and passing by a barrow, heard the noise of
singing and feasting. Seeing a door open in the side of the barrow, he
looked in, and beheld a great banquet. One of the attendants offered him
a cup, which he took, but would not drink. Instead of doing so, he
poured out the contents, and kept the vessel. The fleetness of his beast
enabled him to distance all pursuit, and he escaped. We are told that
the cup, described as of unknown material, of unusual colour and of
extraordinary form, was presented to Henry I., who gave it to his
brother-in-law, David, King of the Scots. After having been kept for
several years in the Scottish treasury it was given by William the Lion
to King Henry II., who wished to see it.[112]

By a fortune somewhat rare, this story, having been written down in the
days of the early Plantagenet kings, has been lately found again among
the folk in the East Riding. The how, or barrow, where it is now said to
have occurred is Willey How, near Wold Newton, on the Bridlington road,
a conspicuous mound about three hundred feet in circumference and sixty
feet in height. The rustic to whom the adventure happened was an
inhabitant of Wold Newton, who had been on a visit to the neighbouring
village of North Burton, and was belated. Another tale resembling the
Gloucestershire saga is found in Swabia, though the object of which the
mysterious benefactor was deprived was not a cup, but a knife. Some farm
servants, while at work in the fields, were approached by an unusually
beautiful maiden clad in black. Every day about nine or ten o'clock in
the morning, and again about four o'clock in the afternoon, she brought
them a small pitcher of wine and a loaf of snow-white bread--greater
luxuries, probably, to peasants then even than they would be now. She
always brought a very pretty silver knife to cut the bread, and always
begged them to be sure to give it back to her, else she were lost. Her
visits continued until one of the servants took it into his head to keep
the knife, which he was ungrateful enough to do in spite of her tears
and prayers. Finding all entreaties vain, she uttered piercing cries of
distress, tore her fair hair, rent her silken clothes, and vanished,
never to be seen again. But often you may hear on the spot where she
once appeared sobs and the sound of weeping.[113]

A Cornish tale relates that a farmer's boy of Portallow was one night
sent to a neighbouring village for some household necessaries. On the
way he fell in with some piskies, and by repeating the formula he heard
them use, transported himself with them, first to Portallow Green, then
to Seaton Beach, and finally to "the King of France's cellar," where he
joined his mysterious companions in tasting that monarch's wines. They
then passed through magnificent rooms, where the tables were laden for
a feast. By way of taking some memorial of his travels he pocketed one
of the rich silver goblets which stood on one of the tables. After a
very short stay the word was passed to return, and presently he found
himself again at home. The good wife complimented him on his despatch.
"You'd say so, if you only know'd where I've been," he replied; "I've
been wi' the piskies to Seaton Beach, and I've been to the King o'
France's house, and all in five minutes." The farmer stared and said the
boy was _mazed_. "I thought you'd say I was mazed, so I brort away this
mug to show vor et," he answered, producing the goblet. With such
undeniable evidence his story could not be any longer doubted. Stealing
from a natural enemy like the King of France was probably rather
meritorious than otherwise; and the goblet remained in the boy's family
for generations, though unfortunately it is no longer forthcoming for
the satisfaction of those who may still be sceptical.[114]

This story differs from the others I have detailed, in narrating a raid
by supernatural beings on the dwelling of a human potentate--a raid in
which a human creature joined and brought away a substantial trophy. In
the seventeenth century there was in the possession of Lord Duffus an
old silver cup, called the Fairy Cup, concerning which the following
tradition was related to John Aubrey, the antiquary, by a correspondent
writing from Scotland on the 25th of March 1695. An ancestor of the then
Lord Duffus was walking in the fields near his house in Morayshire when
he heard the noise of a whirlwind and of voices crying: "Horse and
Hattock!" This was the exclamation fairies were said to use "when they
remove from any place." Lord Duffus was bold enough to cry "Horse and
Hattock" also, and was immediately caught up through the air with the
fairies to the King of France's cellar at Paris, where, after he had
heartily drunk, he fell asleep. There he was found lying the next
morning with the silver cup in his hand, and was promptly brought before
the King, to whom, on being questioned, he repeated this story; and the
King, in dismissing him, presented him with the cup. Where it may be now
I do not know, nor does Aubrey's correspondent furnish us with any
description of it, save the negative but important remark that it had
nothing engraven upon it beside the arms of the family.[115]

On this vessel, therefore, if it be yet in existence, there is nothing
to warrant the name of Fairy Cup, or to connect it with the adventure
just related. Nor does the Oldenburg Horn itself bear any greater marks
of authenticity. That famous vessel is still exhibited at the palace of
Rosenborg at Copenhagen. It is of silver gilt, and ornamented in paste
with enamel. It bears coats of arms and inscriptions, showing that it
was made for King Christian I. of Denmark in honour of the Three Kings
of Cologne, and cannot therefore be older than the middle of the
fifteenth century. The legend attached to it claims for it a much
greater antiquity. The legend itself was narrated in Hamelmann's
"Oldenburger Chronik" at the end of the sixteenth century, and is even
yet current in the mouths of the Oldenburg folk. Hamelmann dates it in
the year 990, when the then Count of Oldenburg was hunting in the forest
of Bernefeuer. He had followed a roe from that forest to the Osenberg,
and had distanced all his attendants. It was the twentieth of July, the
weather was hot, and the count thirsty. He cried out for a draught of
water, and had scarcely uttered the words, when the hill opened and a
beautiful damsel appeared and offered him drink in this horn. Not liking
the look of the beverage, he declined to drink. Whereupon she pressed
him to do so, assuring him that it would go well with him and his
thenceforth, and with the whole house of Oldenburg; but if the count
would not believe her and drink there would be no unity from that time
in the Oldenburg family. He had no faith in her words, and poured out
the drink, which took the hair off his horse wherever it splashed him,
and galloped away with the horn.[116]

Other drinking-horns, of which precisely analogous tales are told, are
still to be seen in Norway. Of the one at Halsteengaard it is related
that the posterity of the robber, down to the ninth generation, were
afflicted, as a penalty, with some bodily blemish. This horn is
described as holding nearly three quarts, and as being encircled by a
strong gilt copper ring, about three inches broad, on which, in monkish
characters, are to be read the names of the Three Kings of Cologne,
Melchior, Baltazar, and Caspar. It is further ornamented with a small
gilt copper plate, forming the setting of an oval crystal. Another horn,
preserved in the museum at Arendal, was obtained in a similar manner. A
father, pursuing his daughter and her lover, was stopped by a troll, and
offered drink in it. Instead of drinking, he cast out the contents, with
the usual result, and put spurs to his horse. He was counselled by
another troll, who was not on good terms with the first, to ride through
the rye and not through the wheat; but even when his pursuer was impeded
by the tall rye-stalks, only the crowing of the cock before dawn rescued
him. The vessel is encircled by three silver gilt rings, bearing an
inscription, which seems not quite correctly reported, as follows:
"Potum servorum benedic deus alme tuorum reliquam unus benede le un
Caspar Melchior Baltazar."[117]

The legend of which I am treating attaches also to a number of sacred
chalices. At Aagerup, in Zealand, is one of these. The thief, nearly
overtaken by the trolls he had robbed, prayed to God in his distress,
and vowed to bestow the cup upon the church if his prayer were heard.
The church of Vigersted, also in Zealand, possesses another. In the
latter case the man took refuge in the church, where he was besieged by
the trolls until morning. In Bornholm a chalice and paten belonging to
the church are said to have been made out of a cup stolen in the same
way by a peasant whose mother was a mermaid, and who had inherited some
portion of her supernatural power; hence, probably, his intercourse with
the trolls, of which he took so mean an advantage. At Viöl, near
Flensborg, in Schleswig, is a beaker belonging to the church, and, like
the chalice at Aagerup, of gold, of which it is narrated that it was
presented full of a liquor resembling buttermilk to a man who was riding
by a barrow where the underground folk were holding high festival. He
emptied and rode off with it in the usual manner. A cry arose behind
him: "Three-legs, come out!" and, looking round, he saw a monster
pursuing him. Finding this creature unable to come up with him, he heard
many voices calling: "Two-legs, come out!" But his horse was swifter
than Two-legs. Then One-leg was summoned, as in the story already cited
from Mecklenburg, and came after him with gigantic springs, and would
have caught him, but the door of his own house luckily stood open. He
had scarcely entered, and slammed it to, when One-leg stood outside,
banging against it, and foiled. The beaker was presented to the church
in fulfilment of a vow made by the robber in his fright; and it is now
used as the communion-cup. At Rambin, on the island of Rügen, is another
cup, the story of which relates that the man to whom it was offered by
the underground folk did not refuse to drink, but having drunk, he kept
the vessel and took it home. A boy who was employed to watch horses by
night on a turf moor near the village of Kritzemow, in Mecklenburg,
annoyed the underground folk by the constant cracking of his whip. One
night, as he was thus amusing himself, a mannikin came up to him and
offered him drink in a silver-gilt beaker. The boy took the beaker, but
being openly on bad terms with the elves, argued no good to himself from
such an offering. So he instantly leaped on horseback and fled, with the
vessel in his hand, along the road to Biestow and Rostock. The mannikin,
of course, followed, but, coming to a crossway, was compelled to give up
the chase. When the boy reached Biestow much of the liquid, as was to be
expected, had been shaken out of the cup, and wherever on the horse it
had fallen the hair had been burnt away. Glad of escaping this danger,
the boy thanked God and handed the vessel over to the church at Biestow.
In none of these instances, however, do I find any description of the
goblet.[118]

Fortunately there is one, and that the most celebrated of all the cups
to which a fairy origin has been ascribed, which has been often and
accurately delineated both with pen and pencil. I refer to the Luck of
Edenhall. It belongs to Sir George Musgrave of Edenhall in Cumberland,
in the possession of whose family it has been for many generations. The
tradition is that a butler, going to fetch water from a well in the
garden, called St. Cuthbert's Well, came upon a company of fairies at
their revels, and snatched it from them. As the little, ill-used folk
disappeared, after an ineffectual attempt to recover it, they cried:

    "If this glass do break or fall,
    Farewell the luck of Edenhall!"

The most recent account of it was written in the year 1880, by the Rev.
Dr. Fitch, for "The Scarborough Gazette," from which it has been
reprinted for private circulation in the shape of a dainty pamphlet. He
speaks of it, from a personal examination, as "a glass stoup, a drinking
vessel, about six inches in height, having a circular base, perfectly
flat, two inches in diameter, gradually expanding upwards till it ends
in a mouth four inches across. The material is by no means fine in
quality, presenting, as it does on close inspection, several small
cavities or air-bubbles. The general hue is a warm green, resembling the
tone known by artists as _brown pink_. Upon the transparent glass is
traced a geometric pattern in white and blue enamel, somewhat raised,
aided by gold and a little crimson. It will, of course, stand on its
base, but it would be far from wise to entrust it, when filled, to this
support." Dr. Fitch is in accord with the common opinion of antiquaries
in pronouncing it to be of Venetian origin, though Mr. Franks thought it
Saracenic. He describes the case in which it is kept as evidently made
for it, being of the same shape. "The lid of this case," he says,
"rather unevenly fits the body by overlapping it. There is no hinge; the
fastenings are certain hooks or catches, not in good condition; the
security and better apposition of the lid is maintained by a piece of
leather, not unlike a modern boot-lace, or thin thong. The case dates,
probably, from the fifteenth century, as articles made of similar
material, viz., _cuir bouilli_, softened or boiled leather, were much in
use in that age. This case bears an elegantly varied pattern that has
been recognized in an inkstand of Henry the Seventh's, yet extant. Upon
the lid of this case, in very chaste and well-formed characters, is the
sacred monogram I.H.S." These three letters, which do not really form a
monogram, have possibly given rise to the surmise, or tradition, that
the Luck was once used as a sacred vessel. Dr. Fitch goes on to quote
several authorities, showing that chalices of glass were sanctioned by
the church, and were, in fact, made and used; and the Luck may have been
such a vessel. But I can see no sufficient evidence of it. There is
nothing to show that the leathern case is of the same date as the glass
itself; and it may have been made long afterwards. The earliest mention
of the relic seems to have been by Francis Douce, the antiquary, who was
at Edenhall in 1785, and wrote some verses upon it; nor is there any
authentic family history attaching to it. The shape of the goblet, its
unsteadiness when full, and the difficulty of drinking from it without
spilling some of its contents, of which Dr. Fitch had some experience,
would point to its being intended rather for convivial than sacred
uses.

The hypothesis of the Luck's having once been a chalice explains
nothing; because, as we have seen, several of the cups alleged to have
been stolen from supernatural beings are chalices to this day. Moreover,
what are we to think of the drinking-horns of which the same tale is
told? Some of these already mentioned bear, not indeed the sacred
letters, but prayers and the names of the sainted Kings of Cologne,
though, unlike the cups, they are not found in churches. One
drinking-horn, however, was preserved in the cathedral at Wexiö, in
Sweden, until carried away by the Danes in 1570. This horn, stated to be
of three hundred colours, was received by a knight on Christmas morning
from a troll-wife, whose head he there and then cut off with his sword.
The king dubbed him Trolle in memory of the deed, and bestowed on him a
coat-of-arms containing a headless troll.[119] How the horn came into
the possession of the cathedral I do not know; but at all events it
could never have been a chalice.

A silver cup, perhaps still used for sacramental purposes at the parish
church of Malew, in the Isle of Man, is the subject of the following
legend. A farmer returning homeward to the parish of Malew from Peel was
benighted and lost his way among the mountains. In the course of his
wanderings he was drawn by the sound of sweet music into a large hall
where a number of little people were banqueting. Among them were some
faces he thought he had formerly seen; but he forbore to take any notice
of them. Nor did they take any notice of him until he was offered drink,
when one of them, whose features seemed not unknown to him, plucked him
by the coat and forbade him, whatever he did, to taste anything he saw
before him; "for if you do," he added, "you will be as I am, and return
no more to your family." Accordingly, when a large silver beaker was put
into his hand, filled with liquor, he found an opportunity to throw its
contents on the ground. The music forthwith ceased, and the company
disappeared, leaving the cup in his hand. On finding his way home, he
told the minister of the parish what had occurred; and the latter, with
the instincts of his profession, advised him to devote the cup to the
service of the Church. We are indebted to Waldron's well-known
"Description of the Isle of Man," originally published in 1731, for this
story. A later writer, annotating Waldron's work rather more than a
quarter of a century ago, refers to the vessel in question as a paten;
he states that it was still preserved in the church, and that it bore
engraved the legend: "Sancte Lupe ora pro nobis."[120] There are no
fewer than eleven saints named Lupus in the calendar. Whichever of them
was invoked here, the inscription points to a continental origin for the
vessel, whether cup or paten, and is not inconsistent with its being of
some antiquity.

Mr. Train, who quotes the tradition in his account of the Isle of Man,
states that several similar tales had been placed at his disposal by
friends in the island; but it was naturally beneath the dignity of an
historian to do more than give a single specimen of this "shade of
superstition," as he calls it. He does, however, mention (though
apparently without being conscious of any close relationship with the
cup of Kirk Malew) an antique crystal goblet in the possession, when he
wrote, of Colonel Wilks, the proprietor of the Estate of Ballafletcher,
four or five miles from Douglas. It is described as larger than a common
bell-shaped tumbler, uncommonly light and chaste in appearance, and
ornamented with floral scrolls, having between the designs, on two
sides, upright _columellæ_ of five pillars. The history of this cup is
interesting. It is said to have been taken by Magnus, the Norwegian King
of Man, from St. Olave's shrine. On what ground this statement rests
does not appear. What is really known about the goblet is that having
belonged for at least a hundred years to the Fletcher family, the owners
of Ballafletcher, it was sold with the effects of the last of the family
in 1778, and was bought by Robert Cæsar, Esq., who gave it to his niece
for safe keeping. This niece was, perhaps, the "old lady, a connection
of the family of Fletcher," who is mentioned by Train as having
presented the cup to Colonel Wilks. The tradition is that it had been
given to the first of the Fletcher family more than two centuries ago,
with the injunction "that as long as he preserved it peace and plenty
would follow; but woe to him who broke it, as he would surely be haunted
by the _lhiannan Shee_," or "peaceful spirit" of Ballafletcher. It was
kept in a recess, whence it was never taken except on Christmas and
Easter days, or, according to Train's account, at Christmas alone. Then,
we are told, it was "filled with wine, and quaffed off at a breath by
the head of the house only, as a libation to the spirit for her
protection."[121]

Here is no mention of the theft of the goblet unless from St. Olave's
sanctuary; but yet I think we have a glimpse of the real character of
the cups to which the legend I am discussing attaches. They were
probably sacrificial vessels dedicated to the old pagan worship of the
house-spirits, of which we find so many traces among the Indo-European
peoples. These house-spirits had their chief seat on the family hearth;
and their great festival was that of the New Year, celebrated at the
winter solstice. The policy of the Church in early and mediæval times
was to baptize to Christian uses as many of the heathen beliefs and
ceremonies as possible. The New Year festival thus became united with
the anniversary of the birth of Christ; and it is matter of history that
as the Danes used, previously to their conversion, to drink to Odin and
the Anses, so after that event they were in the habit of solemnly
pledging Our Lord, His Apostles and the Saints. Such of the old beliefs
and practices, however, as the Church could neither impress with a
sacred character, nor destroy, lingered on. Among them were the
superstitions of the fairies and the household spirits; and there is
nothing unlikely in the supposition that special vessels were kept for
the ceremonies in which these beings were propitiated. For this purpose
a horn would serve as well as any goblet; if, indeed, it were not
actually preferred, as being older, and therefore more sacred in shape
and material. As these ceremonies gradually fell into desuetude, or were
put down by clerical influence, it would be both natural and in
accordance with policy that the cups devoted to the supposed rites
should be transferred to the service of the Church.[122] They would all
be old-fashioned, quaint, and, many of them, of foreign and unknown
provenance. Already connected in the minds of the people with the spirit
world, a supernatural origin would be ascribed to them; and gift or
robbery would be the theory of acquisition most readily adopted. Now,
theory in a certain stage of culture is indistinguishable from
narrative.

In this chapter I have dealt entirely with stolen goods; but, as we have
seen in previous chapters, tales of cups and other articles lent or
given by elves in exchange for services rendered are by no means
unknown. I cannot, however, recall any of such gifts which are now
extant. It were much to be wished that all the drinking-vessels--nay,
all the articles of every kind--to which legends of supernatural origin
belong were actually figured and described. Much light would thereby be
thrown upon their true history. I will only now point out, with regard
to the Luck of Edenhall, and the three horns of Oldenburg, of
Halsteengaard, and of Arendal, of which we have full descriptions, that
what we know of them is all in confirmation of the theory suggested. In
particular, the names of the Three Kings connect the horns with a
Christmas, or Twelfth Night, festival, which is exactly what the theory
of the sacrificial nature of these vessels would lead us to expect. If
we turn from the actual beakers to the stories, it is surprising how
many of these we find pointing to the same festival. The cup of South
Kongerslev was won and lost on Christmas Eve. The horn and pipe of
Liungby were stolen "one night of Christmas." It was at Christmas-time
that the Danish boy acquired his supernatural strength by giving back to
the elf-maiden the horn he had taken from her. The Halsteengaard horn
and the golden beaker of Aagerup were both reft from the trolls on
Christmas Eve, and the horn of Wexiö on Christmas morning. The night of
St. John's Day is mentioned as the time when the horn now at Arendal was
obtained. The saint here referred to is probably St. John the
Evangelist, whose feast is on December the 27th. And in more than one
case the incident is connected with a marriage, which would be an
appropriate occasion for the propitiation of the household spirit. The
only instance presenting any difficulty is that of the cup at Kirk
Malew; and there the difficulty arises from the name of the saint to
whom the cup was apparently dedicated. Nor is it lessened by the number
of saints bearing the name of Lupus. The days on which these holy men
are respectively commemorated range through the calendar from January to
October; and until we know which of them was intended it is useless to
attempt an explanation. The question, however, is of small account in
the face of the probability called forth by the coincidences that
remain.

There is one other matter to which I would call attention, namely, that
while stories of the type discussed in the foregoing pages are common to
both Celts and Teutons, the stolen cup is exclusively a Teutonic
possession. More than that, no authentic record of the preservation of
the relic itself is found save in the homes and conquests of the
Scandinavian race. Is this to be accounted for by the late date of
Christianity, and, therefore, the more recent survival of heathen rites
among Teutonic, and especially Scandinavian, peoples?


FOOTNOTES:

[104] Girald. Cambr., l. i. c. 8.

[105] Davies, "Mythology," p. 155. Mr. Wirt Sikes quotes this story
without acknowledgment, stating that the legend, "varying but little in
phraseology, is current in the neighbourhood of a dozen different
mountain lakes." As if he had collected it himself! (Sikes, p. 45).
Compare an Eskimo story of a girl who, having acquired _angakok_ power,
visited the _ingnersuit_, or underground folk, "and received presents
from them; but while carrying them homewards the gifts were wafted out
of her hands and flew back to their first owners" (Rink, p. 460).

[106] Thorpe, vol. iii. p. 120, apparently quoting Harry's "Sagen,
Märchen und Legenden Niedersachsens"; Sébillot, "Trad. et Sup." vol. i.
p. 115; "Zeits. f. Volksk." vol. ii. p. 415, quoting Vernaleken.

[107] Kuhn und Schwartz, pp. 305, 306; "Choice Notes," p. 76.

[108] Niederhöffer, vol. iv. p. 130; Bartsch, vol. i. p. 278; Thorpe,
vol. iii. p. 56, quoting Müllenhoff; Birlinger, "Volksthümliches," vol.
i. p. 103; Grimm, "Tales," vol. ii. p. 77. A Lusatian tradition quoted
by Grimm in a note represents the watersnake-king's crown as not only
valuable in itself, but like other fairy property, the bringer of great
riches to its possessor. Ibid. 406. _Cf._ a Hindoo story to the same
effect, Day, p. 17; and many other tales.

[109] Thorpe, vol. ii. pp. 148, 146, 121, quoting Thiele, "Danmarks
Folkesagn;" Jahn, p. 75.

[110] Bartsch, vol. i. p. 83 (see also p. 41); Thorpe, vol. ii. p. 6,
quoting Faye, "Norske Folkesagn"; ibid. p. 89, quoting Afzelius,
"Svenske Folkets Sago-Häfder"; Kuhn und Schwartz, p. 26.

[111] Thorpe, vol. ii. p. 142, quoting Thiele. See also Keightley, p.
88; Campbell, vol. ii. p. 97.

[112] Gerv. Tilb., Decis. iii. c. 60; Guil. Neub. "Chronica Rerum
Anglic." lib. i. c. 28, quoted by Liebrecht in a note to Gerv. Tilb.

[113] Nicholson, p. 83. Mr. Nicholson in a letter to me says that he had
the story as given by him from an old inhabitant of Bridlington, and
that it is current in the neighbourhood. Birlinger, "Volkst." vol. i.
pp. 3, 5.

[114] "Choice Notes," p. 73.

[115] Aubrey, "Miscellany," p. 149.

[116] Thorpe, vol. iii. p. 128; Kuhn und Schwartz, p. 280. The latter is
the version still found as traditional. Its details are not so full, and
are in some respects different.

[117] Thorpe, vol. ii. pp. 15, 14, apparently quoting Faye. Dr. Geo.
Stephens of the University of Copenhagen very kindly made a great number
of inquiries for me with a view to obtain information, and, if possible,
drawings of the Scandinavian horns and cups, but unhappily with little
success. The answer to his inquiries in reference to the horns of
Halsteengaard and Arendal, sent by Prof. Olaf Rygh, the learned Keeper
of the Norwegian Museum at Christiania, will be read with interest. He
says: "Mr. Hartland's notice of 'Halsteengaard' in Norway doubtless
refers to a local tale about a drinking-horn formerly in the hands of
the owner of Holsteingaard, Aal parish, Hallingdal. It was first made
public in the year 174-, in 'Ivar Wiels Beskriveke over Ringerige og
Hallingdals Fogderi,' in 'Topografisk Journal for Norge,' Part XXXI.,
Christiania, 1804, pp. 179-183. I know nothing more as to the fate of
this horn than what is said in Nicolaysen's 'Norske Fornlevninger,' p.
152, that it is said to have been sent to the Bergen Museum in 1845.
Should this be so, it will be almost impossible to identify it among the
many such horns in that collection. As described by Wiel, it was merely
a very simple specimen of the kind with the common inscription JASPAR X
MELCHIOR X BALTAZAR. This class of horn was largely imported to Norway
from North Germany in the 15th and 16th centuries.

"Meanwhile I beg to point out that the oldest legend of this kind which
has come down to us is found in 'Biskop Jens Nilssons Visitatsböger og
Reise-optegnelser, udgivne af Dr. Yngvar Nielsen,' p. 393. It was
written by the bishop or his amanuensis during his visitation, 1595, in
Flatdal parish, Telemarken. What has become of the horn spoken of by the
bishop I cannot say.

"I have no idea of what is meant by Mr. Hartland's reference to Arendal.
Possibly it may concern something in the museum there, but of which I
never heard. The printed catalogue of the museum (Arendal, 1882)
includes nothing from the middle age or later."

[118] Thorpe, vol. ii. p. 144, quoting Thiele. Keightley, pp. 109, 111,
note; (The latter mentions another theft of a silver jug where the thief
was saved by crossing running water.) Thorpe, vol. ii. p. 140; vol. iii.
p. 70, quoting Müllenhoff; Jahn, p. 53; Bartsch, vol. i. p. 60.

[119] Thorpe, vol. ii. p. 91, quoting Afzelius.

[120] Waldron, pp. 28, 106.

[121] Train, vol. ii. p. 154; and see a note by Harrison to his edition
of Waldron, p. 106. The cup is stated by Harrison to have been, when he
wrote, in the possession of Major Bacon, of Seafield House. Mrs.
Russell, of Oxford, kindly made inquiries for me in the Isle of Man as
to its present whereabouts, and that of the cup of Kirk Malew, and
inserted a query in _Yn Livar Manninagh_, the organ of the Isle of Man
Natural History and Antiquarian Society, but without eliciting any
information.

[122] It is not irrelevant to observe in this connection that several of
the chalices in Sweden are said to have been presented to the churches
by priests to whom a Berg-woman had offered drink in these very cups or
bowls (Thorpe, vol. ii. p. 90, quoting Afzelius).




CHAPTER VII.

THE SUPERNATURAL LAPSE OF TIME IN FAIRYLAND.

     The story of Rhys and Llewelyn--Dancing for a
     twelvemonth--British variants--Lapse of time among the Siberian
     Tartars--German and Slavonic stories--The penalty of curiosity
     and greed--A Lapp tale--The mother leaving her child in the
     mysterious cave--Rip van Winkle--Eastern variants--King
     Herla--The Adalantado of the Seven Cities--The Seven
     Sleepers--King Wenzel and the smith--Lost brides and
     bridegrooms--The Monk Felix--Visits to Paradise--A Japanese tale.


In previous chapters we have seen that human beings are sometimes taken
by fairies into Fairyland, and that they are there kept for a longer or
shorter period, or, it may be, are never permitted to return to earth at
all. We have noted cases in which they are led down for temporary
purposes and, if they are prudent, are enabled to return when those
purposes are accomplished. We have noted other cases in which babes or
grown women have been stolen and retained until their kindred have
compelled restoration. The story cited in the last chapter from Giraldus
describes a seduction of a different kind. There the visit to Fairyland
was of a more voluntary character, and the hero was able to go to and
fro as he pleased. We have also met with tales in which the temptation
of food, or more usually of drink, has been held out to the wayfarer;
and we have learned that the result of yielding would be to give himself
wholly into the fairies' hands. I propose now to examine instances in
which temptation of one kind or other has been successful, or in which
a spell has been cast over man or woman, not merely preventing the
bewitched person from regaining his home and human society, but also
rendering him, while under the spell, impervious to the attacks of time
and unconscious of its flight.

These stories are of many types. The first type comes, so far as I know,
only from Celtic sources. It is very widely known in Wales, and we may
call it, from its best-known example, the "Rhys and Llewelyn type." A
story obtained between sixty and seventy years ago in the Vale of Neath
relates that Rhys and Llewelyn were fellow-servants to a farmer; and
they had been engaged one day in carrying lime for their master. As they
were going home, driving their mountain ponies before them in the
twilight, Rhys suddenly called to his companion to stop and listen to
the music. It was a tune, he said, to which he had danced a hundred
times, and he must go and have a dance now. So he told his companion to
go on with the horses and he would soon overtake him. Llewelyn could
hear nothing, and began to remonstrate; but away sprang Rhys, and he
called after him in vain. Accordingly he went home, put up the ponies,
ate his supper and went to bed, thinking that Rhys had only made a
pretext for going to the alehouse. But when morning came, and still no
sign of Rhys, he told his master what had occurred. Search proving
fruitless, suspicion fell on Llewelyn of having murdered his
fellow-servant; and he was accordingly imprisoned. A farmer in the
neighbourhood, skilled in fairy matters, guessing how things might have
been, proposed that himself and some others, including the narrator of
the story, should accompany Llewelyn to the place where he parted with
Rhys. On coming to it, "Hush!" cried Llewelyn, "I hear music, I hear
sweet harps." All listened, but could hear nothing. But Llewelyn's foot
was on the outward edge of the fairy-ring. "Put your foot on mine,
David," he said to the narrator. The latter did so, and so did each of
the party, one after the other, and then heard the sound of many harps,
and saw within a circle, about twenty feet across, great numbers of
little people dancing round and round. Among them was Rhys, whom
Llewelyn caught by the smock-frock, as he came by him, and pulled him
out of the circle. "Where are the horses? where are the horses?" cried
he. "Horses, indeed!" said Llewelyn. Rhys urged him to go home and let
him finish his dance, in which he averred he had not been engaged more
than five minutes. It was only by main force they got him away; and the
sequel was that he could not be persuaded of the time that had passed in
the dance: he became melancholy, took to his bed, and soon after
died.[123]

Variants of this tale are found all over Wales. At Pwllheli, Professor
Rhys was told of two youths who went out to fetch cattle and came at
dusk upon a party of fairies dancing. One was drawn into the circle; and
the other was suspected of murdering him, until, at a wizard's
suggestion, he went again to the same spot at the end of a year and a
day. There he found his friend dancing, and managed to get him out,
reduced to a mere skeleton. The first question put by the rescued man
was as to the cattle he was driving. Again, at Trefriw, Professor Rhys
found a belief that when a young man got into a fairy-ring the fairy
damsels took him away; but he could be got out unharmed at the end of a
year and a day, when he would be found dancing with them in the same
ring. The mode of recovery was to touch him with a piece of iron and to
drag him out at once. We shall consider hereafter the reason for
touching the captive with iron. In this way was recovered, after the
expiration of a year and a day, a youth who had wandered into a
fairy-ring. He had new shoes on at the time he was lost; and he could
not be made to understand that he had been there more than five minutes
until he was asked to look at his new shoes, which were by that time in
pieces. Near Aberystwyth, Professor Rhys was told of a servant-maid who
was lost while looking for some calves. Her fellow-servant, a man, was
taken into custody on a charge of murdering her. A "wise man," however,
found out that she was with the fairies; and by his directions the
servant-man was successful at the end of the usual period of twelve
months and a day in drawing her out of the fairy-ring at the place where
she was lost. As soon as she was released and saw her fellow-servant
(who was carefully dressed in the same clothes as he had on when she
left him), she asked about the calves. On their way home she told her
master, the servant-man, and the others, that she would stay with them
until her master should strike her with iron. One day, therefore, when
she was helping her master to harness a horse the bit touched her, and
she disappeared instantly and was never seen from that time forth. In
another case, said to have happened in Anglesea, a girl got into a
fairy-circle while looking, with her father, for a lost cow. By a "wise
man's" advice, however, he rescued her by pulling her out of the circle
the very hour of the night of the anniversary of his loss. The first
inquiry she then made was after the cow, for she had not the slightest
recollection of the time she had spent with the fairies.[124]

A ghastly sequel, more frequently found in a type of the story
considered later on, sometimes occurs. In Carmarthenshire it is said
that a farmer going out one morning very early was lost; nor were any
tidings heard of him for more than twelve months afterwards, until one
day a man passing by a lonely spot saw him dancing, and spoke to him.
This broke the spell; and the farmer, as if waking out of a dream,
exclaimed: "Oh dear! where are my horses?" Stepping out of the magical
circle, he fell down and mingled his dust with the earth. In North Wales
a story was generally current a couple of generations since of two men
travelling together who were benighted in a wood. One of them slept, but
the other fell into the hands of the fairies. With the help of a
wizard's advice, some of his relatives rescued him at the end of a year.
They went to the place where his companion had missed him, there found
him dancing with the fairies and dragged him out of the ring. The
unfortunate man, imagining it was the same night and that he was with
his companion, immediately asked if it were not better to go home. He
was offered some food, which he began to eat; but he had no sooner done
so than he mouldered away. A similar tradition attaches to a certain
yew-tree near Mathafarn in the parish of Llanwrin. One of two
farm-servants was lost at that spot, and found again, a year after,
dancing in a fairy-circle. On being dragged out he was asked if he did
not feel hungry. "No," he replied, "and if I did, have I not here in my
wallet the remains of my dinner that I had before I fell asleep?" He did
not know that a year had passed by. His look was like a skeleton; and as
soon as he had tasted food he too mouldered away.[125]

In Scotland the story is told without this terrible end. For example, in
Sutherlandshire we learn that a man who had been with a friend to the
town of Lairg to enter his first child's birth in the session-books, and
to buy a keg of whisky against the christening, sat down to rest at the
foot of the hill of Durchâ, near a large hole from which they soon
heard a sound of piping and dancing. Feeling curious, he entered the
cavern, and disappeared. His friend was accused of murder, but being
allowed a year and a day to vindicate himself, he used to repair at dusk
to the fatal spot and call and pray. One day before the term ran out, he
sat, as usual, in the gloaming by the cavern, when, what seemed his
friend's shadow passed within it. It was his friend himself, tripping
merrily with the fairies. The accused man succeeded in catching him by
the sleeve and pulling him out. "Why could you not let me finish my
reel, Sandy?" asked the bewitched man. "Bless me!" rejoined Sandy, "have
you not had enough of reeling this last twelvemonth?" But the other
would not believe in this lapse of time until he found his wife sitting
by the door with a yearling child in her arms. In Kirkcudbrightshire,
one night about Hallowe'en two young ploughmen, returning from an
errand, passed by an old ruined mill and heard within music and dancing.
One of them went in; and nothing was seen of him again until a year
after, when his companion went to the same place, Bible in hand, and
delivered him from the evil beings into whose power he had fallen.[126]

The captive, however, does not always require to be sought for: he is
sometimes released voluntarily by his captors. A man who lived at
Ystradgynlais, in Brecknockshire, going out one day to look after his
cattle and sheep on the mountain, disappeared. In about three weeks,
after search had been made in vain for him and his wife had given him up
for dead, he came home. His wife asked him where he had been for the
past three weeks. "Three weeks! Is it three weeks you call three hours?"
said he. Pressed to say where he had been, he told her he had been
playing on his flute (which he usually took with him on the mountain) at
the Llorfa, a spot near the Van Pool, when he was surrounded at a
distance by little beings like men, who closed nearer and nearer to him
until they became a very small circle. They sang and danced, and so
affected him that he quite lost himself. They offered him some small
cakes to eat, of which he partook; and he had never enjoyed himself so
well in his life. Near Bridgend is a place where a woman is said to have
lived who was absent ten years with the fairies, and thought she was not
out of the house more than ten minutes. With a woman's proverbial
persistency, she would not believe her husband's assurances that it was
ten years since she disappeared; and the serious disagreement between
them which ensued was so notorious that it gave a name to the place
where they lived. A happier result is believed to have attended an
adventure that foreboded much worse to a man at Dornoch, in
Sutherlandshire. He was present at a funeral in the churchyard on New
Year's Day, and was so piqued at not being invited, as all the others
were, to some of the New Year's festivities, that in his vexation,
happening to see a skull lying at his feet, he struck it with his staff
and said: "Thou seemest to be forsaken and uncared-for, like myself. I
have been bidden by none; neither have I invited any: I now invite
thee!" That night as he and his wife were sitting down alone to supper,
a venerable old man entered the room in silence and took his share of
the delicacies provided. In those days the New Year's feast was kept up
for eleven days together; and the stranger's visit was repeated in the
same absolute silence for six nights. At last the host, alarmed and
uneasy, sought the priest's advice as to how he was to get rid of his
unwelcome guest. The reverend father bade him, in laying the bannocks in
the basket for the seventh day's supper, reverse the last-baked one.
This, he declared, would induce the old man to speak. It did; and the
speech was an invitation--nay, rather a command--to spend the remainder
of the festival with him in the churchyard. The priest, again consulted,
advised compliance; and the man went trembling to the tryst. He found
in the churchyard a great house, brilliantly illuminated, where he
enjoyed himself, eating, drinking, piping and dancing. After what seemed
the lapse of a few hours, the grey master of the house came to him, and
bade him hasten home, or his wife would be married to another; and in
parting he advised him always to respect the remains of the dead.
Scarcely had he done speaking when the grey old man himself, the guests,
the house, and all that it contained, vanished, leaving the man to crawl
home alone in the moonlight as best he might after so long a debauch.
For he had been absent a year and a day; and when he got home he found
his wife in a bride's dress, and the whole house gay with a bridal
party. His entrance broke in upon the mirth: his wife swooned, and the
new bridegroom scrambled up the chimney. But when she got over her
fright, and her husband had recovered from the fatigue of his year-long
dance, they made it up, and lived happily ever after.[127]

A story of this type has been elaborated by a Welsh writer who is known
as "Glasynys" into a little romance, in which the hero is a shepherd
lad, and the heroine a fairy maiden whom he weds and brings home with
him. This need not detain us; but a more authentic story from the Vale
of Neath may be mentioned. It concerns a boy called Gitto Bach, or
Little Griffith, a farmer's son, who disappeared. During two whole years
nothing was heard of him; but at length one morning when his mother, who
had long and bitterly mourned for him as dead, opened the door, whom
should she see sitting on the threshold but Gitto with a bundle under
his arm. He was dressed and looked exactly as when she last saw him, for
he had not grown a bit. "Where have you been all this time?" asked his
mother. "Why, it was only yesterday I went away," he replied; and
opening the bundle, he showed her a dress the "little children," as he
called them, had given him for dancing with them. The dress was of white
paper without seam. With maternal caution she put it into the fire.[128]

I am not aware of many foreign examples of this type; but among the
Siberian Tartars their extravagant heroes sometimes feast overlong with
friends as mythical as themselves. On one occasion

    "They caroused, they feasted.
    That a month had flown
    They knew not;
    That a year had gone by
    They knew not.
    As a year went by
    It seemed like a day;
    As two years went by
    It seemed like two days;
    As three years went by
    It seemed like three days."

Again, when a hero was married the time very naturally passed rapidly.
"One day he thought he had lived here--he had lived a month; two days he
believed he had lived--he had lived two months; three days he believed
he had lived--he had lived three months." And he was much surprised to
learn from his bride how long it really was, though time seems always to
have gone wrong with him. For after he was born it is recorded that in
one day he became a year old, in two days two years, and in seven days
seven years old; after which he performed some heroic feats, ate
fourteen sheep and three cows, and then lying down slept for seven days
and seven nights--in other words, until he was fourteen years old. In a
Breton tale a girl who goes down underground, to become godmother to a
fairy child, thinks, when she returns, that she has been away but two
days, though in the meantime her god-child has grown big: she has been
in fact ten years. In a Hessian legend the time of absence is seven
years.[129]

Turning away from this type, in which pleasure, and especially the
pleasure of music and dancing, is the motive, let us look at what seem
to be some specially German and Slavonic types of the tale. In the
latter it is rather an act of service (sometimes under compulsion),
curiosity or greed, which leads the mortal into the mysterious regions
where time has so little power. At Eldena, in Pomerania, are the ruins
of a monastery and church, formerly very wealthy, under which are said
to be some remarkable chambers. Two Capuchin monks came from Rome many
years ago, and inquired of the head of the police after a hidden door
which led under the ruins. He lent them his servant-boy, who, under
their direction, removed the rubbish and found the door. It opened at
the touch of the monks, and they entered with the servant. Passing
through several rooms they reached one in which many persons were
sitting and writing. Here they were courteously received; and after a
good deal of secret conference between the monks and their hosts, they
were dismissed. When the servant came back to the upper air, he found he
had been absent three whole years. Blanik is the name of a mountain in
Bohemia, beneath which are lofty halls whose walls are entirely
fashioned of rock-crystal. In these halls the Bohemian hero, the holy
King Wenzel, sleeps with a chosen band of his knights, until some day
the utmost need of his country shall summon him and them to her aid. A
smith, who dwelt near the mountain, was once mowing his meadow, when a
stranger came and bade him follow him. The stranger led him into the
mountain, where he beheld the sleeping knights, each one upon his horse,
his head bent down upon the horse's neck. His guide then brought him
tools that he might shoe the horses, but told him to beware in his work
of knocking against any of the knights. The smith skilfully performed
his work, but as he was shoeing the last horse he accidentally touched
the rider, who started up, crying out: "Is it time?" "Not yet," replied
he who had brought the smith thither, motioning the latter to keep
quiet. When the task was done, the smith received the old shoes by way
of reward. On returning home he was astonished to find two mowers at
work in his meadow, whereas he had only left one there. From them he
learned that he had been away a whole year; and when he opened his bag,
behold the old horse-shoes were all of solid gold! On Easter Sunday,
during mass, the grey horse belonging to another peasant living at the
foot of the Blanik disappeared. While in quest of him the owner found
the mountain open, and, entering, arrived in the hall where the knights
sat round a large table of stone and slept. Each of them wore black
armour, save their chief, who shone in gold and bore three herons'
feathers in his helm. Ever and anon one or other of the knights would
look up and ask: "Is it time?" But on their chief shaking his head he
would sink again to rest. While the peasant was in the midst of his
astonishment he heard a neighing behind him; and turning round he left
the cavern. His horse was quietly grazing outside; but when he got home
every one shrank in fright away from him. His wife sat at the table in
deep mourning. On seeing him she shrieked and asked: "Where have you
been for a whole year?" He thought he had only been absent a single
hour. A servant-man driving two horses over the Blanik heard the
trampling of steeds and a battle-march played. It was the knights
returning from their mimic combat; and the horses he was driving were
so excited that he was compelled to follow with them into the mountain,
which then closed upon them. Nor did he reach home until ten years had
passed away, though he thought it had only been as many days.[130]

We shall have occasion to return to Blanik and its knights. Parallel
traditions attach, as is well known, to the Kyffhäuser, a mountain in
Thuringia, where Frederick Barbarossa sleeps. A peasant going with corn
to market at Nordhausen, drove by the Kyffhäuser, where he was met by a
little grey man, who asked him whither he was going, and offered to
reward him if he would accompany him instead. The little grey man led
him through a great gateway into the mountain till they came at last to
a castle. There he took from the peasant his waggon and horses, and led
him into a hall gorgeously illuminated and filled with people, where he
was well entertained. At last the little grey man told him it was now
time he went home, and rewarding him bountifully he led him forth. His
waggon and horses were given to him again, and he trudged homeward well
pleased. Arrived there, however, his wife opened her eyes wide to see
him, for he had been absent a year, and she had long accounted him dead.
It fared not quite so well with a journeyman joiner from Nordhausen, by
name Thiele, who found the mountain open, as it is every seven years,
and went in. There he saw the Marquis John (whoever he may have been),
with his beard spreading over the table and his nails grown through it.
Around the walls lay great wine-vats, whose hoops and wood had alike
rolled away; but the wine had formed its own shell and was blood-red. A
little drop remained in the wine-glass which stood before the Marquis
John. The joiner made bold to drain it off, and thereupon fell asleep.
When he awoke again he had slept for seven years in the mountain.[131]

Curiosity and greed caused this man to lose seven years of his life.
This is a motive often met with in these stories. A young girl during
the midday rest left a hayfield in the Lavantthal, Carinthia, to climb
the Schönofen, whence there is a fine view over the valley. As she
reached the top she became aware of an open door in the rock. She
entered, and found herself in a cellar-like room. Two fine black steeds
stood at the fodder-trough and fed off the finest oats. Marvelling how
they got there, she put a few handfuls of the oats into her pocket, and
passed on into a second chamber. A chest stood there, and on the chest
lay a black dog. Near him was a loaf of bread, in which a knife was
stuck. With ready wit she divined, or recollected, the purpose of the
bread; and cutting a good slice she threw it to the dog. While he was
busy devouring it she filled her apron from the treasure contained in
the chest. But meantime the door closed, and there was nothing for it
but to lie down and sleep. She awoke to find the door wide open, and at
once made the best of her way home. But she was not a little astounded
to learn that she had been gone for a whole year.[132]

A Lapp tale presents this mysterious lapse of time as the sequel of an
adventure similar to that of Ulysses with Polyphemus. An old Lapp,
having lost his way while hunting, came to a cottage. The door was open;
and he entered to remain there the night, and began to cook in a pot he
carried with him the game he had caught that day. Suddenly a witch
entered, and asked him: "What is your name?" "Myself," answered the
Lapp; and taking a spoonful of the boiling liquid he flung it in her
face. She cried out: "Myself has burnt me! Myself has burnt me!" "If you
have burnt yourself you ought to suffer," answered her companion from
the neighbouring mountain. The hunter was thus delivered for the moment
from the witch, who, however, as she went away, exclaimed: "Self has
burnt me; Self shall sleep till the new year!" When the Lapp had
finished his repast he lay down to repose. On awaking he rummaged in his
provision-sack: he found its contents mouldy and putrid. Nor could he
understand this before he got home and learned that he had been missing
for six months.[133]

This story is unlike the previous ones, inasmuch as it represents the
six months' disappearance as in no way due to any enticements, either of
supernatural beings or of the hero's own passions. Neither music, nor
dancing, neither greed nor curiosity, led him astray. The aboriginal
inhabitants of Japan in like manner tell of a certain man who went out
in his boat to fish and was carried off by a storm to an unknown land.
The chief, an old man of divine aspect, begged him to stay there for the
night, promising to send him home to his own country on the morrow. The
promise was fulfilled by his being sent with some of the old chief's
subjects who were going thither; but the man was enjoined to lie down in
the boat and cover up his head. When he reached his native place the
sailors threw him into the water; and ere he came to himself sailors and
boat had disappeared. He had been away for a whole year; and the chief
appeared to him shortly afterwards in a dream, revealing himself as no
human being, but the chief of the salmon, the divine fish; and he
required the man thenceforth to worship him. Curiously similar to the
Japanese tale is a tale told to M. Sébillot by a cabin-boy of Saint Cast
in Brittany. A fisherman caught one day the king of the fishes, in the
shape of a small gilded fish, but was persuaded to let him go under
promise to send (such is the popular belief in the unselfishness of
kings) at all times as many of his subjects as the fisherman wanted into
his nets. The promise was royally fulfilled. More than this, when the
fisherman's boat was once capsized by a storm the king of the fishes
appeared, gave its drowning owner to drink from a bottle he had brought
for the purpose, and conveyed him under the water to his capital,--a
beautiful city whose streets, surpassing those of London in the
traditions of English peasant children, were paved not only with gold
but with diamonds and other gems. The fisherman promptly filled his
pockets with these paving-stones; and then the king politely told him:
"When you are tired of being with us, you have only to say so." There is
a limit to hospitality; so the fisherman took the hint, and told the
king how delighted he should be to remain there always, but that he had
a wife and children at home who would think he was drowned. The king
called a tunny and commanded him to take the fisherman on his back and
deposit him on a rock near the shore, where the other fishers could see
and rescue him. Then, with the parting gift of an inexhaustible purse,
he dismissed his guest. When the fisherman got back to his village he
found he had been away more than six months. In the chapter on
Changelings I had occasion to refer to some instances of women being
carried off at a critical time in their lives. One more such instance
may be added here. Among the Bohemians a mythical female called
Polednice is believed to be dangerous to women who have recently added
to the population; and such women are accordingly warned to keep within
doors, especially at noon and after the angelus in the evening. On one
occasion a woman, who scorned the warnings she had received, was carried
off by Polednice in the form of a whirlwind, as she sat in the
harvest-field chatting with the reapers, to whom she had brought their
dinner. Only after a year and a day was she permitted to return.[134]

In some of the German and Bohemian tales a curious incident occurs.
Beneath the Rollberg, near Niemes, in Bohemia, is a treasure-vault, the
door of which stands open for a short time every Palm Sunday. A woman
once found it open thus and entered with her child. There she saw a
number of Knights Templars sitting round a table, gambling. They did not
notice her; so she helped herself from a pile of gold lying near them,
having first set down her child. Beside the gold lay a black dog, which
barked from time to time. The woman knew that the third time it barked
the door would close; wherefore she hastened out. When she bethought
herself of the child it was too late: she had left it behind in her
haste, and the vault was closed. The following year she returned at the
hour when the door was open, and found the little one safe and sound, in
either hand a fair red apple. Frequently in these tales a beautiful lady
comes and ministers to the child during its mother's absence; at other
times, a man. The treasure of King Darius is believed to be buried
beneath the Sattelburg in Transylvania. A Wallachian woman, with her
yearling babe in her arms, once found the door open and went in. There
sat an old, long-bearded man, and about him stood chests full of silver
and gold. She asked him if she might take some of this treasure for
herself. "Oh, yes," answered he, "as much as you like." She put down the
child and filled her skirts with gold, put the gold outside and
re-entered. Having obtained permission, she filled and emptied her
skirts a second time. But when she turned to enter a third time the door
banged-to, and she was left outside. She cried out for her child, and
wept--in vain. Then she made her way to the priest and laid her case
before him. He advised her to pray daily for a whole year, and she would
then get her child again. She carried out his injunction; and the
following year she went again to the Sattelburg. The door was open, and
she found the babe still seated in the chest where she had put it down.
It was playing with a golden apple, which it held up to her, crying:
"Look, mother, look!" The mother was astonished to hear it speak, and
asked: "Whence hast thou that beautiful apple?" "From the old man, who
has given me to eat too." The man was, however, no longer to be seen;
and as the mother took her child and left the place, the door closed
behind her.[135]

But the most numerous, and assuredly the most weird and interesting, of
these stories belong to a type which we may call, after the famous
Posthumous Writing of Diedrich Knickerbocker, the "Rip van Winkle type."
Here the hero remains under the spell of the supernatural until he
passes the ordinary term of life; and he comes back to find all his
friends dead and himself nothing but a dim memory. It will be needless
here to recapitulate the tale of Rip van Winkle himself. Whether any
such legend really lingers about the Kaatskill mountains I do not know;
but I have a vehement suspicion that Washington Irving was indebted
rather to Otmar's "Traditions of the Harz," a book published at Bremen
in the year 1800. In this book the scene of the tale is laid on the
Kyffhäuser, and with the exception of such embellishments as the keen
tongue of Dame van Winkle and a few others, the incidents in the
adventures of Peter Claus the Goatherd are absolutely the same as those
of Rip van Winkle.[136]

Of all the variants of this type it is in China that we find the one
most resembling it. Wang Chih, afterwards one of the holy men of the
Taoists, wandering one day in the mountains of Kü Chow to gather
firewood, entered a grotto in which some aged men were playing at chess.
He laid down his axe and watched their game, in the course of which one
of them handed him something in size and shape like a date-stone,
telling him to put it into his mouth. No sooner had he done so than
hunger and thirst passed away. After some time had elapsed one of the
players said: "It is long since you came here; you should go home now."
Wang Chih accordingly proceeded to pick up his axe, but found that its
handle had mouldered into dust; and on reaching home he became aware
that not hours, nor days, but centuries had passed since he left it, and
that no vestige of his kinsfolk remained. Another legend tells of a
horseman who, riding over the hills, sees several old men playing a game
with rushes. He ties his horse to a tree while he looks on at them. In a
few minutes, as it seems to him, he turns to depart; but his horse is
already a skeleton, and of the saddle and bridle rotten pieces only are
left. He seeks his home; but that too is gone; and he lies down and dies
broken-hearted. A similar story is told in Japan of a man who goes into
the mountains to cut wood, and watches two mysterious ladies playing at
chess while seven generations of mortal men pass away. Both these
legends omit the supernatural food which seems to support life, not only
in the case of Wang Chih, but also in that of Peter Claus. In another
Chinese tale two friends, wandering in the T'ien-t'ai mountains, are
entertained by two beautiful girls, who feed them on a kind of
haschisch, a drug made from hemp; and when they return they find that
they have passed seven generations of ordinary men in the society of
these ladies. Another Taoist devotee was admitted for a while into the
next world, where he was fed on cakes, and, as if he were a dyspeptic,
he received much comfort from having all his digestive organs removed.
After awhile he was sent back to this world, to find himself much
younger than his youngest grandson.[137]

Feasts in Fairyland occupy an unconscionable length of time. Walter Map,
writing in the latter half of the twelfth century, relates a legend
concerning a mythical British king, Herla, who was on terms of
friendship with the king of the pigmies. The latter appeared to him one
day riding on a goat, a man such as Pan might have been described to be,
with a very large head, a fiery face, and a long red beard. A spotted
fawn-skin adorned his breast, but the lower part of his body was exposed
and shaggy, and his legs degenerated into goat's feet. This queer little
fellow declared himself very near akin to Herla, foretold that the king
of the Franks was about to send ambassadors offering his daughter as
wife to the king of the Britons, and invited himself to the wedding. He
proposed a pact between them, that when he had attended Herla's wedding,
Herla should the following year attend his. Accordingly at Herla's
wedding the pigmy king appears with a vast train of courtiers and
servants, and numbers of precious gifts. The next year he sends to bid
Herla to his own wedding. Herla goes. Penetrating a mountain cavern, he
and his followers emerge into the light, not of sun or moon, but of
innumerable torches, and reach the pigmies' dwellings, whose splendour
Map compares with Ovid's description of the palace of the sun. Having
given so charming, and doubtless so accurate, a portrait of the pigmy
king, it is a pity the courtier-like ecclesiastic has forgotten to
inform us what his bride was like. He leaves us to guess that her
attractions must have corresponded with those of her stately lord,
telling us simply that when the wedding was over, and the gifts which
Herla brought had been presented, he obtained leave to depart, and set
out for home, laden, he too, with gifts, among which are enumerated
horses, dogs, hawks, and other requisites of a handsome outfit for
hunting or fowling. Indeed, the bridegroom himself accompanied them as
far as the darkness of the cavern through which they had to pass; and at
parting he added to his presentations that of a bloodhound, so small as
to be carried, forbidding any of the train to alight anywhere until the
hound should leap from his bearer. When Herla found himself once more
within his own realm he met with an old shepherd, and inquired for
tidings of his queen by name. The shepherd looked at him astonished,
scarcely understanding his speech; for he was a Saxon, whereas Herla
was a Briton. Nor, as he told the king, had he heard of such a queen,
unless it were a queen of the former Britons, whose husband, Herla, was
said to have disappeared at yonder rock with a dwarf, and never to have
been seen again. That, however, was long ago, for it was now more than
two hundred years since the Britons had been driven out and the Saxons
had taken possession of the land. The king was stupefied, for he deemed
he had only been away three days, and could hardly keep his seat. Some
of his followers, forgetful of the pigmy king's prohibition, alighted
without waiting for the dog to lead the way, and were at once crumbled
into dust. Herla and those who were wiser took warning by the fate of
their companions. One story declared that they were wandering still; and
many persons asserted that they had often beheld the host upon its mad,
its endless journey. But Map concludes that the last time it appeared
was in the year of King Henry the Second's coronation, when it was seen
by many Welshmen to plunge into the Wye in Herefordshire.[138]

Cases in which dancing endures for a whole twelvemonth have already been
mentioned. This might be thought a moderate length of time for a ball,
even for a fairy ball; but some have been known to last longer. Two
celebrated fiddlers of Strathspey were inveigled by a venerable old man,
who ought to have known better, into a little hill near Inverness, where
they supplied the music for a brilliant assembly which lasted in fact
for a hundred years, though to them it seemed but a few hours. They
emerged into daylight again on a Sunday; and when they had learned the
real state of affairs, and recovered from their astonishment at the
miracle which had been wrought in them, they went, as was meet, to
church. They sat listening for awhile to the ringing of the bells; but
when the clergyman began to read the gospel, at the first word he
uttered they both fell into dust. This is a favourite form of the legend
in Wales as well as Scotland; but, pathetic and beautiful as the various
versions are, they present no variations of importance.[139]

Often the stranger's festive visit to Fairyland is rounded with a sleep.
We have seen this in the instance of Rip van Winkle. Another legend has
been put into literary form by Washington Irving, this time from a
Portuguese source. It relates the adventures of a noble youth who set
out to find an island in which some of the former inhabitants of the
Peninsula had taken refuge at the time of the Moorish conquest, and
where their descendants still dwelt. The island was believed to contain
seven cities; and the adventurer was appointed by the king of Portugal
Adalantado, or governor, of the Seven Cities. He reached the island, and
was received as Adalantado, was feasted, and then fell asleep. When he
came to himself again he was on board a homeward-bound vessel, having
been picked up senseless from a drifting wreck. He reached Lisbon, but
no one knew him. His ancestral mansion was occupied by others: none of
his name had dwelt in it for many a year. He hurried to his betrothed,
only to fling himself, not, as he thought, at her feet, but at the feet
of her great-granddaughter. In cases like this the supernatural lapse of
time may be conceived as taking place during the enchanted sleep, rather
than during the festivities. According to a Coptic Christian romance,
Abimelek, the youthful favourite of King Zedekiah, preserved the prophet
Jeremiah's life when he was thrown into prison, and afterwards persuaded
his master to give him charge of the prophet, and to permit him to
release him from the dungeon. In reward, Jeremiah promised him that he
should never see the destruction of Jerusalem, nor experience the
Babylonish captivity, and yet that he should not die. The sun should
take care of him, the atmosphere nourish him; the earth on which he
slept should give him repose, and he should taste of joy for seventy
years until he should again see Jerusalem in its glory, flourishing as
before. Accordingly, going out one day, as his custom was, into the
royal garden to gather grapes and figs, God caused him to rest and fall
asleep beneath the shadow of a rock. There he lay peacefully slumbering
while the city was besieged by Nebuchadnezzar, and during the horrors of
its capture and the whole of the seventy sad years that followed. When
he awoke, it was to meet the prophet Jeremiah returning from the
captivity, and he entered the restored city with him in triumph. But the
seventy years had seemed to him but a few hours; nor had he known
anything of what passed while he slumbered. Mohammed in the Koran
mentions a story referred by the commentators to Ezra. He is represented
as passing by a village (said to mean Jerusalem) when it was desolate,
and saying: "How will God revive this after its death?" And God made him
die for a hundred years. Then He raised him and asked: "How long hast
thou tarried?" Said the man: "I have tarried a day, or some part of a
day." But God said: "Nay, thou hast tarried a hundred years. Look at thy
food and drink, they are not spoiled; and look at thine ass; for we will
make thee a sign to men. And look at the bones, how we scatter them and
then clothe them with flesh." And when it was made manifest to him, he
said: "I know that God is mighty over all."[140]

Mohammed probably was unconscious that this is to all intents and
purposes the same story as that of the Seven Sleepers, to which he
refers in the chapter on the Cave. Some of the phrases he uses are,
indeed, identical. As usually told, this legend speaks of seven youths
of Ephesus who had fled from the persecutions of the heathen emperor
Decius, and taken refuge in a cave, where they slept for upwards of
three hundred years. In Mohammed's time, however, it should be noted,
the number of the sleepers was undetermined; they were credited with a
dog who slept with them, like Ezra's ass; and Mohammed's notion of the
time they slept was only one hundred years. One of the wild tribes on
the northern frontier of Afghanistan is said to tell the following story
concerning a cavern in the Hirak Valley, known as the cave of the Seven
Sleepers. A king bearing the suspicious name of Dakianus, deceived by
the devil, set himself up as a god. Six of his servants, however, having
reason to think that his claim was unfounded, fled from him and fell in
with a shepherd, who agreed to throw in his lot with theirs and to guide
them to a cavern where they might all hide. The shepherd's dog followed
his master; but the six fugitives insisted on his being driven back lest
he should betray their whereabouts. The shepherd begged that he might go
with them, as he had been his faithful companion for years; but in vain.
So he struck the dog with his stick, breaking one of his legs. The dog
still followed; and the shepherd repeated the blow, breaking a second
leg. Finding that the dog continued to crawl after them notwithstanding
this, the men were struck with pity and took it in turns to carry the
poor animal. Arrived at the cave, they all lay down and slept for three
hundred and nine years. Assuming the genuineness of the tradition, which
perhaps rests on no very good authority, its form is obviously due to
Mohammedan influence. But the belief in this miraculous sleep is
traceable beyond Christian and Mohammedan legends into the Paganism of
classical antiquity. Pliny, writing in the first century of our era,
alludes to a story told of the Cretan poet Epimenides, who, when a boy,
fell asleep in a cave, and continued in that state for fifty-seven
years. On waking he was greatly surprised at the change in the
appearance of everything around him, as he thought he had only slept for
a few hours; and though he did not, as in the Welsh and Scottish tales,
fall into dust, still old age came upon him in as many days as the years
he had passed in slumber.[141]

Nor is it only in dancing, feasting, or sleeping that the time passes
quickly with supernatural folk. A shepherd at the foot of the Blanik,
who missed one of his flock, followed it into a cavern, whence he could
not return because the mountain closed upon him with a crash. A dwarf
came and led him into a large hall. There he saw King Wenzel sleeping
with his knights. The king awoke, and bade him stay and clean the
armour. One day--perhaps the criticism would be too carping which
inquired how he knew the day from the night--he received permission to
go, and a bag which he was told contained his reward. When he reached
the light of day, he opened the bag and found it filled with oats. In
the village all was changed, for he had been a hundred years in the
mountain, and nobody knew him. He succeeded in getting a lodging, and on
again opening his bag, lo! all the grains of oats had turned to gold
pieces and thalers, so that he was able to buy a fine house, and
speedily became the richest man in the place. This was a pleasanter fate
than that of the Tirolese peasant who followed his herd under a stone,
where they had all disappeared. He presently came into a lovely garden;
and there a lady came, and, inviting him to eat, offered to take him as
gardener. He readily assented; but after some weeks he began to be
homesick, and, taking leave of his mistress, went home. On arriving
there he was astounded that he knew no one, and no one knew him, save an
old crone, who at length came to him and said: "Where have you been? I
have been looking for you for two hundred years." Thus saying, she took
him by the hand and he fell dead; for the crone who had sought him so
long was Death.[142]

Save in the legends that tell of a mother leaving her child in the
mountain from her eagerness to gather treasure, we have encountered but
few instances of women being beguiled. They are, indeed, not so numerous
as those where the sterner sex is thus overcome; nor need we be detained
by most of them. A Danish tradition, however, runs that a bride, during
the dancing and festivities of her wedding-day, left the room and
thoughtlessly walked towards a mound where the elves were also making
merry. The hillock was standing, as is usual on such occasions, on red
pillars; and as she drew near, one of the company offered her a cup of
wine. She drank, and then suffered herself to join in a dance. When the
dance was over she hastened home. But alas! house, farm, everything was
changed. The noise and mirth of the wedding was stilled. No one knew
her; but at length, on hearing her lamentation, an old woman exclaimed:
"Was it you, then, who disappeared at my grandfather's brother's
wedding, a hundred years ago?" At these words the aged bride fell down
and expired. A prettier, if not a more pathetic, story is widely current
on the banks of the Rhine. A maiden who bore an excellent character for
piety and goodness was about to be married. She was fond of roses; and
on the wedding morning she stepped into the garden to gather a small
bunch. There she met a man whom she did not know. He admired two lovely
blossoms which she had, but said he had many finer in his garden: would
she not go with him? "I cannot," she said; "I must go to the church: it
is high time." "It is not far," urged the stranger. The maiden allowed
herself to be persuaded; and the man showed her beautiful, beautiful
flowers--finer she had never seen--and gave her a wonderful rose of
which she was very proud. Then she hastened back, lest she should be too
late. When she mounted the steps of the house she could not understand
what had happened to her. Children whom she knew not were playing there:
people whom she did not recognize were within. And every one ran away
from her, frightened to see a strange woman in an antiquated
wedding-dress stand there bitterly weeping. She had but just left her
bridegroom to go for a moment into the garden, and in so short a time
guests and bridegroom had all vanished. She asked after her bridegroom,
and nobody knew him. At last she told her story to the folk around her.
A man said he had bought the house, and knew nothing at all of her
bridegroom or her parents. They took her to the parish priest. He
reached his church-books down, and there he found recorded that almost
two hundred years before, a certain bride on the wedding-day had
disappeared from her father's house. Burdened thus with two centuries of
life, she lingered on a few lonely years, and then sank into the grave;
and the good, simple villagers whisper that the strange gardener was no
other than the Lord Jesus, who thus provided for His humble child an
escape from a union which would have been the source of bitterest woe.
After this it is almost an anti-climax to refer to a Scottish tale in
which a bridegroom was similarly spirited away. As he was leaving the
church after the ceremony, a tall dark man met him and asked him to come
round to the back of the church, for he wanted to speak to him. When he
complied, the dark man asked him to be good enough to stand there until
a small piece of candle he held in his hand should burn out. He
good-humouredly complied. The candle took, as he thought, less than two
minutes to burn; and he then rushed off to overtake his friends. On his
way he saw a man cutting turf, and asked if it were long since the
wedding party had passed. The man replied that he did not know that any
wedding party had passed that way to-day, or for a long time. "Oh, there
was a marriage to-day," said the other, "and I am the bridegroom. I was
asked by a man to go with him to the back of the church, and I went. I
am now running to overtake the party." The turf-cutter, feeling that
this could not be, asked him what date he supposed that day was. The
bridegroom's answer was in fact two hundred years short of the real
date: he had passed two centuries in those two minutes which the bit of
candle took, as he thought, to burn. "I remember," said he who cut the
turf, "that my grandfather used to tell something of such a
disappearance of a bridegroom, a story which his grandfather told him as
a fact which happened when he was young." "Ah, well then, I am the
bridegroom," sighed the unfortunate man, and fell away as he stood,
until nothing remained but a small heap of earth.[143]

Every reader of Longfellow loves the story of the Monk Felix, so
exquisitely told in "The Golden Legend." Its immediate source I do not
know; but it is certain that the tradition is a genuine one, and has
obtained a local habitation in many parts of Europe. Southey relates it
as attached to the Spanish convent of San Salvador de Villar, where the
tomb of the Abbot to whom the adventure happened was shown. And he is
very severe on "the dishonest monks who, for the honour of their convent
and the lucre of gain, palmed this lay (for such in its origin it was)
upon their neighbours as a true legend." In Wales, the ruined monastery
at Clynnog-Fawr, on the coast of Carnarvonshire, founded by St. Beuno,
the uncle of the more famous St. Winifred, has been celebrated by a
Welsh antiquary as the scene of the same event, in memory whereof a
woodland patch near Clynnog is said to be called Llwyn-y-Nef, the Grove
of Heaven. At Pantshonshenkin, in Carmarthenshire, a youth went out
early one summer's morning and was lost. An old woman, Catti Madlen,
prophesied of him that he was in the fairies' power and would not be
released until the last sap of a certain sycamore tree had dried up.
When that time came he returned. He had been listening all the while to
the singing of a bird, and supposed only a few minutes had elapsed,
though, seventy years had in fact gone over his head. In the Mabinogi of
Branwen, daughter of Llyr, Pryderi and his companions, while bearing the
head of Bran the Blessed, to bury it in the White Mount in London, were
entertained seven years at Harlech, feasting and listening to the
singing of the three birds of Rhiannon--a mythical figure in whom
Professor Rhys can hardly be wrong in seeing an old Celtic goddess. In
Germany and the Netherlands the story is widely spread. At the abbey of
Afflighem, Fulgentius, who was abbot towards the close of the eleventh
century, received the announcement one day that a stranger monk had
knocked at the gate and claimed to be one of the brethren of that
cloister. His story was that he had sung matins that morning with the
rest of the brotherhood; and when they came to the verse of the 90th
Psalm where it is said: "A thousand years in Thy sight are but as
yesterday," he had fallen into deep meditation, and continued sitting in
the choir when the others had departed, and that a little bird had then
appeared to him and sung so sweetly that he had followed it into the
forest, whence, after a short stay, he had now returned, but found the
abbey so changed that he hardly knew it. On questioning him about his
abbot and the name of the king whom he supposed to be still reigning,
Fulgentius found that both had been dead for three hundred years. The
same tale is told of other monasteries. In Transylvania it is told
concerning a student of the school at Kronstadt that he was to preach on
the fifteenth Sunday after Trinity in St. John's Church, now known as
the Church of the Franciscans, and on the Saturday previous he walked
out on the Kapellenberg to rehearse his sermon. After he had learned it
he saw a beautiful bird, and tried to catch it. It led him on and on
into a cavern, where he met a dwarf, who showed the astonished and
curious student all the wealth of gold and jewels stored up in the
vaults of the mountain. When he escaped again to the upper air the trees
and the houses were altered; other and unknown faces greeted him at the
school; his own room was changed--taken by another; a different rector
ruled; and in short a hundred years had elapsed since he had gone forth
to study his sermon for the next day. The old record-book, bound in
pigskin, reposed on the rector's shelves. He took it down: it contained
an entry of the student's having quitted the school and not returned,
and of the difficulty caused thereby at St. John's Church, where he was
to have preached the following day. By the time the entry was found and
the mystery solved, it was noon. The student was hungry with his
hundred-years' fast; and he sat down with the others at the common table
to dine. But he had no sooner tasted the first spoonful of soup than his
whole frame underwent a change. From a ruddy youth he became an old man
in the last stage of decrepitude. His comrades scarce had time to hurry
him upon a bed ere he breathed his last. Some pretty verses, attributed
to Alaric A. Watts, commemorate a similar incident, said to have
happened to two sisters who were nuns at Beverley Minister. They
disappeared one evening after vespers. After some months they were found
in a trance in the north tower. On being aroused they declared they had
been admitted into Paradise, whither they would return before morning.
They died in the night; and the beautiful monument called the Sisters'
Shrine still witnesses to the truth of their story.[144]

From monastic meditations we may pass without any long interval to a
type of the story that perhaps appears at its best in M. Luzel's
charming collection of distinctively Christian traditions of Lower
Brittany. In this type we are given the adventures of a youth who
undertakes to carry a letter to "_Monsieur le Bon Dieu_" in Paradise.
Proceeding by the directions of a hermit, he is guided by a ball to the
hermit's brother, who points out the road and describes the various
difficulties through which he will have to pass. Accordingly he climbs
the mountain before him; and the path then leads him across an arid
meadow filled with fat cattle, and next over a lush pasture tenanted
only by lean and sickly kine. Having left this behind he enters an
avenue where, under the trees, youths and damsels richly clad are
feasting and making merry; and they tempt the traveller to join them.
The path then becomes narrow and steep, and encumbered with brambles and
nettles and stones. Here he meets a rolling fire, but standing firm in
the middle of the path, the fire passes harmlessly over his head. Hardly
has it gone by, however, when he hears a terrible roar behind him, as
though the sea in all its fury were at his heels ready to engulf him. He
resolutely refuses to look back; and the noise subsides. A thick hedge
of thorns closes the way before him; but he pushes through it, only to
fall into a ditch filled with nettles and brambles on the other side,
where he faints with loss of blood. When he recovers and scrambles out
of the ditch, he reaches a place filled with the sweet perfume of
flowers, with butterflies, and with the melody of birds. A clear river
waters this beautiful land; and there he sits upon a stone and bathes
his cruelly torn feet. No wonder he falls asleep and dreams that he is
already in Paradise. Awaking, he finds his strength restored, and his
wounds healed. Before him is Mount Calvary, the Saviour still upon the
cross, and the blood yet running from His body. A crowd of little
children are trying to climb the mountain; but ere they reach the top
they roll down again continually to the foot, only to recommence the
toil. They crowd round the traveller, and beseech him to take them with
him; and he takes three, one on each shoulder and one by the hand; but
with them he cannot get to the top, for he is hurled back again and
again. Leaving them therefore behind, he climbs with ease, and throws
himself at the foot of the cross to pray and weep. On rising, he sees
before him a palace that proves to be Paradise itself. St. Peter, the
celestial porter, receives his letter and carries it to its destination.
While the youth waits, he finds St. Peter's spectacles on the table and
amuses himself by trying them on. Many and marvellous are the things
they reveal to him; but the porter comes back, and he hastily takes off
the glasses, fearing to be scolded. St. Peter, however, tells him: "Fear
nothing, my child. You have already been looking through my glasses for
five hundred years!" "But I have only just put them on my nose!" "Yes,
my child," returned the door-keeper, "it is five hundred years, and I
see you find the time short." After this it is a trifle that he spends
another hundred years looking at the seat reserved for himself in
Paradise and thinks them only a moment. The Eternal Father's reply to
the letter is handed to him; and since his master and the king who sent
him on the errand have both long been dead and in Paradise (though on
lower seats than that which he is to occupy), he is bidden to take the
reply to his parish prices [TN: priests]. The priest will in return hand
him a hundred crowns, which he is to give to the poor, and when the
last penny has been distributed he will die and enter Paradise, to
obtain the seat he has been allowed to see. As he makes his way back,
one of the hermits explains to him the various sights he beheld and the
difficulties he conquered during his outward journey. I shall not stop
to unveil the allegories of this traditional Pilgrim's Progress, which
is known from Brittany to Transylvania, from Iceland to Sicily. Other
Breton tales exist, describing a similar journey, in all of which the
miraculous lapse of time is an incident. In one the youth is sent to the
sun to inquire why it is red in the morning when it rises. In another a
maiden is married to a mysterious stranger, who turns out to be Death.
Her brother goes to visit her, and is allowed to accompany her husband
on his daily flight, in the course of which he sees a number of
remarkable sights, each one of them a parable.[145]

A story is told at Glienke, near New Brandenburg, of two friends who
made mutual promises to attend one another's weddings. One was married,
and his friend kept his word; but before the latter's turn to marry came
the married man had fallen into want, and under the pressure of need had
committed robbery, a crime for which he had been hanged. Shortly
afterwards his friend was about to be married; and his way a few days
before, in the transaction of his business, led him past the gallows
where the body still swung. As he drew near he murmured a Paternoster
for the dead man, and said: "At your wedding I enjoyed myself; and you
promised me to come to mine, and now you cannot come!" A voice from the
gallows distinctly replied: "Yes, I will come." To the wedding feast
accordingly the dead man came, with the rope round his neck, and was
placed between the pastor and the sacristan. He ate and drank in
silence, and departed. As he left, he beckoned the bridegroom to follow
him; and when they got outside the village the hanged man said: "Thanks
to your Paternoster, I am saved." They walked a little further, and the
bridegroom noticed that the country was unknown to him. They were in a
large and beautiful garden. "Will you not return?" asked the dead man;
"they will miss you." "Oh! let me stay; it is so lovely here," replied
his friend. "Know that we are in Paradise; you cannot go with me any
further. Farewell!" So saying the dead man vanished. Then the bridegroom
turned back; but he did not reach the village for three days. There all
was changed. He asked after his bride: no one knew her. He sought the
pastor and found a stranger. When he told his tale the pastor searched
the church-books and discovered that a man of his name had been married
one hundred and fifty years before. The bridegroom asked for food; but
when he had eaten it he sank into a heap of ashes at the pastor's feet.
The Transylvanian legend of "The Gravedigger in Heaven" also turns upon
an invitation thoughtlessly given to a dead man and accepted. The
entertainment is followed by a counter-invitation; and the gravedigger
is forced to pay a return visit. He is taken to Heaven, where, among
other things, he sees at intervals three leaves fall slowly one after
another from off a large tree in the garden. The tree is the Tree of
Life, from which a leaf falls at the end of every century. He was three
hundred years in Heaven and thought it scarce an hour. The Icelandic
version concerns a wicked priest. His unjust ways are reproved by a
stranger who takes him to the place of joy and the place of torment, and
shows him other wonderful things such as the youth in the Breton tale is
permitted to behold. When he is brought back, and the stranger leaves
him, he finds that he has been absent seven years, and his living is now
held by another priest.[146]

Here, perhaps, is a fitting place to mention the Happy Islands of
Everlasting Life as known to Japanese tradition, though the story can
hardly be said to belong to the type we have just discussed,--perhaps
not strictly to any of the foregoing types. A Japanese hero, the wise
Vasobiove, it was who succeeded in reaching the Happy Islands, and in
returning to bring sure tidings of them. For, like St. Brendan's Isle in
western lore, these islands may be visible for a moment and afar off to
the seafarer, but a mortal foot has hardly ever trodden them. Vasobiove,
however, in his boat alone, set sail from Nagasaki, and, in spite of
wind and waves, landed on the green shore of Horaisan. Two hundred years
he sojourned there; yet wist he not how long the period was, there where
everything remained the same, where there was neither birth nor death,
where none heeded the flight of time. With dance and music, in
intercourse with wise men and lovely women, his days passed away. But at
length he grew weary of this sweet round of existence: he longed for
death--an impossible wish in a land where death was unknown. No poison,
no deadly weapons were to be found. To tumble down a chasm, or to fling
oneself on sharp rocks was no more than a fall upon a soft cushion. If
he would drown himself in the sea, the water refused its office, and
bore him like a cork. Weary to death the poor Vasobiove could find no
help. In this need a thought struck him: he caught and tamed a giant
stork and taught him to carry him. On the back of this bird he returned
over sea and land to his beloved Japan, bringing the news of the realm
of Horaisan. His story took hold of the hearts of his fellow-countrymen;
and that the story-tellers might never forget it, it has been
emblazoned by the painters in a thousand ways. Nor can the stranger go
anywhere in Japan without seeing the old, old man depicted on his stork
and being reminded of his voyage to the Happy Islands.[147]


FOOTNOTES:

[123] Croker, vol. iii. p. 215. This tale is given by Sikes, p. 70, of
course without any acknowledgment. It is also found in Keightley, p.
415.

[124] "Y Cymmrodor," vol. vi. pp. 174, 157, 196, 187.

[125] Howells, pp. 141, 145; Sikes, p. 73. I have not been able to trace
Mr. Sikes' authority for the last story; but his experience and skill in
borrowing from other books are so much greater than in oral collection
that it is probably from some literary source, though no doubt many of
the embellishments are his own. The foundation, however, appears to be
traditional.

[126] Campbell, vol. ii. pp. 63, 55.

[127] "F. L. Journal," vol. vi. p. 191. (This story was told to the
present writer and Mr. G. L. Gomme by Alderman Howel Walters, of
Ystradgynlais, who had it from an old man who knew the hero well and
gave implicit credit to the narrative.) "Trans. Aberd. Eistedd." p. 227;
"F. L. Journal," vol. vi. p. 183. A similar tale is referred to in
Jones' "Account of the Parish of Aberystruth," 1779, quoted in "Choice
Notes," p. 157.

[128] "Cymru Fu," p. 177 (a translation is given by Professor Rhys in "Y
Cymmrodor," vol. v. p. 81); Croker, vol. iii. p. 208.

[129] Radloff, vol. i. p. 95, vol. iv. p. 109; Sébillot, "Contes," vol.
ii. p. 8; Grimm, "Tales," vol. i. p. 162.

[130] Jahn, p. 199; Grohmann, pp. 19, 20, 18.

[131] Kuhn und Schwartz, pp. 220, 222.

[132] Rappold, p. 34.

[133] "Archivio," vol. vi. p. 398.

[134] "F. L. Journal," vol. vi. p. 33; "Archivio," vol. ix. p. 233
Grohmann, p. 112.

[135] Grohmann, pp. 29, 289, 296, 298; Müller, p. 83.

[136] See Thorpe's translation of the story, "Yule Tide Stories," p.
475.

[137] Dennys, p. 98; Giles, vol. ii. pp. 89 note, 85; Brauns, p. 366.

[138] Map, Dist. i. c. 11. But see below, p. 234.

[139] Croker, vol. iii. p. 17; Howells, p. 123; "Y Cymmrodor," vol. iv.
p. 196, vol. v. pp. 108, 113.

[140] "Wolfert's Roost, and other Sketches," by Washington Irving
(London, 1855) p. 225; Amélineau, vol. ii. p. 111; Koran, c. 2 ("Sacred
Books of the East," vol. vi. p. 41); "Masnavi i Ma'navi," p. 214.

[141] Koran, c. 18 ("Sacred Books of the East," vol. ix. p. 14); "Indian
N. and Q." vol. iv. p. 8, quoting the "Pall Mall Gazette" (The story of
the Seven Sleepers is also localized at N'gaous in Algeria; Certeux et
Carnoy, vol. i. p. 63.) Pliny, "Nat. Hist." l. vii. c. 33.

[142] Grohmann, p. 16; Schneller, p. 217.

[143] Thorpe, vol. ii. p. 138; Birlinger, "Volkst." vol. i. p. 257
(_cf._ Bartsch, vol. i, p. 326, where there is no wedding, and curiosity
is the lady's motive for venturing into the fairy cavern); "Celtic Mag."
Oct. 1887, p. 566.

[144] Southey, "Doctor," p. 574; "Y Brython," vol. iii. p. 111, and
Cymru Fu, p. 183; Howells, p. 127; "Y Llyvyr Coch," p. 40 (Lady
Charlotte Guest's translation, p. 381); Thorpe, vol. iii. p. 297,
quoting Wolf; Müller, p. 50 (_cf._ Jahn, p. 96). The reader will not
fail to remark the record-book bound in pigskin as a resemblance in
detail to Longfellow's version. Thorpe alludes in a note to a German
poem by Wegener, which I have not seen. Nicholson, p. 58.

[145] Luzel, "Légendes Chrét." vol. i. pp. 225, 216, 247, 249; "Contes,"
vol. i. pp. 14, 40; _cf._ Pitré, vol. vi. p. 1; and Gonzenbach, vol. ii.
p. 171, in neither of which the lapse of time is an incident. Dr. Pitré
says that the tale has no analogues (_riscontri_) outside Sicily; by
which I understand him to mean that it has not been hitherto found in
any other Italian-speaking land.

[146] Bartsch, vol. i. p. 282; Müller, p. 46; Powell and Magnusson, vol.
ii. p. 37.

[147] Brauns, p. 146.




CHAPTER VIII.

THE SUPERNATURAL LAPSE OF TIME IN FAIRYLAND

(_continued_).

     Ossian in the Tir na n'Og--The Island of Happiness--The
     Mermaid--Thomas of Erceldoune--Olger the Dane--The Sleeping
     Hero--King Arthur--Don Sebastian--The expected deliverer--British
     variants--German variants--Frederick Barbarossa--Nameless
     heroes--Slavonic variants.


The stories we have hitherto considered, relating to the supernatural
lapse of time in fairyland, have attributed the mortal's detention there
to various motives. Compulsion on the part of the superhuman powers, and
pleasure, curiosity, greed, sheer folly, as also the performance of just
and willing service on the part of the mortal, have been among the
causes of his entrance thither and his sojourn amid its enchantments.
Human nature could hardly have been what it is if the supreme passion of
love had been absent from the list. Nor is it wanting, though not found
in the same plenteous measure that will meet us when we come to deal
with the Swan-maiden myth--that is to say, with the group of stories
concerning the capture by men of maidens of superhuman birth.

We may take as typical the story of Oisin, or Ossian, as told in
Ireland. In County Clare it is said that once when he was in the full
vigour of youth Oisin lay down under a tree to rest and fell asleep.
Awaking with a start, he saw a lady richly clad, and of more than mortal
beauty, gazing on him. She was the Queen of Tir na n'Og, the Country of
Perpetual Youth. She had fallen in love with Oisin, as the strange
Italian lady is said to have done with a poet of whose existence we are
somewhat better assured than of Oisin's; and she invited him to
accompany her to her own realm and share her throne. Oisin was not long
in making up his mind, and all the delights of Tir na n'Og were laid at
his feet. In one part of the palace garden, however, was a broad flat
stone, on which he was forbidden to stand, under penalty of the heaviest
misfortune. Probably, as is usual in these cases, if he had not been
forbidden, he would never have thought of standing on it. But one day
finding himself near it, the temptation to transgress was irresistible.
He yielded, and stepping on the stone he found himself in full view of
his native land, the very existence of which he had forgotten till that
moment. Even in the short space of time since he left it much had
changed: it was suffering from oppression and violence. Overcome with
grief, he hastened to the queen and prayed for leave to go back, that he
might help his people. The queen tried to dissuade him, but in vain. She
asked him how long he supposed he had been absent. Oisin told her:
"Thrice seven days." She replied that three times thrice seven years had
passed since he arrived in Tir na n'Og; and though Time could not enter
that land, it would immediately assert its dominion over him if he left
it. At length she persuaded him to promise that he would return to his
country for one day only, and then come back to dwell with her for ever.
She accordingly gave him a beautiful jet-black horse, from whose back he
was on no account to alight, or at all events not to allow the bridle to
fall from his hand; and in parting she gifted him with wisdom and
knowledge far surpassing that of men. Mounting the steed, he soon found
himself near his former home; and as he journeyed he met a man driving a
horse, across whose back was thrown a sack of corn. The sack had fallen
a little aside; and the man asked Oisin to assist him in balancing it
properly. Oisin, good-naturedly stooping, caught it and gave it such a
heave that it fell over on the other side. Annoyed at his ill-success,
he forgot his bride's commands, and sprang from the horse to lift the
sack from the ground, letting go the bridle at the same time. Forthwith
the steed vanished; and Oisin instantly became a blind, feeble, helpless
old man--everything lost but the wisdom and knowledge bestowed upon him
by his immortal bride.[148]

A variant adds some particulars, from which it appears that Oisin was
not only husband of the queen, but also rightful monarch of Tir na n'Og.
For in that land was a strange custom. The office of king was the prize
of a race every seven years. Oisin's predecessor had consulted a Druid
as to the length of his own tenure, and had been told that he might keep
the crown for ever unless his son-in-law took it from him. Now the
king's only daughter was the finest woman in Tir na n'Og, or indeed in
the world; and the king naturally thought that if he could so deform his
daughter that no one would wed her he would be safe. So he struck her
with a rod of Druidic spells, which turned her head into a pig's head.
This she was condemned to wear until she could marry one of Fin Mac
Cumhail's sons in Erin. The young lady, therefore, went in search of Fin
Mac Cumhail's sons; and having chosen Oisin she found an opportunity to
tell him her tale, with the result that he wedded her without delay. The
same moment her deformity was gone, and her beauty as perfect as before
she was enchanted. Oisin returned to Tir na n'Og with her; and on the
first race for the crown he won so easily that no man ever cared to
dispute it with him afterwards. So he reigned for many a year, until one
day the longing seized him to go to Erin and see his father and his men.
His wife told him that if he set foot in Erin he would never come back
to her, and he would become a blind old man; and she asked him how long
he thought it was since he came to Tir na n'Og. "About three years," he
replied. "It is three hundred years," she said. However, if he must go
she would give him a white steed to bear him; but if he dismounted, or
touched the soil of Erin with his foot, the steed would return that
instant, and he would be left a poor old man. This inevitable
catastrophe occurred in his eagerness to blow the great horn of the
Fenians, in order to summon his friends around him. His subsequent
adventures with Saint Patrick, interesting though they are, are
unimportant for our present purpose.[149]

Perhaps the nearest analogue to this is the Italian Swan-maiden
_märchen_, of the Island of Happiness. There a youth sets out to seek
Fortune, and finds her in the shape of a maiden bathing, whose clothes
he steals, obtaining possession thereby of her book of command, and so
compelling her to wed him. But in his absence his mother gives her the
book again, which enables her to return to her home in the Island of
Happiness. Thither her husband goes to seek her, and after a variety of
adventures he is reunited to her. All goes smoothly until he desires to
visit his mother, supposing that he had only been in the island for two
months, whereas in fact he has been there two hundred years. Fortune,
finding he was bent on going, was more prudent than the queen of Tir na
n'Og, for she went with him on the magic horse. In their way they met
with a lean woman who had worn out a carriage-load of shoes in
travelling. She feigned to fall to the ground to see if Fortune's
husband would lift her up. But Fortune cried out to him: "Beware! that
is Death!" A little further on they met a devil in the guise of a great
lord riding a horse whose legs were worn out with much running. He also
fell from his horse. This was another trap for Fortune's husband; but
again she cried out to him: "Beware!" Then, having reached his own
neighbourhood and satisfied himself that no one knew him, and that none
even of the oldest remembered his mother, he allowed his wife to lead
him back to the Island of Happiness, where he still dwells with
her.[150]

In an Annamite saga a certain king wished to build a town on a site he
had fixed upon. All at once a tree bearing an unknown foliage and
strange flowers sprang up on the spot. It was determined to offer these
flowers to the king; and sentinels were placed to see that no one
plucked the blossoms. A rock still pointed out in the north of Annam was
the home of a race of genii. A young and lovely maiden belonging to that
race visited the tree, and was unlucky enough to touch one of the
flowers and to cause it to drop. She was at once seized by the guards,
but was released at the intercession of a certain mandarin. The
mandarin's heart was susceptible: he fell in love with her, and,
pursuing her, he was admitted into the abodes of the Immortals and
received by the maiden of his dreams. His happiness continued until the
day when it was his lady's turn to be in attendance on the queen of the
Immortals. Ere she left him she warned him against opening the back door
of the palace where they dwelt, otherwise he would be compelled to
return home, and his present abode would be forbidden to him from that
moment. He disobeyed her. On opening the door he beheld once more the
outside world, and his family came to his remembrance. The Immortals
who were within earshot drove him out, and forbade him to return. He
thought he had only been there a few days, but he could no longer find
his relatives. No one knew the name he asked for. At last an old man
said: "There existed once, under the reign of I do not now remember what
sovereign, an old mandarin of the name, but you would have some
difficulty in finding him, for he has been dead three or four hundred
years." An Esthonian tale represents a mermaid, the daughter of the
Water-Mother, as falling in love with a loutish boy, the youngest son of
a peasant, and taking him down to dwell with her as her husband in her
palace beneath the waves. The form in which she appeared to him was a
woman's; but she passed her Thursdays in seclusion, which she forbade
him to break, enjoining him, moreover, never to call her Mermaid. After
little more than a year, however, he grew curious and jealous, and
yielded to the temptation of peeping through the curtain of her chamber,
where he beheld her swimming about, half woman and half fish. He had
broken the condition of his happiness, and might no longer stay with
her. Wherefore he was cast up again on the shore where he had first met
the mermaid. Rising and going into the village he inquired for his
parents, but found that they had been dead for more than thirty years,
and that his brothers were dead too. He himself was unconsciously
changed into an old man. For a few days he wandered about the shore, and
the charitable gave him bread. He ventured to tell his history to one
kind friend; but the same night he disappeared, and in a few days the
waves cast up his body on the beach.[151]

The foregoing tales all combine with the characteristics of the group
under discussion, either those of the Swan-maiden group or those of the
Forbidden Chamber group. In the myth of the Swan-maidens, as in some
types of the myth of the Forbidden Chamber, the human hero weds a
supernatural bride; and a story containing such an incident seems to
have a tendency to unite itself to one or other of these two groups.
This tendency is not, however, always developed. The two ladies in the
Chinese legend, cited in the last chapter, were neither Swan-maidens nor
female Bluebeards; and this is not the only tale from the Flowery Land
in which these superhuman beauties appear without promoting the
development in question. Nor do I find any hint of it in the tradition
of Bran Mac Fearbhall, King of Ireland, who was one day lulled asleep by
a strain of fairy music. On awaking he found the silver branch of a tree
by his side; and a strange lady appeared at his court and invited him to
a land of happiness. He handed her the silver branch; and the next
morning with a company of thirty persons he sailed out on the ocean. In
a few days they landed on an island inhabited only by women, of whom the
strange lady appeared to be the chieftainess. Here Bran Mac Fearbhall
remained several ages before returning to his own palace near Lough
Foyle. An Arab tale in the Bibliothèque Nationale at Paris shows us a
king's son who in his wanderings lands on a strange island, where he
marries the king's daughter and becomes his father-in-law's vizier. The
country was watered by a river which flowed at certain seasons from a
great mountain. Every year it was the vizier's duty to enter the cavern,
having first received instructions from the king and a mysterious gift.
At the end of an hour he reappeared, followed by the stream, which
continued to flow during the time needful for the fertilization of the
country. When the prince as vizier entered the cavern he found a negro,
who led him to his mistress, the queen of a people of Amazons. In her
hands was the management of the river; and she had caused the
periodical drought in order to exact a tribute of date-stones which she
had to pass on to an Ifrit, to purchase his forbearance towards her own
subjects. The prince ingratiates himself with her: she suppresses the
periodical droughts and marries him. After two centuries of wedded life
she dies, leaving him ten daughters, whom he takes back, together with
considerable wealth, to the city formerly governed by his father-in-law,
and now by his great-great-grandson. The latter was a hundred years old,
and venerable by the side of his great-great-grandfather, over whose
head the years had passed in that enchanted realm without effect. He
made himself known to his descendant and stayed ten years with him; but
whether he succeeded in marrying off any of his daughters, of ages so
very uncertain, the abstract of the story I have before me does not say.
At last he returned to his native land, and reigned there for a long
time.[152]

In the hero of the Island of Happiness we found just now one who, having
returned to earth for a season, had been taken back again by his
supernatural spouse to a more lasting enjoyment. But he is not alone in
his good fortune. Thomas of Erceldoune, a personage less shadowy than
some of those commemorated in this chapter, is known to have lived in
the thirteenth century. His reputation for prophetic powers has been
wide and lasting. These powers were said to be, like Oisin's, a gift
from the Fairy Queen. She met him under the Eildon Tree, which stood on
the easternmost of the three Eildon Hills. Having got him into her
power, she took him down with her into Fairyland, where he abode, as he
deemed, for three days, but in reality for three years. At the end of
that time the lady carries him back to Eildon Tree and bids him
farewell. He asks her for some token whereby he may say that he had been
with her; and she bestows on him a prophetic tongue that cannot lie,
and leaves him with a promise to meet him again on Huntley Banks. Here
both the old ballads and the older romance desert us; but if we may
trust Sir Walter Scott's report of the tradition current in the
neighbourhood, Thomas was under an obligation to return to Fairyland
whenever he was summoned. "Accordingly, while Thomas was making merry
with his friends in the tower of Ercildoune, a person came running in,
and told, with marks of fear and astonishment, that a hart and hind had
left the neighbouring forest, and were, composedly and slowly, parading
the street of the village. The prophet instantly arose, left his
habitation, and followed the wonderful animals to the forest, whence he
was never seen to return. According to the popular belief, he still
'drees his weird' in Fairyland, and is one day expected to revisit
earth. In the meanwhile his memory is held in the most profound
respect."[153]

In the romance of Ogier, or Olger, the Dane, one of the Paladins of
Charlemagne, it is related that six fairies presided at his birth and
bestowed various gifts upon him. Morgan the Fay, the last of the six,
promised that after a long and glorious career he should never die, but
dwell with her in her castle of Avalon. Wherefore, after he had lived
and fought and loved for more than a hundred years, Morgan caused him to
be shipwrecked. All men thought he had perished. In reality Morgan had
taken this means of bringing him to Avalon, where she met him and put a
ring on his finger, which restored him to youth, and a golden crown of
myrtle and laurel on his brow--the crown of forgetfulness. His toils,
his battles, even his loves were forgotten; and his heart was filled
with a new devotion, namely, for the fairy queen Morgan. With her he
dwelt in pleasures ever new for two hundred years, until there came a
day when France and Christendom fell into trouble and danger, and the
peoples cried out for a deliverer. Morgan heard them, and resolved that
Olger must go to fight for them. She lifted the crown from his brow, and
his memory came back. She bade him guard well his ring, and gave him a
torch: if that torch were lighted his life would burn out with the last
spark. He returned to France, fought the Paynim and conquered, freeing
France and Christendom. The widowed queen of France then intrigued to
marry him; but as she was on the point of attaining her purpose Morgan
appeared and caught him away. In Avalon he still dreams in her arms; and
some day when France is in her direst need, Olger will come back on his
famous charger to smite and to deliver her.

Here we come upon another type, the story and the superstition of the
expected deliverer, which is widely scattered through Europe. In this
country the most noted example is that of King Arthur, who may fitly
give his name to the type. King Arthur, according to the romances, is,
like Olger, in the Island of Avalon, where indeed the romance of Olger
declares that the two heroes met. Sir Thomas Malory tells us: "Some men
yet say in many parts of England that King Arthur is not dead, but had
by the will of our Lord Jesus Christ into another place; and men say
that hee will come againe, and he shall winne the holy crosse. I will
not say that it shall bee so, but rather I will say that heere in this
world hee changed his life. But many men say that there is written upon
his tombe this verse: Hic jacet Arthurus, rex quondam, rexque futurus."
This is a belief dear to the heart of many an oppressed people. It was
told of Harold that he was not slain at Senlac, and that he would yet
come back to lead his countrymen against the hated Normans. Even of
Roderick, the Last of the Goths, deeply stained as he was with crime,
men were loth to believe that he was dead. In the latter part of the
sixteenth century, after Don Sebastian had fallen in the ill-fated
expedition to Morocco, Philip the Second of Spain took advantage of the
failure of the male line on the death of the cardinal-king, Henry, to
add Portugal to his dominions, already too large. His tyranny roused a
popular party whose faith was that Don Sebastian was not really dead: he
was reigning in the Island of the Seven Cities, and he would return by
and by to drive out the Spaniards and their justly execrated king. Even
in the year 1761 a monk was condemned by the Inquisition as a
Sebastianist, a believer and a disseminator of false prophecies,--so
long did the tradition linger. In the Spanish peninsula, indeed, the
superstition has been by no means confined to Christians. The Moors who
were left in the mountains of Valentia looked for the return of their
hero Alfatimi upon a green horse, from his place of concealment in the
Sierra de Aguar, to defend them and to put their Catholic tyrants to the
sword.[154]

Oppression nourishes beliefs of this kind. It was under the Roman
dominion that the Jewish expectation of a Messiah grew to its utmost
strength; and the manifestation of the Messiah was to be preceded by the
reappearance of Elijah, a prophet who was not dead but translated to
heaven. And strange sometimes are the gods from whom salvation is to
come. Only a few years ago, if we may trust Bishop Melchisedech of
Roumania, there was a Slavonic sect, the object of whose worship was
Napoleon the First. He, said his worshippers, had not really died; he
was only at Irkousk, in Siberia, where, at the head of a powerful, an
invincible, army, he was ready once more to overrun the world.[155]

But, however the belief in a deity, or hero, who is to return some day,
may be strengthened by political causes, it is not dependent upon them.
Many races having traditions of a Culture God--that is, of a superior
being who has taught them agriculture and the arts of life, and led them
to victory over their enemies--add that he has gone away from them for
awhile, and that he will some day come back again. Quetzalcoatl and
Viracocha, the culture gods of Mexico and Peru, are familiar instances
of this. In the later Brahminism of India, Vishnu, having already
accomplished nine avatars, or incarnations, for special emergencies in
the past, was yet to have one more avatar for the final destruction of
the wicked and the restoration of goodness at the end of the present
age; he would then be revealed in the sky seated on a white horse and
wielding a blazing sword. I need not specify others: it will be manifest
that the traditions of modern Europe we have been considering contain
the same thought. Nor is it unlikely that they have been influenced by
the Christian doctrine of the Second Advent. Many of them have received
the polish of literature. The stories of Olger and Arthur, for example,
have descended to us as romances written by cultivated men. Don
Sebastian was the plaything of a political party, if not the symbol of
religious heresy, for nearly two centuries. In all these stories we
encounter the belief that the god or hero is in heaven, or in some
remote land. Such a belief is the sign of a civilization comparatively
advanced. The cruder and more archaic belief is that he sleeps within
the hills.

This cruder belief is more familiar in the folklore of Europe than the
other. King Arthur was believed to lie with his warriors beneath the
Craig-y-Ddinas (Castle Rock) in the Vale of Neath. Iolo Morganwg, a
well-known Welsh antiquary, used to relate a curious tradition
concerning this rock. A Welshman, it was said, walking over London
Bridge with a hazel staff in his hand, was met by an Englishman, who
told him that the stick he carried grew on a spot under which were
hidden vast treasures, and if the Welshman remembered the place and
would show it to him he would put him in possession of those treasures.
After some demur the Welshman consented, and took the Englishman (who
was in fact a wizard) to the Craig-y-Ddinas and showed him the spot.
They dug up the hazel tree on which the staff grew and found under it a
broad flat stone. This covered the entrance to a cavern in which
thousands of warriors lay in a circle sleeping on their arms. In the
centre of the entrance hung a bell which the conjurer begged the
Welshman to beware of touching. But if at any time he did touch it and
any of the warriors should ask if it were day, he was to answer without
hesitation: "No; sleep thou on." The warriors' arms were so brightly
polished that they illumined the whole cavern; and one of them had arms
that outshone the rest, and a crown of gold lay by his side. This was
Arthur; and when the Welshman had taken as much as he could carry of the
gold which lay in a heap amid the warriors, both men passed out; not,
however, without the Welshman's accidentally touching the bell. It rang;
but when the inquiry: "Is it day?" came from one of the warriors, he was
prompt with the reply: "No; sleep thou on." The conjurer afterwards told
him that the company he had seen lay asleep ready for the dawn of the
day when the Black Eagle and the Golden Eagle should go to war, the
clamour of which would make the earth tremble so much that the bell
would ring loudly and the warriors would start up, seize their arms, and
destroy the enemies of the Cymry, who should then repossess the island
of Britain and be governed from Caerlleon with justice and peace so long
as the world endured. When the Welshman's treasure was all spent he went
back to the cavern and helped himself still more liberally than before.
On his way out he touched the bell again: again it rang. But this time
he was not so ready with his answer, and some of the warriors rose up,
took the gold from him, beat him and cast him out of the cave. He never
recovered the effects of that beating, but remained a cripple and a
pauper to the end of his days; and he never could find the entrance to
the cavern again. Merlin and the charm

    "Of woven paces and of waving hands"

I need not do more than mention. A recess in the rock three miles
eastward of Carmarthen, called Merlin's Cave, is generally accredited as
the place where Vivien perpetrated her treachery. Merlin's county is
possessed of another enchanted hero. On the northern side of Mynydd Mawr
(the Great Mountain) near Llandilo, is a cave where Owen Lawgoch (Owen
of the Red Hand), one of the last chieftains who fought against the
English, lies with his men asleep. And there they will lie until
awakened by the sound of a trumpet and the clang of arms on Rhywgoch,
when they will arise and conquer their Saxon foes, driving them from the
land. A more famous chieftain is the subject of a similar belief in the
Vale of Gwent. Considerable obscurity overhangs the fate of Owen
Glendower. What is certain about him is that he disappeared from history
in the year 1415. What is believed in the Vale of Gwent is that he and
his men still live and lie asleep on their arms in a cave there, called
"Gogov y Ddinas," or Castle Cave, where they will continue until England
become self-debased; but that then they will sally forth to reconquer
their country, privileges, and crown for the Welsh, who shall be
dispossessed of them no more until the Day of Judgment.[156]

In other Celtic lands the same superstition occurs. There is a hole
called the Devil's Den at the foot of a mountain in the Isle of Man
where it was believed in the last century that a great prince who never
knew death had been bound by spells for six hundred years; but none had
ever had courage enough to explore the hole. In Sutherlandshire it is
said that a man once entered a cave and there found many huge men all
asleep on the floor. They rested on their elbows. In the centre of the
hall was a stone table, and on it lay a bugle. The man put the bugle to
his lips and blew once. They all stirred. He blew a second blast, and
one of the giants, rubbing his eyes, said: "Do not do that again, or you
will wake us!" The intruder fled in terror, and never found the mouth of
the cavern again. Earl Gerald of Mullaghmast sleeps with his warriors in
a cavern under the castle, or Rath, of Mullaghmast. A long table runs
down the middle of the cave. The Earl sits at the head, and his troopers
in complete armour on either side, their heads resting on the table.
Their horses, saddled and bridled, stand behind their masters in stalls
on either side. The Earl was a leader of the Irish; he was very skilful
at weapons, and deep in the black art. He could change himself into any
shape he pleased. His lady was always begging him to let her see him in
some strange shape; but he always put her off, for he told her that if
during his transformation she showed the least fright he would not
recover his natural form till many generations of men were under the
mould. Nothing, however, would do for the lady but an exhibition of his
powers; so one evening he changed himself into a goldfinch. While he was
playing with her in this form a hawk caught sight of him and pursued
him. The hawk dashed itself against a table and was killed; but the lady
had given a loud scream at seeing her husband's danger, and neither
goldfinch nor Earl did she behold again. Once in seven years the Earl
rides round the Curragh of Kildare on a horse whose silver shoes were
half an inch thick when he disappeared. When they are worn as thin as a
cat's ear, a miller's son, who is to be born with six fingers on each
hand, will blow his trumpet, the troopers will awake and mount their
horses and with the Earl go forth to battle against the English; and he
will reign King of Ireland for twoscore years. A horse-dealer once found
the lighted cavern open on the night the Earl was riding round the
Curragh and went in. In his astonishment at what he saw he dropped a
bridle on the ground. The sound of its fall echoing in the recesses of
the cave aroused one of the warriors nearest to him; and he lifted up
his head and asked: "Is it time yet?" The man had the wit to say: "Not
yet, but soon will;" and the heavy helmet sank down once more upon the
table, while the man made the best of his way out. On Rathlin Island
there is a ruin called Bruce's Castle. In a cave beneath lie Bruce and
his chief warriors in an enchanted sleep; but some day they will arise
and unite the island to Scotland. Only once in seven years the entrance
to the cave is visible. A man discovered it on one of these occasions,
and went in. He found himself in the presence of these men in armour. A
sabre was half-sheathed in the earth at his feet. He tried to draw it,
but every one of the sleepers lifted his head and put his hand on his
sword. The intruder fled; but ere the gate of the cavern clanged behind
him he heard voices calling fiercely after him: "Why could we not be
left to sleep?"[157]

The population of the south and west of Yorkshire is largely Celtic. A
tradition of Arthur seems to have been preserved among them to the
effect that he and his knights sit spell-bound in the ruins of a castle,
believed by the clergyman who communicated it to Mr. Alfred Nutt to be
Richmond Castle. Wherever it was, a man named Potter Thompson
penetrated by chance into the hall, and found them sitting around a
table whereon lay a sword and a horn. The man did not venture, like the
Sutherlandshire intruder, to blow the horn, but turned and fled at once.
There, it seems, he made a mistake; for had he done so he would have
released Arthur from the spell. And as he crossed the threshold again a
voice sounded in his ears:--

    "Potter Thompson, Potter Thompson, hadst thou blown the horn,
    Thou hadst been the greatest man that ever was born."

He had missed his chance, and could not return into the enchanted hall.
By the twelfth century the legend of Arthur had reached Sicily, perhaps
with the Normans. Gervase of Tilbury tells us that a boy was in charge
of the Bishop of Catania's palfrey, when it broke loose and ran away. He
pursued it boldly into the dark recesses of Mount Etna, where, on a wide
plain full of all delights, he found Arthur stretched on a royal couch
in a palace built with wonderful skill. Having explained what brought
him thither, the hero caused the horse to be given up to him, and added
gifts which were afterwards beheld with astonishment by many. Arthur
informed him, moreover, that he had been compelled to remain there on
account of his wound, which broke out afresh every year.[158]

In Teutonic lands the legends of the sleeping host and the sleeping
monarch are very numerous. Grimm in his Mythology has collected many of
them. I select for mention a few only, adding one or two not included by
him. Karl the Great lies in the Unterberg, near Salzburg, and also in
the Odenberg, where Woden himself, according to other legends, is said
to be. Siegfried, the hero of the Nibelungen Lied, dwells in the
mountain fastness of Geroldseck. Diedrich rests in the mountains of
Alsace, his hand upon his sword, waiting till the Turk shall water his
horses on the banks of the Rhine. On the Grütli, where once they met to
swear the oath which freed their country, lie the three founders of the
Swiss Federation in a cleft of the rock. The Danes have appropriated
Olger, who, Grimm says, really belongs to the Ardennes; and in a vaulted
chamber under the castle of Kronburg he sits, with a number of warriors
clad in mail, about a stone table, into which his beard has grown. A
slave who was condemned to death received pardon and freedom on
condition of descending to ascertain what was beneath the castle; for at
that time no one knew, and no one could explain the clashing of armour
sometimes heard below. He passed through an iron doorway and found
himself in the presence of Olger and his men. Their heads rested on
their arms, which were crossed upon the table. When Olger lifted up his
head the table burst asunder. "Reach me thy hand," he said to the slave;
but the latter, not venturing to give his hand, held out an iron bar
instead, which Olger squeezed so that the marks remained visible. At
length letting it go, he exclaimed: "It gladdens me that there are still
men in Denmark!"[159]

But of all the great names appropriated by this myth, the one which has
thus been made most famous is that of Frederick Barbarossa. When he was
drowned in crossing the river Calycadmus in Asia Minor, the peasants of
Germany refused to believe in his death, and constantly expected him to
return. Poems which go back to the middle of the fourteenth century, or
within a century and a half of Frederick's death, prove the existence of
a tradition to this effect. More than this, they contain allusions to
some of the details about to be mentioned, and foretell his recovery of
the Holy Sepulchre. The Kyffhäuser in Thuringia is the mountain usually
pointed out as his place of retreat, though other places also claim the
honour. Within the cavern he sits at a stone table, and rests his head
upon his hand. His beard grows round the table: twice already has it
made the circuit; when it has grown round the third time the emperor
will awake. He will then come forth, and will hang his shield on a
withered tree which will break into leaf, and a better time will dawn.
Gorgeous descriptions are given of the cavern. It is radiant with gold
and jewels; and though it is a cavern deep in the earth, it shines
within like the sunniest day. The most splendid trees and shrubs stand
there, and through the midst of this Paradise flows a brook whose very
mud is pure gold. Here the emperor's rest is not so profound as might
have been expected. A strain of music easily seems to rouse him. A
shepherd having once piped to him, Frederick asked: "Fly the ravens
round the mountain still?" "Yes," replied the shepherd. "Then must I
sleep another hundred years," murmured the emperor. The shepherd was
taken into the armoury, and rewarded with the stand of a hand-basin,
which turned out to be of pure gold. A party of musicians on their way
home from a wedding passed that way, and played a tune "for the old
Emperor Frederick." Thereupon a maiden stepped out, and brought them the
emperor's thanks, presenting each of them with a horse's head by way of
remembrance. All but one threw the gift away in contempt. One, however,
kept his "to have a joke with his old woman," as he phrased it, and
taking it home he put it under the pillow. In the morning, when his wife
turned up the pillow to look at it, instead of a horse's head she
brought forth a lump of gold. Other stories are told of persons who have
penetrated into the emperor's presence and been enriched. A shepherd
found the mountain open on St. John's Day, and entered. He was allowed
to take some of the horse-meal, which when he reached home he found to
be gold. Women have been given knots of flax, of the same metal. A
swineherd, however, who went in, was less lucky. The emperor's
lady-housekeeper made signs to him that he might take some of the
treasure on the table before him; accordingly he stuffed his pockets
full. As he turned to go out she called after him: "Forget not the
best!" She meant a flower which lay on the table; but he heeded not, and
the mountain, slamming behind him, cut off his heel, so that he died in
great pain.[160]

Such are a few of the legends relating to the Kyffhäuser; but it should
be observed that Frederick Barbarossa's is not the only name given to
the slumbering hero. We have already seen in the last chapter that one
tradition calls him the Marquis John. Another dubs him the Emperor Otto;
and yet in another Dame Holle is identified with his housekeeper. Now
this difference in the traditions about names, while they agree in the
substance of the superstition, indicates that the substance is older and
more important than the names, and that well-known names have become
affixed to the traditions as they happened from time to time to strike
the popular imagination. This is confirmed by the fact that in many
places where similar traditions are located, no personal name at all is
given to the hero. In the Guckenberg, near Fränkischgemünden, _an
emperor_ disappeared a long time ago with his army. A boy selling rolls
once met an old man, to whom he complained of bad trade. The old man
said he could show him a place where he could bring his rolls every day;
but he must tell no one thereof. So saying, he led the boy into the
mountain, where there were many people. The emperor himself sat at a
table, round which his beard had grown twice: when it has grown round
it once more he will come forth again with all his men. The boy's rolls
were bought; and he daily repeated his visit. After a while, however, he
could not pass the ancient coin wherein he was paid. The people in the
village, grown suspicious, made him confess all; and he could never find
his way to the mountain again. In the "Auersperg Chronicle," under the
year 1223, it is recorded that from a certain mountain which Grimm
identifies with the Donnersberg (Thor's mountain), near Worms, a
multitude of armed horsemen used daily to issue, and thither daily to
return. A man, who armed himself with the sign of the cross, and
questioned one of the host in the name of Our Lord, was told by him: "We
are not, as you think, phantoms, nor, as we seem, a band of soldiers,
but the souls of slain soldiers. The arms and clothing, and horses,
because they once were the instruments of sin, are now to us the
materials of our punishment; for what you behold upon us is really on
fire, although you cannot perceive it with your bodily eyes." We saw in
an earlier chapter that a story influenced by the Welsh Methodist
revival represented the midwife whose sight was cleared by fairy
ointment as beholding herself surrounded by flames, and the fairies
about her in the guise of devils. In the same way here the wonders
recorded by a pious ecclesiastic have taken, though possibly not in the
first instance from him, a strictly orthodox form, and one calculated to
point a pulpit moral.[161]

Over against the last two legends we may place two from Upper Alsace. A
body of the Emperor Karl the Great's warriors had become so puffed up by
their successes that at last they pointed their guns and cannon against
heaven itself. Scarcely had they discharged their pieces when the whole
host sank into the earth. Every seventh year they may be seen by night
on their horses, exercising. Concerning them it is said that a baker's
daughter of Ruffach, in the Ochsenfeld valley, was carrying white bread
to the next village, when she met a soldier on a white horse who offered
to lead her to a place where she could sell the bread immediately for a
good price. She accordingly followed him through a subterranean passage
into a great camp quite full of long-bearded soldiers, who were all fast
asleep. Here she sold all her bread, and was well paid; and for several
years she continued daily to sell her bread there, so that her father
became a rich man. One day she was ill and unable to go, whereupon she
sent her brother, describing the place to him. He found it, but a door
blocked up the passage, and he could not open it. The girl died soon
after, and since then no one has entered the subterranean camp. From
Bütow in Pomerania comes a saga similar to that of Olger at Kronburg. A
mountain in the neighbourhood is held to be an enchanted castle,
communicating by an underground passage with the castle of Bütow. A
criminal was once offered his choice whether to die by the hangman, or
to make his way by the passage in question to the enchanted castle, and
bring back a written proof from the lord who sat enchanted within it. He
succeeded in his mission; and the document he brought back is believed
to be laid up among the archives of the town. According to another
account a man once met two women who led him into the mountain, where he
found a populous city. They brought him safely back after he had spent
six hours within the mountain. A saga referred to by Grimm relates how a
shepherd found in the cavern of the Willberg _a little man_ sitting at a
stone table through which his beard had grown; and in another three
unnamed malefactors are spoken of. In Sweden there is a story that may
remind us of the Sutherlandshire legend. In a large cleft of the
mountain of Billingen, in West Gothland, called the Giant's Path, it is
said there was formerly a way leading far into the mountain, into which
a peasant once penetrated, and found a man lying asleep on a large
stone. No one knows how he came there; but every time the bell tolls for
prayers in Yglunda church, he turns round and sighs. So he will continue
until Doomsday.[162] In none of these stories is the hero identified
with any known historical person.

Among the Slavonic peoples corresponding sagas are told. In Servia and
Bulgaria King Marko is the enchanted hero. He is variously held to be in
a palace on some mysterious island, or in a mountain not far from the
Iron Gates. The traveller who crosses the mountain calls to him: "Marko,
dost thou live?" and in the echo he believes that Marko gives him a
reply. "Prince" Marko is also believed by the Serbs to be in the
mountain Urvina with his horse Sharatz, asleep. His sword is rising
slowly out of the mountain. When it is fully disclosed, Marko will awake
and deliver his people. If other accounts may be trusted, however, he
has retired to the Alps since the invention of gunpowder, and now lives
as a hermit in a cave. So great pity was it

    "This villainous saltpetre should be digg'd
    Out of the bowels of the harmless earth."[163]

The Carpathian hero is Dobocz, the robber chief. He is bespelled by a
jealous mistress in a cavern on the Czornahora, where he perpetually
counts the gold he has hidden. On certain days of the year he comes out
with his followers; and then he has often been seen by the mountaineers.
Sometimes he visits his wife in her rock-dwelling by Polansko, where she
too is enchanted; and on such occasions the nightly festivities may be
seen and heard. Bold are they who endeavour to penetrate the depths of
the mountain where Dobocz dwells. They never return, but are caught by
the robber and added to his band. Strengthened with these reinforcements
his companions will be with him when the charm shall one day be broken,
and he will issue forth to take vengeance on the men who betrayed him.
Some of the stories of Blanik Mountain, where Wenzel, the king of
Bohemia, lies, have been set before the reader. The horses of himself
and his followers stand ever ready saddled; and at midnight the mountain
opens, and the king and his knights ride forth to exercise upon the
plain. But other heroes than Wenzel dispute with him the honour of being
the enchanted inhabitant of the Blanik. One clear moonlight night of
spring the burgesses of Jung-Wositz were aroused from their slumbers by
the beating of drums, and the clang of armour, and the trampling of
horses. Terrified at such a rout, and not knowing what it might mean,
they seized their weapons and stood on the defensive. Nor were they a
little surprised to see on the open meadows a troop of horsemen engaged
in knightly play. By and by, at the sound of the kettledrum, the troop
formed into rank, and vanished into the mountain, which closed behind
them with a crash. The burgesses offered a reward to whomsoever would
explore the recesses of the mountain, and bring them sure tidings of the
ghostly horsemen. Three years passed by ere the task was attempted. At
last a clever man, Zdenko von Zasmuk, undertook the adventure. He was
lucky enough to find the mountain open; and riding in, he came into a
vast lighted hall where slept on stone benches the knights of the
mountain, now changed into fine old men with long white beards. Their
snow-white horses, ready saddled, stood fastened to the piers of the
vault. Zdenko accidentally knocked down a spear; and the clangour,
echoing round the hall, awakened the men. He explained to them why he
had come, and politely offered, if they wished, to attempt their
deliverance. Their leader informed him in reply that he was Ulrich von
Rosenberg, that he with his companions had fallen gloriously against
Chichka, in defence of the city of Litic, and that God, instead of
admitting them into Paradise, had assigned them an abode in that place
until Bohemia should be at its sorest need; then they would sally forth,
and bring back peace and happiness to the land. And he enjoined Zdenko
to make this known to the people. So saying, he sank again to sleep. It
is said, moreover, that when the time of which Ulrich spoke shall come,
a certain hazel-tree shall begin to blossom, though it will be winter. A
quite different story alleges that it is the Knight Stoymir, who is
under the spell at Blanik. His last struggle against the plundering
hordes which overran the country took place there; and he with all his
band perished. The next morning when the enemy had departed his friends
searched the battlefield, but not a trace could be recovered of their
bodies. It was first thought that the foes had carried them off to be
ransomed. At night, however, the inhabitants of the neighbourhood were
roused from slumber by the noise of a host; and they beheld the slain
heroes exercising and afterwards watering their horses at the beck
before they returned to the mountain. The herdsman who told the
foregoing tale declared that he had been into the mountain, and had
himself seen Stoymir and his companions in their sleep. There can be no
doubt, therefore, of its truth.[164]

Legends of buried armies occur also at Trzebnica, in Silesia, where the
Poles encountered the Turks, and at Matwa in the Prussian province of
Posen. In the former a girl who is admitted into the cavern is warned
against touching a bell that, as in the Welsh tale, hangs in the
entrance. She cannot resist the temptation to transgress this command,
and is ignominiously ejected. In the latter, an old man buys corn for
the troops. Again, in the Carpathians, as in one of the sagas concerning
the Blanik, a smith is summoned to shoe the steeds. The Rev. W. S.
Lach-Szyrma, in addition to these stories, gave the Folklore Society
some years ago, from a chap-book of Posen, the following abstract of a
legend I have not met with elsewhere: "Once upon a time, in Mazowia,
there were seven victorious leaders. After having won a hundred battles,
finding their beards had grown white, they ordered their soldiers to
build in their honour a very high tower. The soldiers built and built,
but every day part of the tower tumbled down. This lasted a whole year.
The leaders, after supper, assembled at the ruins of the tower. Here, at
the sound of lutes and songs, immediately a tower grew up from the earth
to heaven, and on its seven pinnacles shone the seven helmets of the
seven leaders. Higher and higher they rose, but brighter and brighter
they shone till they appeared as the seven stars in heaven. The soldiers
sank down into graves which had been dug round the tower and fell
asleep. The tower has melted out of view, but on fine nights we still
see the seven helmets of the leaders, and the soldiers are sleeping till
they are wanted."[165]


FOOTNOTES:

[148] "Choice Notes," p. 94.

[149] Curtin, p. 327. See also Kennedy, p. 240, and "F. L. Record," vol.
ii. p. 15, where the late Mr. H. C. Coote quotes the "Transactions of
the Ossianic Society."

[150] Comparetti, vol. i. p. 212. An English version is given by Mr.
Coote, "F. L. Record," vol. ii. p. 12. Madame D'Aulnoy gives a similar
story in her "Histoire d'Hypolite, Comte de Douglas," which seems to be
the original of a tale in verse quoted by Mr. Baring-Gould from
Dodsley's "Poetical Collection." See "F. L. Record," vol. ii. p. 8;
Baring-Gould, p. 547.

[151] Des Michels, p. 38; Kreutzwald, p. 212. See also my article on
"The Forbidden Chamber," "F. L. Journal," vol. iii. p. 193, where the
relations of the Esthonian tale to the myth of the Forbidden Chamber are
discussed.

[152] Dennys, p. 98, "Gent. Mag. Lib." (Eng. Trad. Lore), p. 22; "Revue
des Trad. Pop." vol. iii. p. 566.

[153] "Thomas of Erceldoune," _passim_; Child, vol. i. p. 318; "Border
Minstrelsy," vol. iii. p. 170.

[154] Malory, vol. iii. p. 339; Braga, vol. ii. p. 238; Liebrecht in a
note to Gerv. Tilb., p. 95, quoting Aznar, "Expulsion de los Moriscos."

[155] "Athenæum," No. 2,400, 25 Oct. 1873, giving an account of Bishop
Melchisedech's book, entitled "Lipovenismulu," on the creed and customs
of the Raskolnics, or Russian schismatics.

[156] "Trans. Aberd. Eistedd.," p. 227, quoting Waring's "Recollections
of Iolo Morganwg"; Black's "Picturesque Guide to Wales" (1872), p. 279;
Howells, p. 104; "Iolo MSS." (Llandovery, 1848), pp. 68, 454, quoting
from papers attributed to the Rev. Evan Evans, and said to be, when
copied by Iolo Morganwg, in the possession of Paul Panton, Esq., of
Anglesea.

[157] Waldron, p. 68; "F. L. Journal," vol. vi. p. 164; Kennedy, p. 172,
Lady Wilde, vol. i. p. 161.

[158] "F. L. Journal," vol. i. p. 193; Gerv. Tilb., Dec. ii. c. 12. See
Mr. Nutt's remarks on these in his admirable "Studies on the Legend of
the Holy Grail" (London, 1888), pp. 123, 196.

[159] Grimm, "Teut. Myth." pp. 953, 955, 961; Thorpe, vol. ii. p. 222,
translating Thiele; Certeux et Carnoy, vol. i. p. 65.

[160] Grimm, "Teut. Myth.," p. 955; Kuhn und Schwartz, p. 217. See also
Thorpe, vol. iii. p. 101, translating Kuhn und Schwartz, and Grimm.

[161] Kuhn und Schwartz, pp. 220, 222; Grimm, "Teut. Myth." pp. 953,
954.

[162] Meier, pp. 122, 123; Jahn, p. 248; Grimm, "Teut. Myth." p. 961;
Thorpe, vol. ii. p. 91, from Afzelius. In an Austrian _märchen_ the
Sleeping Host is a host of serpents. The king slept on a crystal table
in the centre. During the winter serpents are believed to sleep. In the
spring the oldest serpent awakes and wakens the others, crying: "It is
time" (Vernaleken, p. 113).

[163] Grohmann, p. 10. Marko was a shepherd, who for a service rendered
to a Vila was gifted by her with heroism, beauty, and other good fortune
(Krauss, "Volksgl." p. 103).

[164] Grohmann, pp. 11, 13, 15.

[165] "F. L. Record," vol. iv. p. 67. Mr. Lach-Szyrma conjectures that
the seven stars are the stars of _Ursa Major_.




CHAPTER IX.

THE SUPERNATURAL LAPSE OF TIME IN FAIRYLAND

(_continued_).

     The story not an early one--Its weirdest developments
     European--Stories of short time appearing long--Mohammed's
     night-journey and its variants--The Sleeping Hero, a heathen
     god--The Wild Hunt--The Enchanted Princess, a heathen goddess.


The visits to Fairyland recorded in Chapter VII differ only in one
respect from those mentioned in earlier chapters of this book. Like
them, they are visits of business or of pleasure. Mortals are summoned
to perform some service for the mysterious beings whose dwelling is
beneath the earth, such as to stand sponsor to their children, or to
shoe their horses; or they go to take a message from this world, or to
bring a message back. Or else they are drawn into the regions over which
the power of the supernatural extends, by curiosity, by the desire of
pleasure, or else by the invitation, or unconsciously by the spell, of
their superhuman inhabitants. The point at which the visits differ from
those we have previously considered, and from a hundred others precisely
parallel in all other respects, is in their length. To the entrammelled
mortal the visit seems to last but a moment; for while under the fairy
sway he is unconscious of the flight of time. In other stories deception
is practised on the sight. The midwife, without the ointment, is
deceived like Thor by Utgard-Loki: nothing is as it appears to her.
Parents and husbands are deceived by changelings: they are made to
believe that images of dead wood are living creatures, or human corpses.
In these stories, on the other hand, the magic is directed against the
sense of time. A subtler, a weirder, a more awful horror is thus added
to the dread of communion with the supernatural.

This horror is one arising comparatively late in the history of culture.
The idea of time must first grow up and be elaborated. Time is dependent
on number. A savage who can barely count beyond five cannot know
anything of stories which deal with the lapse of centuries. Even the
vaguer, but shorter, period of a generation will be an idea he cannot
grasp. We have therefore found no such tales in the lower savagery; and
even among the Lapplanders and the Siberian tribes the stories we have
been able to collect speak only of short periods, such as the transition
from autumn to spring, where a man had slept through the winter, and the
expansion of a day into a month, or a year. In these two cases not only
the phases of the moon and the measurement of time by them, which must
have been early in development, but also the cycle of the seasons had
been observed. But the idea lying at the root of this group of tales is
as yet only in germ. The full terror of the situation, as exhibited in
the traditions of the more highly organized societies of Europe and of
the extreme Orient, is unforeseen. For it is in proportion to the
organization of society that such a catastrophe as the loss of years,
and thereby of kindred and friends, becomes really dreadful. Indeed, it
would seem to have been reserved for the European nations to put the
final touches of gloom and horror upon the canvas. It may be sufficient
to refer this to the more sombre imagination of Western peoples. But we
ought not to overlook the influence of the Catholic Church in darkening
the general tone of the imagination, and particularly the tone of the
fairy sagas, by the absolute and unquestioned supremacy she demanded,
and the frightful penalties, temporal and spiritual, she invoked upon
those who dared to indulge in cults she was unable to incorporate. To
men under such an influence, intercourse with fairies would be a thing
unholy; and the greater the temptations to it, the severer, they would
deem, should be the penalties. This is the frame of mind which would, if
with shuddering, yet without a murmur, acquiesce in the justice of the
doom suffered by Herla, to put an extreme case--a frame of mind
undoubtedly countenanced by the equally uncompromising claims of various
forms of Protestantism. But, while reprobating commerce with unhallowed
spirits, intercourse with spirits sanctioned by the Church was believed
to be almost equally possible, and was encouraged as much as the other
was denounced. If such intercourse sometimes resulted in severance
between the favoured mortal and his human friends, this was only an
extension of the monastic idea; and, as in that case, the loss was held
to be abundantly compensated by the favour of Heaven and the bliss
received. At all events it is certain, from whatever cause, that the
deepest depths and the loftiest heights of which this story-plot has
been found capable, have been reached only under Christian influences.
Pliny and Mohammed, the Taoist and the Shintoist, have recorded no tale
that sways our emotions like those of Herla, the Aged Bride, and the
Monk Felix.

But the magical power over time operates now and then in the contrary
way, by making a short time appear long. A few examples may be
interesting, though they will in no way affect the foregoing
conclusions. In the tenth part of a night Mohammed, it will be
remembered, was taken up to Paradise on the back of the beast Alborac,
and passed through all the seven heavens into the presence of Allah
himself, with whom he had a conversation, which could not have been a
very short one, and was then brought back by the way he had gone. He
remained long enough in each heaven to give a full, true and particular
account of it and of its inhabitants, and performed various other feats
during the journey. Nor will it be forgotten how one of the Sultans one
day expressing doubts on the possibility of so much having happened to
the Apostle in so short a time, a learned doctor of the Mohammedan law
caused a basin of water to be brought and requested him to dip his head
into it. When the Sultan dipped his head he found himself in a strange
country, alone and friendless, on the seashore. He made his way to a
neighbouring town, obtained employment, became rich, married, lived
seven years with his wife, who afterwards, to his great grief, died, and
then he lost all. One day he was wandering in despondency along the
seashore, where he had first found himself; and in his despair he
determined to cast himself into the sea. Scarcely had he done so when he
beheld his courtiers standing around his throne: he was once more
Sultan, and the basin of water into which he had dipped his head was
before him. He began furiously to reproach the learned doctor for
banishing him from his capital and sending him into the midst of
vicissitudes and adventures for so many years. Nor was it without
difficulty that he was brought to believe that he had only just dipped
his head into the water and lifted it out again.

This type of story is less frequent than the other, but it is known in
countries far apart. A stripling, in Pembrokeshire, joined a fairy
dance, and found himself in a palace glittering with gold and pearls,
where he remained in great enjoyment with the fairy folk for many years.
One restriction was laid upon him: he was not to drink from a certain
well in the midst of the palace gardens. But he could not forbear. In
that well swam golden fishes and fishes of all colours. One day the
youth, impelled by curiosity, plunged his hand into the water; but in a
moment fishes and all disappeared, a shriek ran through the garden, and
he found himself again on the hillside with his father's flocks around
him. In fact, he had never left the sheep, and what seemed to him to be
years had been only minutes, during which the fairy spell had been over
him. In Count Lucanor, a Spanish work of the fourteenth century, is a
story of a Dean of Santiago, who went to Don Illan, a magician of
Toledo, to be instructed in necromancy. Don Illan made a difficulty,
stating that the dean was a man of influence and consequently likely to
attain a high position, and that men when they rise forget easily all
past obligations, as well as the persons from whom they received them.
The dean, however, protested that, no matter to what eminence he
attained, he would never fail to remember and to help his former
friends, and the magician in particular. This being the bargain, Don
Illan led the dean into a remote apartment, first desiring his
housekeeper to procure some partridges for supper, but not to cook them
until she had his special commands. Scarcely had the dean and his friend
reached the room when two messengers arrived from the dean's uncle, the
archbishop, summoning him to his death-bed. Being unwilling, however, to
forego the lessons he was about to receive, he contented himself with a
respectful reply. Four days afterwards other messengers arrived with
letters informing the dean of the archbishop's death, and again at the
end of other seven or eight days he learned that he himself had been
appointed archbishop in his uncle's place. Don Illan solicited the
vacant deanery for his son; but the new archbishop preferred his own
brother, inviting, however, Don Illan and his son to accompany him to
his see. After awhile, the deanery was again vacant: and again the
archbishop refused Don Illan's suit, in favour of one of his own uncles.
Two years later, the archbishop was named cardinal and summoned to Rome,
with liberty to name his successor in the see. Don Illan, pressing his
suit more urgently, was again repulsed in favour of another uncle. At
length the pope died, and the new cardinal was chosen pope. Don Illan,
who had accompanied him to Rome, then reminded him that he had now no
excuse for not fulfilling the promises he had so often repeated to him.
The pope sought to put him off; but Don Illan complained in earnest of
the many promises he had made, none of which had been kept, and declared
that he had no longer any faith in his words. The pope, much angered,
threatened to have Don Illan thrown into prison as a heretic and a
sorcerer; for he knew that in Toledo he had no other means of support
but by practising the art of necromancy. Don Illan, seeing how ill the
pope had requited his services, prepared to depart; and the pope, as if
he had not already shown sufficient ingratitude, refused even to grant
him wherewith to support himself on the road. "Then," retorted Don
Illan, "since I have nothing to eat, I must needs fall back on the
partridges I ordered for to-night's supper." He then called out to his
housekeeper and ordered her to cook the birds. No sooner had he thus
spoken than the dean found himself again in Toledo, still dean of
Santiago, as on his arrival, for, in fact, he had not stirred from the
place. This was simply the way the magician had chosen to test his
character, before committing himself to his hands; and the dean was so
crestfallen he had nothing to reply to the reproaches wherewith Don
Illan dismissed him without even a taste of the partridges.[166]

A modern folk-tale from Cashmere tells of a Brahmin who prayed to know
something of the state of the departed. One morning, while bathing in
the river, his spirit left him and entered the body of the infant child
of a cobbler. The child grew up, learned his father's business, married,
and had a large family, when suddenly he was made aware of his high
caste, and, abandoning all, he went to another country. There the king
had just died; and the stranger was chosen in his place, and put upon
his throne. In the course of a few years his wife came to know where he
was, and sought to join him. In this or some other way his people
learned that he was a cobbler; and great consternation prevailed on
account of his low caste. Some of his subjects fled; others performed
great penances; and some indeed burnt themselves lest they should be
excommunicated. When the king heard all this, he too burnt himself; and
his spirit went and re-occupied the Brahmin's corpse, which still lay by
the riverside. Thereupon the Brahmin got up and went home to his wife,
who only said: "How quickly you have performed your ablutions this
morning!" The Brahmin said not a word of his adventures, notwithstanding
he was greatly astonished. To crown all, however, about a week
afterwards a man came to him begging, and said he had eaten nothing for
five days, during which he had been running away from his country
because a cobbler had been made king. All the people, he said, were
running away, or burning themselves, to escape the consequences of such
an evil. The Brahmin, while he gave the man food, thought: "How can
these things be? I have been a cobbler for several years; I have reigned
as a king for several years;--and this man confirms the truth of my
thoughts. Yet my wife declares I have not been absent from this house
more than the usual time; and I believe her, for she does not look any
older, neither is the place changed in any way." Thus were the gods
teaching him that the soul passes through various stages of existence
according to a man's thoughts, words, and acts, and in the great
Hereafter a day is equal to a thousand years, and a thousand years are
equal to a day.[167]

We may now turn to the types in which the spell is believed to be still
powerful over heroes once mighty but now hidden within the hills, or in
some far-off land, awaiting in magical sleep, or in more than human
delight, the summons that shall bid them return to succour their
distressed people in the hour of utmost need. As to the personality of
these heroes there can be no doubt. Grimm long ago pointed out that the
red-bearded king beneath the Kyffhäuser can be no other than Thor, the
old Teutonic god of thunder, and that the long beard--sometimes
described as white--attributed to other leaders was a token of Woden.
The very name of Woden is preserved in the Odenberg, to which several of
such legends attach; and the hidden king there is sometimes called Karl
the Great, and sometimes Woden. In other countries Quetzalcoatl and
Vishnu, we know, are gods of the native cults. Oisin, Merlin, and King
Arthur all belong to the old Celtic Pantheon. And if some other sleeping
or vanished heroes bear the names of personages who once had a real
existence, they are but decked in borrowed plumes. In short, all these
Hidden Heroes are gods of the earlier faiths, vanquished by Christianity
but not destroyed.

If this be so, it may be inferred that these gods were at one time
conceived as presently active, and that it is only since the
introduction of the new faith that they have been thought to be retired
beneath the overhanging hills or in the Islands of the Blest. But this
was not so. In all regions the chief activity of the deities has always
been placed in the past. Upon the stories told of the deeds of yesterday
the belief of to-day is founded. Whether it be creation, or strife
against evil spirits, or the punishment of men, or the invention of the
civilizing arts, or the endless amours of too susceptible divinities,
all is looked upon as past and done. The present is a state of rest, of
suspension of labour, or at least of cessation of open and visible
activity. These gods, like men, require an abode. In the later stages of
culture this abode is a Paradise on some more or less imaginary
mountain-top, or effectually cut off from men by the magical tempests
of the immeasurable main, or by the supreme and silent heights of
heaven. But this exaltation of ideas took long to reach. At first a
strange rock, a fountain, the recesses of a cavern, or the mysterious
depths of the forest, enshrouded the divinity. In the earlier stages of
savagery it would be almost truer to say that these _were_ very often
the divinity: at least they were often his outward and visible form. Mr.
Im Thurn, who has had exceptional opportunities of observing the
characteristics of the savage mind, and has made exceptionally good use
of those opportunities, in describing the animism of the Indians of
Guiana, says: "Every object in the whole world is a being consisting of
body and spirit, and differs from every other object in no respect
except that of bodily form, and in the greater or less degree of brute
power and brute cunning consequent on the difference of bodily form and
bodily habits." Then, after discussing the lower animals and plants as
each possessed of body and soul, and particularizing several rocks which
are supposed by the Indians to possess spirits like human beings, he
goes on: "It is unnecessary to multiply instances, further than by
saying that almost every rock seen for the first time, and any rock
which is in any way abnormal whenever seen, is believed to consist of
body and spirit. And not only many rocks, but also many waterfalls,
streams, and indeed material bodies of every sort, are supposed to
consist each of a body and a spirit as does man; and that not all
inanimate objects have this dual nature avowedly attributed to them is
probably only due to the chance that, while all such objects may at any
time, in any of the ways above indicated, show signs of the presence of
a spirit within them, this spirit has not yet been noticed in some
cases."[168] From this belief to that in which the rocks and hills and
other inanimate objects are looked upon as having the relation to
spirits, not of body and soul, but of dwelling and dweller, is a step
upward, and perhaps a long one. But it is a natural development, and one
which would inevitably take place as the popular opinion of the power of
certain spirits grew, and these spirits attracted to themselves
superstitions and sagas current among the people whose civilization was
by the same slow movement growing too.

The development spoken of would perhaps be assisted by the erection of
monuments like piles of stones, or earthen barrows, over the dead. As
formerly in their huts, so now in their graves, the dead would be
regarded as the occupiers. Their spirits were still living, and would be
seen from time to time haunting the spot. Food would be buried with
them; and sacrifices at the moment of burial and on subsequent occasions
would be offered to them. In process of time among illiterate races
their identity would be forgotten, and then if the barrows were not
large enough to attract attention the superstitions which had their seat
there might cease. But if the barrows could not be overlooked, the
spirits supposed to haunt them might merge into some other objects of
reverence. In Denmark the barrows are invariably regarded as the haunt
of fairies; and this is frequently the case in other countries.[169]
When men once became habituated to think of a barrow as not the outward
and visible form of some spirit, but simply its dwelling-place--still
more, perhaps, if many interments took place within it, so that it
became the dwelling-place of many spirits--they would be led by an easy
transition to think of rocks, fountains, hills, and other natural
objects in the same way. The spirits once supposed to be their inner
identity would become perfectly separable in thought from them, because
merely their tenants. Thus the gulf would be bridged between the savage
philosophy of spirits described by Mr. Im Thurn, and the polytheism of
the higher heathendom, represented by Mexico, Scandinavia, and Greece.

But whether they travelled by this, or any different road, certain it is
that in the remoter times of the higher heathendom men had arrived no
further than the belief that certain spots, and preferably certain
striking objects, were the abodes of their gods. This was a doctrine
developed directly from that which regarded the more remarkable objects
of nature as the bodies of powerful spirits. Nor was it ever entirely
abandoned; for even after the more advanced and thoughtful of the
community had reached the idea of an Olympus, or an Asgard, far removed
above the every-day earth of humanity, the gods still had their temples,
and sacred legends still attached to places where events of the divine
history had happened. Consequently some localities kept their reputation
of sanctity. That they were really the abiding-places of the gods the
common people would not cease to hold, whatever might be taught or held
by those who had renounced that crudity. And, indeed, it may be doubted
whether anybody ever renounced it altogether. Probably, at all events,
most persons would see no difficulty in believing that the god dwelt on
the sacred spot of earth and also at the same time in heaven. They would
accept both traditions as equally true, without troubling themselves how
to reconcile them.

But the gods did not always remain in their dwellings. The Wild Hunt, a
tradition of a furious host riding abroad with a terrific noise of
shouts and horns and the braying of hounds, common to Germany and
England, has been identified beyond doubt by Grimm with Woden and his
host. We cannot here discuss the subject except in its relations with
the group of stories now under consideration. Woden, it will be borne in
mind, is one of the figures of the old mythology merged in the Hidden
Hero beneath the German hills. Now, nothing is more natural than that,
when a company of warriors is conceived as lying ready for a summons,
themselves all armed and their steeds standing harnessed at their sides,
they should be thought now and then to sally forth. This was the sound
which surprised the good burgesses of Jung-Wositz when Ulrich von
Rosenberg and his train rode out by night upon the plain. In this way
King Wenzel exercises his followers, and the unfortunate Stoymir
vindicated his existence beneath the Blanik notwithstanding his death.
In this way too, before a war, Diedrich is heard preparing for battle at
one o'clock in the morning on the mountain of Ax. Once in seven years
Earl Gerald rides round the Curragh of Kildare; and every seventh year
the host at Ochsenfeld in Upper Alsace may be seen by night exercising
on their horses. On certain days the Carpathian robber issues from his
cavern in the Czornahora. Grimm mentions the story of a blacksmith who
found a gap he had never noticed before in the face of a cliff on the
Odenberg, and entering, stood in the presence of mighty men, playing
there at bowls with balls of iron, as Rip van Winkle's friends were
playing at ninepins. So a Wallachian saga connects the Wild Hunt with a
mysterious forest castle built by the Knight Sigmirian, who was cursed
with banishment for three hundred years from the society of men for
refusing the daughter of the King of Stones. In the same category we
must put the spectral host in the Donnersberg, and Herla's company,
which haunted the Welsh marches, and is described by Walter Map as a
great band of men and women on foot and in chariots, with pack-saddles
and panniers, birds and dogs, advancing with trumpets and shouts, and
all sorts of weapons ready for emergencies. Night was the usual time of
Herla's wanderings, but the last time he and his train were seen was at
noon. Those who then saw them, being unable to obtain an answer to their
challenge by words, prepared to exact one by arms; but the moment they
did so the troop rose into the air and disappeared, nor was it ever seen
again.[170]

This is a different account of Herla from that previously quoted from an
earlier part of Map's work; but perhaps, if it were worth while to spend
the time, not altogether irreconcilable with it. The tradition, it
should be observed, appears to have been an English, and not a Welsh,
tradition, since the host received the English name of Herlething.
Gervase of Tilbury, writing about the same time, reports that Arthur was
said by the foresters, or woodwards, both in Britain and in Brittany, to
be very often seen at midday, or in the evening moonlight at full of the
moon, accompanied by a troop of soldiers, hunters, dogs, and the sound
of horns. This is manifestly a Celtic tradition. But these occasions are
not the last on which such appearances have been seen and heard in this
country. If we may believe a tract published in 1643, spectral fights
had taken place at Keniton, in Northamptonshire, during four successive
Saturday and Sunday nights of the preceding Christmastide. By those who
are reported to have witnessed the phenomenon--and among them were
several gentlemen of credit mentioned by name as despatched by the king
himself from Oxford--it was taken to be a ghostly repetition of the
battle of Edgehill, which had been fought only two months before on the
adjacent fields. The excitement of men's minds during periods of
commotion has doubtless much to do with the currency of beliefs like
this. Saint Augustine alludes to a story of a battle between evil
spirits beheld upon a plain in Campania during the civil wars of Rome.
As in the case of Edgehill, the vision was accompanied by all the noises
of a conflict; and indeed the saint goes the length of declaring that
after it was over the ground was covered with the footprints of men and
horses. On the spot where this is said to have happened an actual battle
took place not very long after.[171] These two instances are unconnected
with the Sleeping Host; but many of the legends explicitly declare the
exercises of the host when it emerges from its retirement to consist of
a sham fight. Although the legends containing this account are not all
found among Teutonic peoples, it cannot be deemed irrelevant to draw
attention to the fact that similar fights are mentioned as the daily
occupation of the heroes who attain to Valhalla, just as the nightly
feasts of that roystering paradise correspond to the refreshments
provided for the warriors around the tables of stone in their
subterranean retreats. Whatever may have been the creed of other
European races, it is hardly to be doubted that in these German
superstitions we have an approach to the primitive belief, of which the
Eddaic Valhalla was a late and idealized development.

But we may--nay, we must--go further. For in the history of traditional
religions goddesses have been as popular as gods; and if we are right in
seeing, with Grimm, the archaic gods in the Hidden Heroes, some where
we must find their mates, the corresponding goddesses. We have already
had glimpses of them in Morgan the Fay, in the Emperor Frederick's
lady-housekeeper (_ausgeberin_) and in the maid who in another saga
attended on his bidding. The lady-housekeeper is expressly called in one
story Dame Holle. Now Dame Holle herself is the leader of a Furious
Host, or Wild Hunt, and has been identified by Grimm beyond any doubt as
a pagan goddess, like Berchta.

Let us take another story in which the female companion of the enchanted
hero appears. Near the town of Garz, on the island of Rügen, lies a lake
by which a castle formerly stood. It belonged to an old heathen king,
whose avarice heaped up great store of gold and jewels in the vaults
beneath. It was taken and destroyed by the Christians, and its owner was
transformed into a great black dog ever watching his treasure. Sometimes
he is still seen in human form with helm, or golden crown, and coat of
mail, riding a grey horse over the city and the lake; sometimes he is
met with by night in the forest, wearing a black fur cap and carrying a
white staff. It is possible to disenchant him, but only if a pure
virgin, on St. John's night between twelve and one o'clock, will
venture, naked and alone, to climb the castle wall and wander backwards
to and fro amid the ruins, until she light upon the spot where the
stairway of the tower leads down into the treasure chamber. Slipping
down, she will then be able to take as much gold and jewels as she can
carry, and what she cannot herself carry the old king will bring after
her, so that she will be rich for the rest of her life. But she must
return by sunrise, and she must not once look behind her, nor speak a
single word, else not only will she fail, but she will perish miserably.
A princess who was accused of unchastity obtained her father's
permission to try this adventure, in order to prove the falsehood of the
charge against her. She safely gained the vault, which was illuminated
with a thousand lights. The king, a little grey old man, bestowed the
treasure upon her, and sent a number of servants laden with it to follow
her. All would have gone well, but unhappily when she had climbed a few
of the old steps she looked round to see if the servants were coming. At
once the king changed into a great black dog, that sprang upon her with
fiery throat and glowing eyes. She just had time to scream out when the
door slammed to, the steps sank, and she fell back into the vault in
darkness. She has sat there now for four hundred years, waiting until a
pure youth shall find his way down in the same manner on St. John's
night, shall bow to her thrice and silently kiss her. He may then take
her hand and lead her forth to be his bride; and he will inherit such
riches as a whole kingdom cannot buy.[172]

But goddesses do not always play so secondary a part. In a wood in
Pomerania stands a round, flat hill called the Castle Hill, and at its
foot lies a little lake known as the Hertha Lake. By its name it is thus
directly connected with one of the old divinities, like that lake on the
island of Rügen referred to in Chapter IV. And here, too, a mysterious
lady has been seen to wash, a young and lovely maiden, clad in
black--not in secret, as in the former instance, but openly, as if for
the purpose of attracting attention from passers-by, and of being spoken
to. At last a broad-shouldered workman, named Kramp, ventured to give
the maiden "the time of day," and to get her into conversation. She told
him she was a princess, who, with her castle, had been from time
immemorial enchanted, and that she was still waiting for her deliverer.
The mode of loosing the spell was by carrying her on his back in silence
to the churchyard of Wusseken and there putting her down, being careful
not to look round the while; for, happen what would, he could take no
harm, even if it were threatened to tear his head off. He undertook the
task, and had nearly accomplished it without troubling in the least
about the troops of spirits which followed him, when suddenly, as he
drew near the churchyard, a hurricane arose and took his cap off.
Forgetful of his promise, he looked round; and the maiden rose into the
air, weeping and crying out that she could never be delivered now. A
story told in Mecklenburg is more picturesque. It concerns the daughter
of a lake-king, who leagued himself with other knights against a robber,
the owner of a castle called the Glamburg, which was a place of some
strength, being entirely surrounded by the water of the Lake of Glam.
The confederates were defeated; and nine large round barrows were raised
the next day over the slain, among whom was the lake-king. His daughter
wept upon her father's grave, and her tears, as they touched the earth,
became lovely blue flowers. These flowers still grow upon the loftiest
of the nine barrows, while the others are quite destitute of them. The
princess threw herself that night--it was St. John's night--into the
lake; and now every year on St. John's night, between twelve and one
o'clock, a bridge of copper rises out of the lake, and the princess
appears upon it, sighing for her deliverance.[173]

The typical form of the tale is as follows: In the Buchenberg by Doberan
dwells an enchanted princess, who can only be released once in a hundred
years, on St. John's Day between twelve and one. In the year 1818 a
servant boy was watching sheep on the eastern side of the Buchenberg the
day before St. John's day. About noon a white lady appeared to him and
told him that he could deliver her, if he would, the next day at the
same hour, kiss her. She would then come to him in the form of a toad
with a red band round its neck. The shepherd promised; but the next day
when he saw the toad he was so horrified that he ran away. A variant
records the hour as between twelve and one at night, and the form of the
lady as a snake which sought to twine round the shepherd's neck. A
great treasure buried in the hill would have been his had he stood the
proof; but now the lady will have to wait until a beech tree shall have
grown up on the spot and been cut down, and of its timber a cradle made:
the child that is rocked in that cradle will have power to save her.
This is in effect the story told by Sir John Maundeville concerning the
daughter of Hippocrates, the renowned physician, who was said to have
been enchanted by Diana on the island of Cos, or (as he calls it) Lango,
and given with so much of Mr. William Morris' power in "The Earthly
Paradise."[174] "Then listen!" says the damsel in the ruined castle to
the seaman whom she meets--

    "Then listen! when this day is overpast,
      A fearful monster I shall be again,
    And thou may'st be my saviour at the last,
      Unless, once more, thy words are nought and vain;
      If thou of love and sovereignty art fain,
    Come thou next morn, and when thou seest here
    A hideous dragon, have thereof no fear,

    "But take the loathsome head up in thine hands,
      And kiss it, and be master presently
    Of twice the wealth that is in all the lands,
      From Cathay to the head of Italy;
      And master also, if it pleaseth thee,
    Of all thou praisest as so fresh and bright,
    Of what thou callest crown of all delight."

           *       *       *       *       *

    "Ah, me! to hold my child upon my knees,
    After the weeping of unkindly tears,
    And all the wrongs of these four hundred years."

But the horrible apparition of the dragon was too much for the
adventurer's courage:

      "He cried out and wildly at her smote,
    Shutting his eyes, and turned and from the place
    Ran swiftly, with a white and ghastly face,"

to die within three days, a raving maniac. And

        "Never any man again durst go
    To seek her woman's form, and end her wo."

It would be too tedious to run through even a small proportion of the
examples of this tale, almost innumerable in Germany alone. Fortunately,
it will only be necessary to allude to a few of its chief features. When
the enchanted princess assumes a monstrous form, the usual ordeal of the
would-be deliverer is to kiss her. A toad or a snake is, perhaps, her
favourite form; but occasionally she is half woman, half toad, or half
woman, half snake. Further transformations now and then take place, as
from a snake into a fiery dog, or from a bear into a lion, from a lion
into a snake. Sometimes as a bear alone she threatens her deliverer. In
a Carinthian saga he is to cut three birch rods at the full of the moon,
and then wait at the appointed place. The damsel approaches in the guise
of a snake, with a bunch of keys in her mouth, and menaces him, hissing
and snorting fire. Unmoved by the creature's rage, he is to strike her
thrice on the head with each rod and take the keys from her mouth. In
the Duchy of Luxemburg the favourite form assumed by the princess is
that of a fire-breathing snake, bearing in her mouth a bunch of keys, or
a ring; and the deliverer's task then is to take the keys or ring away
with his own mouth. It is believed that Melusina, whose story we shall
deal with in the following chapters, is enchanted beneath the Bockfels,
a rock near the town of Luxemburg. There she appears every seventh year
in human form and puts one stitch in a smock. When she shall have
finished sewing the smock she will be delivered; but woe then to the
town! for its ruins will be her grave and monument. Men have often
undertaken her earlier deliverance. This is to be effected at midnight,
when she appears as a snake, by taking with the mouth a key from her
mouth and flinging it into the Alzet. No one, however, has yet succeeded
in doing this; and meantime when a calamity threatens the town, whose
faithful guardian she is, she gives warning by gliding round the
Bockfels uttering loud laments.[175]

But in many of the sagas the princess meets her hero in her own proper
shape, and then the feat to be performed varies much more. In a Prussian
tale she comes out of a deep lake, which occupies the site of a
once-mighty castle, at sunset, clothed in black, and accompanied by a
black dog. The castle belonged to the young lady's parents, who were
wicked, though she herself was pious; and it was destroyed on account of
their evil doings. Since that time she has wandered around, seeking some
bold and pious man who will follow her into the depths of the lake, and
thus remove the curse. This would seem but another form of the tradition
of the lake at the foot of the Herthaburg on the isle of Rügen. In
another story the lady must be brought an unbaptized child to kiss. In
yet another the deliverer is led down through a dark underground passage
into a brilliantly lighted room, where sit three black men writing at a
table, and is bidden to take one of two swords which lie on the table
and strike off the enchanted lady's head. To cut off the head of a
bewitched person is an effectual means of destroying the spell. So, in
the Gaelic story of the Widow and her Daughters, the heroine
decapitates the horse-ogre, who thereupon returns to his true form as a
king's son, and marries her. A large number of parallel instances might
easily be given; but they would lead us too far afield. The lady of the
Princess Hill, near Warin, in Mecklenburg, has to be held fast from
midnight until one o'clock in spite of all frightful apparitions of
snakes, dragons, and toads which crowd around and threaten the
adventurer. In the same way Peleus, desiring to secure Thetis, had to
hold her fast through her various magical changes until she found
resistance useless, and returned to her true form. In a modern Cretan
tale the hero, by the advice of an old woman, seizes at night a Nereid
by the hair and holds her until the cock crows, in spite of her changes
successively into a dog, a snake, a camel, and fire. The process of
disenchanting Tam Lin, in the ballad of that name, was for his lady-love
to take him in her arms and hold him, notwithstanding his transformation
into a snake, a bear, a lion, a red-hot iron, and lastly into a "burning
gleed," when he was to be immediately flung into a well.[176]

We have already seen that the task is sometimes to carry the maiden to a
churchyard. At the Castle Hill of Bütow she was to be carried to the
Polish churchyard and there thrown to the ground with all the
deliverer's might. A castle is said to have stood formerly on the site
of Budow Mill in Eastern Pomerania. An enchanted princess now haunts the
place. She is only to be freed by a bachelor who will carry her in
silence, and without looking behind him, around the churchyard; but the
spirits which hold her under their spell will seek in every way to
hinder her deliverance. On the Müggelsberg is, or was (for it is said to
be now destroyed), a large stone under which a treasure lies. It was
called the Devil's Altar; and at night it often seemed, from the
neighbouring village of Müggelsheim, to be in a blaze; but on drawing
near the fire would vanish from sight. At Köpenick, another village not
far off, it was called the Princesses' Stone, but the lake at the foot
of the hill was called the Devil's Lake. The stone was said to occupy
the site of a castle, now enchanted and swallowed up in the earth.
Beneath it a hole ran deep into the mountain, out of which a princess
was sometimes of an evening seen to come, with a casket of pure gold in
her hand. He who would carry her thrice round the church of Köpenick
without looking about him, would win the casket of gold and deliver her.
The names of the stone and of the lake, as well as the attendant
circumstances, are strong evidence in favour of the conclusion that we
have in this superstition a relic of heathen times, and a record of some
divinity believed to reside at that spot. A princess, clad in white and
having a golden spinning-wheel in her hand, was believed to appear on
the Castle Hill at Biesenthal, at midday. Once at midnight she appeared
to a gardener who had often heard voices at night summoning him to the
castle garden. At first he was frightened at the vision, but at length
consented to carry her to the church, which stands near the hill. He
took her on his back; but when he entered the churchyard gate he
suddenly met a carriage drawn by coal-black horses, which vomited fire.
So terrified was he that he shrieked aloud, whereupon the carriage
vanished, and the princess flew away moaning: "For ever lost!" In a case
where a prince had been enchanted, the feat was to wrestle with him
three nights in succession.[177]

But it was not always that so hard a task was set before the deliverer.
To our thinking, it says little for the German way of doing business
that the difficulty in unspelling the castle near Lossin, and the
maiden who dwelt therein, was to buy a pair of shoes without bargaining
and cheapening their price, but to pay for them exactly the piece of
money which the maiden handed to the youth who undertook the enterprise.
In another case a maiden was seen to scour a kettle at a little lake.
She was enchanted. The man who beheld her thought the kettle would prove
useful at his approaching wedding, and borrowed it on the express
condition of returning it at a fixed time. He failed to do so, and the
Evil One came and fetched it; and the maiden had to wait longer for her
deliverance. There are stories similar to this of fairies lending such
articles on this condition. If the condition be not complied with, the
fairies are never seen again. Aubrey relates that in the vestry of
Frensham Church, in Surrey, is a great kettle, which was borrowed from
the fairies who lived in the Borough Hill, about a mile away. It was not
returned according to promise, and though afterwards taken back, it was
not received, nor since that time had there been any borrowing
there.[178]

A man who was in the habit of meeting in a certain wood an adder, which
always sneezed thrice as he passed, consulted his parish priest on the
subject. The priest advised him to say the next time, as he would to a
human friend who sneezed: "God help thee!" The man did so, whereupon the
adder shot forth before him with fiery body and terrible rattling, so
startling him that he turned and fled. The snake hurried after him,
crying out that it would not hurt him, but that if he would take (not,
however, with naked hands) the bunch of keys that hung about its neck,
it would then lead the way to a great treasure and make him happy. He
turned a deaf ear to these entreaties; and as he ran away he heard the
snake exclaim that now it must remain enchanted until yon little oak
tree had grown great, and a cradle had been made out of the timber: the
first child that lay in that cradle would be able to deliver it. The
same incident reappears in another saga, in which some men passing
through the forest hear a sneeze, and one of them says: "God help thee!"
The sneeze and the blessing are repeated; but when the sneeze was heard
a third time, the man exclaimed: "Oh, go to the devil!" "I believe
somebody is making game of us," said another. But a mannikin stepped
forward and said: "If you had said a third time 'God help thee!' I
should have been saved. Now I must wait until an acorn falls from yonder
tree and becomes an oak, and a cradle is made out of its timber. The
child that comes to lie in that cradle will be able to deliver me." In
this case all that was required was a thrice-repeated blessing. Another
curious means of deliverance is found in a story from Old Strelitz.
There an enchanted princess haunted a bridge a short distance from one
of the gates of the town, on the road to Woldegk. Whoever in going over
this bridge uttered a certain word, could unspell her if he would
afterwards allow her to walk beside him the rest of the way over the
bridge without speaking; but the difficulty was that nobody knew what
the powerful word was.[179]

Two other legends may be noticed on the mode of undoing the spell. The
White Lady who haunts the White Tower on the White Hill at Prague was
married to a king. She betrayed him, and married his enemy, from whom
she subsequently fled with an officer of his army. She was, however,
caught, and walled up in the White Tower. From this she may be delivered
if she can find any one who will allow her to give him three stabs in
the breast with a bayonet without uttering a sound. Once she prevailed
on a young recruit, who was placed as sentinel before the magazine of
the castle, to stand the necessary trial; but on receiving the first
blow he could not forbear crying aloud: "Jesus! Mary! thou hast given
it me!" Another old castle in Bohemia has twelve ladies enchanted by day
as fish in the fountain of the castle garden, and appearing only at
night in their true shape. They can not be disenchanted unless by twelve
men who will remain in the castle for twelve months without once going
outside the walls.[180]

These bring us to a number of _märchen_ in which the bespelled heroine
is released by a youth who suffers torture on her account. The
Transylvanian gipsies tell a tale of a very poor man who, instructed by
a dream, climbed a certain mountain and found a beautiful maiden before
a cavern, spinning her own golden hair. She had been sold by her
heartless parents to an evil spirit, who compelled her to this labour;
but she could be saved if she could find any one willing to undergo in
silence, for her sake, an hour's torture from the evil spirit on three
successive nights. The man expressed himself ready to make the attempt;
he entered the cave, and at midnight a gigantic Prikulich, or evil
spirit, appeared, and questioned him as to who he was and what he wanted
there. Failing to get any reply, the Prikulich flung him to the ground
and danced about madly on him. The man endured without a moan; and at
one o'clock the Prikulich disappeared. The second night the man was
beaten with a heavy hammer, and so tortured that the maiden had great
difficulty in persuading him to stand the third proof. While she was
praying him, however, to stay, the Prikulich appeared the third time,
and beat him again with the hammer until he was half dead. Then the
goblin made a fire and flung him into it. The poor fellow uttered not a
single sound, in spite of all this torment; and the maiden was saved and
wedded her deliverer. This is a tale by no means uncommon. Want of space
forbids us to follow it in detail, but a few references in the note
below will enable the reader to do so if he please. Meantime, I will
only say that sometimes the princess who is thus to be rescued is
enchanted in the form of a snake, sometimes of a she-goat, sometimes of
a bird; and in one of the stories she herself, in the shape of a monster
like a hedgehog, comes out of a coffin to tear the hero in pieces.[181]
The group is allied, on the one hand, to that of Fearless Johnny who,
passing the night in a haunted house, expelled the ghosts, or goblins,
which had taken possession of it; on the other hand, to that of the
Briar Rose, illustrated by Mr. Burne Jones' series of paintings.

The Briar Rose, or The Beauty of Sleeping Wood, as it comes to us from
Perrault's hands, is the story of a maiden who was cursed by an offended
fairy to pierce her hand with a spindle and to die of it--a curse
afterwards mitigated into a sleep of a hundred years. Every effort was
made by the king, her father, to avert the doom, but in vain; and for a
whole century the princess and all her court remained in the castle in a
magical sleep, while the castle itself and all within it were protected
from intrusion by an equally magical growth of brambles and thorns,
which not only prevented access, but entirely hid it from view. At
length a king's son found his way in at the very moment the fated period
came to an end; or, as we have it in other versions, he awakened the
maiden with a kiss. In the old stories of the Niblungs and the Volsungs
Odin has pricked the shield-maid Brynhild with a sleep-thorn, and thus
condemned her to sleep within the shield-burg on Hindfell. Attracted by
the appearance of fire, Sigurd comes to the shield-burg and, finding
Brynhild, releases her from her slumber by ripping up her armour with
his sword. This is chronologically the earliest form of the myth of the
Enchanted Princess with which we are acquainted; and it is interwoven
with the very fibres of the Teutonic mythology. It is no wonder,
therefore, that the Germans have given it so prominent a place in their
folklore. So far as now appears it is less conspicuous in the folklore
of the other European races with the exception of the Slaves, and when
it does show itself it shows itself chiefly as a _märchen_. But,
although what we know of the folklore of the Teutonic and Slavonic races
may suggest reasons for this, we must not forget how rarely we can
dogmatize with safety on national characteristics. To this rule the
folklore of a nation is no exception; nay, rather, the rule applies with
a double emphasis to a subject the scientific investigation of which has
so lately begun and has yet achieved so little.

Declining this speculation, therefore, we turn to a last point in the
sagas before us, namely, the propitious time for the disenchantment.
Different times of the year are spoken of for this purpose. In some
stories it is Advent, or New Year's night, when the lady makes her
appearance and may be delivered. In a Pomeranian saga, where a woman
cursed her seven daughters and they became mice, a woman, who is of the
same age as the mother when she uttered the curse, must come with seven
sons of the same ages as the daughters were when they were cursed, on
Good Friday at noon, to the thicket where the mice are, and put her sons
on a certain round stone there. The seven mice will then return to human
shape; and when the children are old enough they will marry, and become
rich and happy for the rest of their lives. A Carinthian tale requires
the deliverer to come the next full moon after "May-Sunday"; and
May-night is the date fixed in another case. But the favourite time is
St. John's Day, either at noon or midnight.[182] Some of these days are
ecclesiastical festivals; but perhaps the only one which has not
superseded an ancient heathen feast is Good Friday. The policy of the
Church, in consecrating to Christian uses as many as possible of the
seasons and customs she found already honoured among the peoples she had
conquered, seized upon their holy days and made them her own. And if the
science of Folklore has taught us anything, it is that the observances
on these converted holy days external to the rites demanded by the
Church are relics of the ceremonies performed in pagan days to pagan
deities. In none of these instances has the proof been more conclusive
than in that of St. John's, or Midsummer Day. Grimm, first, with
abundant learning, and more recently Mr. Frazer, with a wealth of
illustration surpassing that of Grimm himself, and indeed inaccessible
in his day, have shown that the Midsummer festival was kept in honour of
the sun; that it consisted of the ceremonial kindling of fire, the
gathering and use of floral garlands, the offering of human and other
sacrifices, and the performance of sacred dances; and that its object
was to increase the power of the sun by magical sympathy, to obtain a
good harvest and fruitfulness of all creatures, and to purge the sins of
the people. It was, in fact, the chief ceremony of the year among the
European races.

Prominent among the remnants of these ceremonies continued down to
modern days are the Midsummer bonfires. These were lighted on the tops
of mountains, hills, or even barrows. This situation may be thought to
have symbolic reference to the solstice; but probably a still more
powerful reason for it was the already sacred character of such places.
But we need hardly consider whether the ceremonies of which the bonfires
are the remnant, were observed on the hill-tops and other high places
because the latter were already sacred, or, conversely, the hill tops
and other high places were held sacred because of the ceremonies enacted
there; for in either case the sanctity remains. Wells and pools, too,
many of them still held sacred, were in various ways the objects of
superstition at the Midsummer festival; for which the Church, when she
chose to take the practices under her protection, had an ample excuse in
St. John's mission to baptize.[183] Now, whatever spots were the haunt
of pagan divinities, there it was doubtless that those divinities were
expected to appear; and by the same reasoning they would be most likely
to appear during the favoured hours of the holy days. This is exactly
what we find to be the case with Enchanted Princesses, and, so far as
the days are recorded, with Sleeping Heroes. The heroes lie within the
hills, which in many legends are only open on certain days. The
princesses appear upon the hills, or by the sides of pools, the sites,
if we believe the legends, of ancient castles where they dwelt. Once in
the year, or once in a cycle of years, on a certain day, usually
Midsummer Day or Midsummer Eve, they come to wash, or to fetch water, in
their own form, either compelled or permitted by the terms of the curse
that has bound them; and then it is that mortals are admitted to an
interview and may render them the service of disenchantment. The
instances in which the days are specified are so frequent we may perhaps
suspect that they were originally mentioned in all, but that time and
other circumstances have caused them to be forgotten. However this may
be, it is only reasonable to conclude that, in the number of instances
remaining, we have a tradition of the honours long ago paid to these
degraded divinities on the days appointed for their worship.

I may be going too far in suggesting that the feats to be performed
afford some confirmation of this conclusion; yet it seems to me there is
much to be said for such an opinion. The appearance of a god in animal
form--even in a loathsome animal form--would not derogate from his
essential godhead. Where in these stories the deliverer has to deal with
an animal, a kiss is the usual task prescribed. Kissing is a very
ancient and well-known act of worship, which survives among us in many a
practice of the Roman Catholic Church, as well as in the form of oath
taken daily in our law courts; and it may be that the more repulsive the
object to be kissed, the greater the merit of kissing it. Again, the
lady who required to be followed into the depths of a lake may be
matched with the goddess Hertha, whose slaves were drowned in the
self-same waters wherein they had washed her; nor does it seem more
menial to carry a princess than to wash a goddess. The ceremony of
carrying may indeed be the relic of a solemn procession, or of a sacred
drama. The words of blessing following on a sneeze need no explanation;
and the omission to return at the promised time a borrowed kettle would
be more likely to provoke the anger of a god than to retard the
deliverance of a mortal. This is implied by the statement that the devil
fetched the kettle himself; and we need have little doubt that in an
earlier form the story so described it. I am unable to explain the
unknown word which would deliver the lady who haunted the bridge at Old
Strelitz, unless it be a reminiscence of an incantation.

There remain the demand for an unbaptized child to kiss, the torture to
which the heroes of the two Bohemian sagas submit, the requirement in
the Pomeranian tale to place seven brothers on the stone haunted by the
seven mice, and lastly the personal violence to the damsel involved in
striking her with a birch-rod or a bunch of juniper and in beheadal. In
all these we probably have traces of sacrifice. The offering of an
innocent child is familiar, if not comprehensible, enough to any one who
has the most superficial acquaintance with savage rites. We have already
seen that an unbaptized child is regarded as a pagan, and is an object
of desire on the part of supernatural beings. The same reasons which
induce fairies to steal it would probably render it an acceptable
offering to a pagan divinity. No words need be wasted on the torture, or
the tale of the mice. But the personal violence, if indeed the remnant
of a tradition of sacrifice, involves the slaughter of the divinity
herself. This might be thought an insuperable objection; but it is not
really so. For, however absurd it may seem to us, it is a very
widespread custom to sacrifice to a divinity his living representative
or incarnation, whether in animal or human form. It is believed in such
cases that the victim's spirit, released by sacrifice, forthwith finds a
home in another body. The subject is too vast and complex to be
discussed here at length; the reader who desires to follow it out can do
so in Mr. Frazer's profoundly interesting work on "The Golden Bough."
Assuming, however, the custom and belief, as here stated, to be
admitted, it will be seen that the underlying thought is precisely that
which we want in order to explain this mode of disenchantment. For if,
on the one hand, what looks like murder be enjoined in a number of
stories for the purpose of disenchanting a bewitched person; and if, on
the other hand, the result of solemnly slaughtering a victim be in fact
held to be simply the release of the victim's spirit--nay, if it was the
prescribed mode of releasing that spirit--to seek a new, sometimes a
better, abode in a fresh body, we may surely be satisfied that both
these have the same origin. We may then go further, and see in this
unspelling incident, performed, as in the Enchanted Princess stories, in
this way, at a haunted spot, frequently on a day of special sanctity,
one more proof that the princess herself was in the earlier shape of
the traditions no other than a goddess.

Finally: the myth of the Enchanted Princess has preserved in many of its
variants a detail more archaic than any in that of the Sleeping Hero,
and one which is decisive as to the lady's real status. If Frederick
were to arise and come forth from his sleeping-place, the Kyffhäuser
itself would remain. If Arthur were to awake and quit the Castle Rock,
the rock itself wherein he lay would still be there. But the lake or
mountain haunted by an enchanted maiden often owes its very existence,
if not to her, at least to the spell which holds her enthralled. When
she is delivered the place will be changed: the lake will give way to a
palace; the earth will open and a buried castle will reascend to the
surface; what is now nothing but an old grey boulder will forthwith
return to its previous condition of an inhabited and stately building;
or what is now a dwelling of men will become desolate. One of the best
examples of this is the superstition I have already cited concerning
Melusina. When she finishes her needlework she will be disenchanted, but
only to die; and the ruins of the town of Luxemburg will be her grave
and monument. In other words, the existence of the town is bound up with
her enchantment,--that is to say, with her life. In the same way the
bespelled damsel of the Urschelberg, near Pfullingen, in Swabia, is
called by the very name of the mountain--the Old Urschel. This can only
be the survival of a belief in the enchanted lady as the indwelling
spirit, the soul, the real life of the spot she haunted: a belief which
goes back to a deeper depth of savagery than one that regards her as a
local goddess, and out of which the latter would be easily
developed.[184]

These considerations by no means exhaust the case; but I have said
enough in support of conclusions anticipated by Grimm's clear-sighted
genius and confirmed by every fresh discovery. Let me, therefore,
recapitulate the results of the investigations contained in this and the
two preceding chapters. We have rapidly examined several types of fairy
tales in which the hero, detained in Fairyland, is unconscious of the
flight of time. These tales are characteristic of a high rather than a
low stage of civilization. Connected with them we have found the story
of King Arthur, the Sleeping Hero, "_rex quondam, rex que futurus_," the
expected deliverer, sometimes believed to be hidden beneath the hills,
at other times in a far-off land, or from time to time traversing the
world with his band of attendants as the Wild Hunt. This is a tradition
of a heathen god put down by Christianity, but not destroyed in the
hearts and memories of the people--a tradition independent of political
influences, but to which oppression is apt to give special and enduring
vitality. The corresponding tradition concerning a heathen goddess is
discovered in the Enchanted Princess of a thousand sagas, whose peculiar
home, if they have one, is in Teutonic and Slavonic countries.


FOOTNOTES:

[166] Howells, p. 120; "Count Lucanor," p. 77.

[167] Knowles, p. 17.

[168] Im Thurn, pp. 352, 354. _Cf._ Brett, p. 375. So Leland, p. 3: "The
Indian _m'téoulin_, or magician, distinctly taught that every created
thing, animate or inanimate, had its indwelling spirit. Whatever had an
_idea_ had a soul."

[169] _Cf._ Grimm, "Teut. Myth." p. 962, quoting Harry, "Nieders.
Sagen"; Jahn, p. 228, quoting Temme. Many of the sanctuaries of the
Celts were upon mounds, which were either barrows of the dead, or were
expressly made for temples; and the god was called in Irish _Cenn
Cruaich_, in Welsh _Penn Cruc_ (now _Pen Crûg_), both meaning the Head
or Chief of the Mound (Rhys, "Hibbert Lectures," p. 201). Many mounds in
England, now crowned by churches, have been conjectured to be old Celtic
temples. See an able paper by Mr. T. W. Shore on "Characteristic
Survivals of the Celts in Hampshire," _Journ. Anthrop. Inst._, vol. xx.
p. 9. Mont St. Michel, near Carnac, in Brittany, is a chambered barrow
surmounted by a little chapel. From the relics found in the tomb, as
well as the size of the barrow itself, some person, or persons, of
importance must have been buried there. The mound may well have been a
haunted, a sacred spot ever since the ashes of the dead and their costly
weapons and ornaments were committed to its keeping far back in the
Neolithic age. Instances might easily be multiplied.

[170] Müller, p. 203; Map, Dist. iv. c. 13.

[171] Gerv. Tilb., Dec. ii. c. 12; "Book of Days," vol. i. p. 154;
Augustine, "De Civ. Dei," l. ii. c. 25.

[172] Jahn, p. 182, quoting Arndt.

[173] Knoop, p. 10; Bartsch, vol. i. p. 273.

[174] Bartsch, vol. i. p. 271; "Early Trav.," p. 138.

[175] Bartsch, vol. i. pp. 269 (citing Niederhöffer, below), 271, 272,
273, 274, 318. In this last case it is a man who is to be saved by a
kiss from a woman while he is in serpent form. Niederhöffer, vol. i. pp.
58, 168, vol. ii. p. 235; Meier, pp. 6, 31, 321; Kuhn und Schwartz, pp.
9, 201; Baring-Gould, p. 223, citing Kornemann, "Mons Veneris," and
Prætorius, "Weltbeschreibung"; Jahn, p. 220; Rappold, p. 135. Gredt, pp.
8, 9, 215, 228, &c. In one of Meier's Swabian tales the princess appears
as a snake and flings herself round the neck of her would-be
deliverer--a woman--who is to strike her lightly with a bunch of
juniper: Meier, p. 27. In one of Kuhn und Schwartz' collection, where
the princess becomes a toad, no ceremony is prescribed: Kuhn und
Schwartz, p. 9.

[176] Von Tettau, p. 220; Kuhn, pp. 66, 99; Bartsch, vol. i. p. 272;
Jahn, p. 249; Ovid, "Metam." l. xi. f. 5; Child, vol. i. pp. 336 (citing
Schmidt, "Volkleben der Neugriechen," p. 115), 340.

[177] Knoop, pp. 6, 57; Kuhn, pp. 113, 172; Kuhn und Schwartz, p. 1. The
prohibition to look back was imposed on Orpheus when he went to rescue
Eurydice from Hades.

[178] Knoop, pp. 51, 59; Keightley, p. 295, quoting Aubrey's "Natural
History of Surrey"; "Gent. Mag. Lib." (Pop. Supers.), p. 280.

[179] Meier, pp. 209, 87; Niederhöffer, vol. iii. p. 251.

[180] Grohmann, pp. 56, 50.

[181] Von Wlislocki, p. 76; Campbell, vol. ii. p. 293; Luzel, "Contes,"
vol. i. pp. 198, 217; "Annuaire des Trad. Pop." 1887, p. 53; Pitré, vol.
v. pp. 238, 248; Grundtvig, vol. i. p. 148; Schneller, pp. 103, 109.

[182] Meier, p. 26; Bartsch, vol. i. pp. 271, 272, 274; Jahn, p. 185;
Rappold, p. 135; Bartsch, vol. i. pp. 269, 270, 271, 272, 273, 283, 308,
318; Niederhöffer, vol. i. p. 168, vol. ii. p. 235, vol. iii. p. 171;
Knoop, p. 10; Jahn, pp. 182, 185, 206, 207, 217, 220, 221; and many
others.

[183] "Gent. Mag. Lib." (Pop. Superst.) p. 51; Brand, vol. i. p. 250,
note; Pitré, vol. xii. pp. 304, 307; Bartsch, vol. ii. p. 288;
"Antiquary," vol. xxi. p. 195, vol. xxii. p. 67. _Cf._ a legend in which
the scene haunted by the enchanted lady is a Johannisberg on the top of
which is a chapel dedicated to St. John the Baptist, to which
pilgrimages were made and the lady appeared on Midsummer Day (Gredt, pp.
215, 219, 225, 579).

[184] Von Tettau, p. 220; Kuhn und Schwartz, pp. 9, 200; Meier, pp. 6,
8; Gredt, pp. 7, 228, 281. In another story, quoted by Meier (p. 34),
from Crusius' "Schwäb. Chron.", the enchanted maiden is called "a
heathen's daughter"--pointing directly to pagan origin.




CHAPTER X.

SWAN-MAIDENS.

     The _märchen_ of Hasan of Bassorah--The Marquis of the Sun--The
     feather robe and other disguises--The taboo--The Star's
     Daughter--Melusina--The Lady of the Van Pool and other
     variants--The Nightmare.


The narratives with which we have hitherto been occupied belong to the
class called Sagas. But our discussions of them have led us once and
again to refer to the other class mentioned in the second Chapter--that
of Nursery Tales or _Märchen_. For, as I have already pointed out, there
is no bridgeless gulf between them. We have seen the very same incidents
narrated in Wales or in Germany with breathless awe as a veritable
occurrence which in India, or among the Arabs, are a mere play of fancy.
Equally well the case may be reversed, and what is gravely told at the
antipodes as a series of events in the life of a Maori ancestor, may be
reported in France or England as a nursery tale. Nay, we need not go out
of Europe itself to find the same plot serving for a saga in one land
and a _märchen_, detached from all circumstances of time and place, in
another.

An excellent example of this is furnished by the myth of the
Swan-maiden, one of the most widely distributed, and at the same time
one of the most beautiful, stories ever evolved from the mind of man. As
its first type I shall take the tale of Hasan of Bassorah, where it has
been treated with an epic grandeur hardly surpassed by any of its
companions in the famous "Nights," and perhaps only by one of the less
famous but equally splendid Mabinogion of old Wales.

Hasan is a worthless boy who falls under the influence of a Magian, who
professes to be an alchemist, and who at length kidnaps him. Having used
him with great cruelty the Magian takes him fifteen days' journey on
dromedaries into the desert to a high mountain, at the foot whereof the
old rascal sews him up in a skin, together with a knife and a small
provision of three cakes and a leathern bottle of water, afterwards
retiring to a distance. One of the vultures which infest the mountain
then pounces on Hasan and carries him to the top. In accordance with the
Magian's instructions, the hero, on arriving there, slits the skin, and
jumping out, to the bird's affright, picks up and casts down to the
Magian bundles of the wood which he finds around him. This wood is the
means by which the alchemy is performed; and having gathered up the
bundles the Magian leaves Hasan to his fate. The youth, after despairing
of life, finds his way to a palace where dwell seven maidens, with whom
he remains for awhile in Platonic friendship. When they are summoned
away by their father for a two months' absence, they leave him their
keys, straitly charging him not to open a certain door. He disregards
their wishes, and finds within a magnificent pavilion enclosing a basin
brimful of water, at which ten birds come to bathe and play. The birds
for this purpose cast their feathers; and Hasan is favoured with the
sight of "ten virgins, maids whose beauty shamed the brilliancy of the
moon." He fell madly in love with the chief damsel, who turns out to be
a daughter of a King of the Jann. On the return of the maidens of the
palace he is advised by them to watch the next time the birds come, and
to take possession of the feather-suit belonging to the damsel of his
choice, for without this she cannot return home with her attendants. He
succeeds in doing so, and thus compels her to remain with him and
become his wife. With her he departs to his own country and settles in
Bagdad, where his wife bears him two sons. During his temporary absence,
however, she persuades her mother-in-law--who, unfortunately for the
happiness of the household, lives with the young couple--to let her have
the feather-suit which her husband has left under her charge. Clad with
this she takes her two boys in her arms and sails away through the air
to the islands of Wák, leaving a message for the hapless Hasan that if
he loves her he may come and seek her there. Now the islands of Wák were
seven islands, wherein was a mighty host, all virgin girls, and the
inner isles were peopled by satans and marids and warlocks and various
tribesmen of the Jinn, and whoso entered their land never returned
thence; and Hasan's wife was one of the king's daughters. To reach her
he would have to cross seven wadys and seven seas and seven mighty
mountains. Undaunted, however, by the difficulties wherewith he is
threatened, he determines to find her, swearing by Allah never to turn
back till he regain his beloved, or till death overtake him. By the help
of sundry potentates of more or less forbidding aspect and supernatural
power, to whom he gets letters of introduction, and who live in gorgeous
palaces amid deserts, and are served by demons only uglier and less
mighty than themselves, he succeeds in traversing the Land of Birds, the
Land of Wild Beasts, the country of the Warlocks and the Enchanters, and
the Land of the Jinn, and enters the islands of Wák--there to fall into
the hands of that masterful virago, his wife's eldest sister. After a
preliminary outburst against Hasan, this amiable creature pours, as is
the wont of women, the full torrent of her wrath against her erring
sister. From the tortures she inflicts, Hasan at length rescues his
wife, with their two sons, by means of a cap of invisibility and a rod
conferring authority over seven tribes of the Jinn, which he has stolen
from two boys who are quarrelling over them. When his sister-in-law
with an army of Jinn pursues the fugitives, the subjects of the rod
overcome her. His wife begs for her sister's life and reconciles her
husband to her, and then returns with her husband to his home in Bagdad,
to quit him no more.[185]

Such in meagre outline is this wonderful story. Its variants are legion,
and I can only refer to a few of them which are of special interest. In
dealing with these I shall confine my attention to the essential points
of the plot, touching only such details as are germane to the questions
thus evoked. We shall accordingly pass in review the maiden's disguise
and capture, her flight and her recapture; and afterwards turning to
other types of the tale, we shall look at the corresponding incidents to
be met with therein, reserving for another chapter the consideration of
the meaning of the myth, so far as it can be traced.

The bird whose shape is assumed by the Jinn in the foregoing tale is not
specified; but in Europe, where beauty and grace and purity find so apt
an emblem in the swan, several of the most important variants have
naturally appropriated that majestic form to the heroine, and have thus
given a name to the whole group of stories. In Sweden, for example, we
are told of a young hunter who beheld three swans descend on the
seashore and lay their plumage aside before they plunged into the water.
When he looked at the robes so laid aside they appeared like linen, and
the forms that were swimming in the waves were damsels of dazzling
whiteness. Advised by his foster-mother, he secures the linen of the
youngest and fairest. She, therefore, could not follow her companions
when they drew on their plumage and flew away; and being thus in the
hunter's power, she became his wife. The hero of a story current among
the Germans of Transylvania opens, like Hasan, a forbidden door, and
finds three swan-maids bathing in a blue pool. Their clothes are
contained in satchels on its margin, and when he has taken the satchel
of the youngest he must not look behind until he has reached home. This
done, he finds the maiden there and persuades her to marry him. Mikáilo
Ivanovitch, the hero of a popular Russian ballad, wanders by the sea,
and, gazing out upon a quiet bay, beholds a white swan floating there.
He draws his bow to shoot her, but she prays him to desist; and rising
over the blue sea upon her white wings, she turns into a beautiful
maiden. Surprised with love, he offers to kiss her; but she reveals
herself as a heathen princess and demands first to be baptized, and then
she will wed him. In a Hessian story a forester sees a fair swan
floating on a lonely lake. He is about to shoot it when it warns him to
desist, or it will cost him his life. Immediately the swan was
transformed into a maiden, who told him she was bewitched, but could be
freed if he would say a Paternoster for her every Sunday for a
twelvemonth, and meantime keep silence concerning his adventure. The
test proved too hard, and he lost her.[186]

The swan, however, by no means monopolizes the honour of concealing the
heroine's form. In a Finnish tale from OEsterbotten, a dead father
appears in dreams to his three sons, commanding them to watch singly by
night the geese on the sea-strand. The two elder are so frightened by
the darkness that they scamper home. But the youngest, despised and
dirty, watches boldly, till at the first flush of dawn three geese fly
thither, strip off their feathers, and plunge, as lovely maidens, into
the water to bathe. Then the youth chooses the most beautiful of the
three pairs of wings he finds on the shore, hides them, and awaits
events; nor does he give them up again to the owner until she has
betrothed herself to him. Elsewhere the damsels are described as ducks;
but a more common shape is that of doves. A story is current in Bohemia
of a boy whom a witch leads to a spring. Over the spring stands an old
elm-tree haunted by three white doves, who are enchanted princesses.
Catching one and plucking out her wings, he restores her to her natural
condition; and she brings him to his parents, whom he had lost in the
sack of the city where they dwelt. The Magyars speak of three pigeons
coming every noontide to a great white lake, where they turn somersaults
and are transformed into girls. They are really fairy-maidens; and a boy
who can steal the dress of one of them and run away with it, resisting
the temptation to look back when she calls in caressing tones, succeeds
in winning her. In the "Bahar Danush" a merchant's son perceives four
doves alight at sunset by a piece of water, and, resuming their natural
form (for they are Peries), forthwith undress and plunge into the water.
He steals their clothes, and thus compels the one whom he chooses to
accept him as her husband. The extravagance characteristic of the
"Arabian Nights," when, in the story of Janshah, it represents the
ladies as doves, expands their figures to the size of eagles, with far
less effect, however, than where they retain more moderate dimensions.
No better illustration of this can be given than the story from South
Smaland of the fair Castle east of the Sun and north of the Earth,
versified so exquisitely in "The Earthly Paradise." There a peasant,
finding that the fine grass of a meadow belonging to him was constantly
trodden down during the summer nights, set his three sons, one after
another, to watch for the trespassers. The two elder, as usual in these
tales, are unsuccessful, but the youngest keeps wide awake until the sun
is about to rise. A rustling in the air, as of birds, then heralds the
flight of three doves, who cast their feathers and become fair maidens.
These maidens begin to dance on the green grass, and so featly do they
step that they scarce seem to touch the ground. To the watching youth,
one among them looked more beautiful than all other women; and he
pictured to himself the possession of her as more to be longed for than
that of every other in the world. So he rose and stole their plumage,
nor did he restore it until the king's daughter, the fairest of them
all, had plighted her troth to him.[187]

The story is by no means confined to Europe and Asia. The Arawàks, one
of the aboriginal tribes of Guiana, relate that a beautiful royal
vulture was once captured by a hunter. She was the daughter of Anuanima,
sovereign of a race whose country is above the sky, and who lay aside
there the appearance of birds for that of humanity. Smitten with love
for the hunter, the captive divested herself of her feathers and
exhibited her true form--that of a beautiful girl. "She becomes his
wife, bears him above the clouds, and, after much trouble, persuades her
father and family to receive him. All then goes well, until he expresses
a wish to visit his aged mother, when they discard him, and set him on
the top of a very high tree, the trunk of which is covered with
formidable prickles. He appeals pathetically to all the living creatures
around. Then spiders spin cords to help him, and fluttering birds ease
his descent, so that at last he reaches the ground in safety. Then
follow his efforts, extending over several years, to regain his wife,
whom he tenderly loves. Her family seek to destroy him; but by his
strength and sagacity he is victorious in every encounter. The birds at
length espouse his cause, assemble their forces, and bear him as their
commander above the sky. He is at last slain by a valiant young warrior,
resembling himself in person and features. It is his own son, born after
his expulsion from the upper regions, and brought up there in ignorance
of his own father. The legend ends with the conflagration of the house
of the royal vultures, who, hemmed in by crowds of hostile birds, are
unable to use their wings, and forced to fight and die in their human
forms."[188] This tale, so primitive in form, can hardly have travelled
round half the globe to the remote American Indians among whom it was
discovered. And yet in many of its features it presents the most
striking likeness to several of the versions current in the Old World.

Sometimes, however, as in the tale of Hasan, the species is left
undescribed. Among the Eskimo the heroine is vaguely referred to as a
sea-fowl. The Kurds have a strange tale of a bird they call the Bird
Simer. His daughter has been ensnared by a giant when she and three
other birds were out flying; but she is at length rescued by two heroes,
one of whom she weds. When she becomes homesick she puts on her
feather-dress and flies away.[189]

A Pomeranian saga forms an interesting link between the Swan-maiden
group and the legends of Enchanted Princesses discussed in the last
chapter. A huntsman, going his rounds in the forest, drew near a pool
which lies at the foot of the Hühnerberg. There he saw a girl bathing;
and thinking that she was from the neighbouring village, he picked up
her clothes, with the intention of playing her a trick. When she saw
what he had done, she left the water and hastened after him, begging him
to give back her clothes--or at any rate her shift. He, however, was not
to be moved; and she then told him she was an enchanted princess, and
without her shift she could not return. _Now_ he was fully determined
not to give up the precious article of apparel. She was, therefore,
compelled to follow him to his hut, where his mother kept house for him.
The huntsman there put the shift into a chest, of which he took the key,
so that the maiden could not escape; and after some time she accepted
the position, and agreed to become his wife. Years passed by, and
several children had been born, when one day he went out, leaving the
key of the chest behind. When the heroine saw this she begged her
mother-in-law to open the chest and show her the shift; for, we are
told, the enchanted princess could not herself open the trunk. She
begged so hard that her mother-in-law at last complied; and no sooner
had she got the shift into her hands than she vanished out of sight.
When the husband returned and heard what had happened, he made up his
mind to seek her. So he climbed the Hühnerberg and let himself down the
opening he found there. He soon arrived at the underground castle.
Before its closed gate lay a great black dog, around whose neck a paper
hung which conveniently contained directions how to penetrate into the
castle. Following these, he presently found himself in the presence of
the princess, his wife, who was right glad to see him, and gave him a
glass of wine to strengthen him for the task before him; for at midnight
the Evil One would come to drive him out of the castle and prevent the
lady's deliverance. At this point, unfortunately, the reciter's memory
failed: hence we do not know the details of the rescue. But we may
conjecture, from the precedents, that the huntsman had to endure
torture. The issue was that he was successful, the castle ascended out
of the earth, and husband and wife were reunited.[190]

This story differs in many important respects from the type; and it
contains the incident, very rare in a modern European saga belonging to
this group, of the recovery of the bride. I shall have occasion to
revert to the curious inability of the enchanted princess to open the
chest containing the wonderful shift. Meanwhile, let me observe that in
most of the tales the feather-dress, or talisman, by which the bride may
escape, is committed to the care of a third person--usually a kinswoman
of the husband, and in many cases his mother; and that the wife as a
rule only recovers it when it is given to her, or at least when that
which contains it has been opened by another: she seems incapable of
finding it herself.

There is another type of the Swan-maiden myth, which appears to be the
favourite of the Latin nations, though it is also to be met with among
other peoples. Its outline may, perhaps, best be given from the nursery
tale of the Marquis of the Sun, as told at Seville. The Marquis of the
Sun was a great gamester. A man played with him and lost all he had, and
then staked his soul--and lost it. The Marquis instructed him, if he
desired to recover it, to come to him when he had worn out a pair of
iron shoes. In the course of his wanderings he finds a struggle going on
over a dead man, whose creditors would not allow him to be buried until
his debts had been paid. Iron Shoes pays them, and one shoe goes to
pieces. He afterwards meets a cavalier, who reveals himself as the dead
man whose debts had been paid, and who is desirous of requiting that
favour. He therefore directs Iron Shoes to the banks of a river where
three white doves come, change into princesses, and bathe. Iron Shoes is
to take the dress of the smallest, and thus get her to tell him whither
he has to go. Obeying this direction, he learns from the princess that
the Marquis is her father; and she shows him the way to his castle.
Arrived there, he demands his soul. Before conceding it the Marquis sets
him tasks: to level an inconvenient mountain, so that the sun may shine
on the castle; to sow the site of the mountain with fruit trees, and
gather the fruit of them in one day for dinner; to find a piece of plate
which the Marquis's great-grandfather had dropped into the river; to
catch and mount a horse which is no other than the Marquis himself; and
to choose a bride from among the princesses, his daughters. The damsel
who had shown Iron Shoes the way to the palace performs the first two of
these tasks: and she teaches him how to perform the others. For the
third, he has to cut her up and cast her into the river, whence she
immediately rises whole again, triumphantly bringing the lost piece of
plate. In butchering her he has, however, clumsily dropped a piece of
her little finger on the ground. It is accordingly wanting when she
rises from the river; and this is the token by which Iron Shoes
recognizes her when he has to choose a bride; for, in choosing, he is
only allowed to see the little fingers of these candidates for
matrimony. He and his bride afterwards flee from the castle; but we need
not follow their adventures now.[191]

In stories of this type doves are the shape usually assumed by the
heroine and her comrades; but swans and geese are often found, and in a
Russian tale we are even introduced to spoonbills. Nor do the birds I
have mentioned by any means exhaust the disguises of these supernatural
ladies. The stories comprised under this and the foregoing type are
nearly all _märchen_; but when we come to other types where sagas become
more numerous, we find other animals favoured, well-nigh to the
exclusion of birds. In the latter types there is no recovery of the wife
when she has once abandoned her husband. An inhabitant of Unst, one of
the Shetland Islands, beholds a number of the sea-folk dancing by
moonlight on the shore of a small bay. Near them lie several sealskins.
He snatches up one, the property, as it turns out, of a fair maiden, who
thereupon becomes his wife. Years after, one of their children finds her
sealskin, and runs to display it to his mother, not knowing it was hers.
She puts it on, becomes a seal, and plunges into the waters. In Croatia
it is said that a soldier once, watching in a haunted mill, saw a
she-wolf enter, divest herself of her skin, and come out of it a damsel.
She hangs the skin on a peg and goes to sleep before the fire. While she
sleeps the soldier takes the skin and nails it fast to the mill-wheel,
so that she cannot recover it. He marries her, and she bears him two
sons. The elder of these children hears that his mother is a wolf. He
becomes inquisitive, and his father at length tells him where the skin
is. When he tells his mother, she goes away and is heard of no more. A
Sutherlandshire story speaks of a mermaid who fell in love with a
fisherman. As he did not want to be carried away into the sea he, by
fair means or foul, succeeded in getting hold of her pouch and belt, on
which her power of swimming depended, and so retained her on land; and
she became his bride. But we are not surprised to hear that her tail was
always in the way: her silky hair grew tangled too, for her comb and
glass were in the pouch; the dogs teased her, and rude people mocked
her. Thus her life was made wretched. But one day in her husband's
absence the labourers were pulling down a stack of corn. As she watched
them, weeping for her lost freedom, she espied her precious pouch and
belt, which had been built in and buried among the sheaves. She caught
it and leaped into the sea.[192]

In the last tale there is no change of form: the hero simply possesses
himself of something without which the supernatural maiden has no power
to leave him. Even in the true Hasan of Bassorah type, the magical
change does not always occur. A variant translated by Jonathan Scott
from a Syrian manuscript merely enwraps the descending damsels in robes
of light green silk. When her robe is taken the chosen beauty is kept
from following her companions in their return flight. Similar to this is
the Pomeranian saga already cited. In the New Hebrides there is a legend
of seven winged women whose home was in heaven, and who came down to
earth to bathe. Before bathing, they put off their wings. According to
the version told in Aurora island, Qatu one day, seeing them thus
bathing, took the wings of one and buried them at the foot of the main
post of his house. In this way he won their owner as his wife; and she
so remained until she found her wings again. In modern Greece it is
believed that Nereids can be caught by seizing their wings, their
clothes, or even their handkerchiefs. The Bulgarians, who have similar
tales, call the supernatural ladies Samodivas; and they are captured by
means of their raiment. A number of parallels have been cited from
various sources by M. Cosquin, a few of which may be mentioned. A
Burmese drama, for instance, sets before us nine princesses of the city
of the Silver Mountain, who wear enchanted girdles that enable them to
fly as swiftly as a bird. The youngest of these princesses is caught
while bathing, by means of a magical slip-knot. A divine ancestress of
the Bantiks, a tribe inhabiting the Celebes Islands, came down from the
sky with seven companions to bathe. A man who saw them took them for
doves, but was surprised to find that they were women. He possessed
himself of the clothes of one of them, and thus obliged her to marry
him. In a story told by the Santals of India, the daughters of the sun
make use of a spider's thread to reach the earth. A shepherd, whom they
unblushingly invite to bathe with them, persuades them to try which of
them all can remain longest under water; and while they are in the river
he scrambles out, and, taking the upper garment of the one whom he
loves, flees with it to his home. In another Indian tale, five apsaras,
or celestial dancers, are conveyed in an enchanted car to a pool in the
forest. Seven supernatural maidens, in a Samoyede _märchen_, are brought
in their reindeer chariot to a lake, where the hero possesses himself of
the best suit of garments he finds on the shore. The owner prays him to
give them up; but he refuses, until he obtains a definite pledge of
marriage, saying: "If I give thee the garments thou wilt fare up again
to heaven."[193]

In none of these stories (and they are but samples of many) does the
feather dress occur; yet it has left reminiscences which are
unmistakable. The variants hitherto cited have all betrayed these
reminiscences as articles of clothing, or conveyance, or in the
pardonable mistake of the Bantik forefather at the time of capture. I
shall refer presently to cases whence the plumage has faded entirely out
of the story--and that in spite of its picturesqueness--without leaving
a trace. But let me first call attention to the fact that, even where it
is preserved, we often do not find it exactly how and where we should
have expected it. Witness the curious Algonkin tale of "How one of the
Partridge's wives became a Sheldrake Duck." A hunter, we are told,
returning home in his canoe, saw a beautiful girl sitting on a rock by
the river, making a moccasin. He paddled up softly to capture her; but
she jumped into the water and disappeared. Her mother, however, who
lived at the bottom, compelled her to return to the hunter and be his
wife. The legend then takes a turn in the direction of the Bluebeard
myth; for the woman yields to curiosity, and thus deprives her husband
of his luck. When he finds this out he seizes his bow to beat her. "When
she saw him seize his bow to beat her she ran down to the river, and
jumped in to escape death at his hands, though it should be by drowning.
But as she fell into the water she became a sheldrake duck." The
Passamaquoddies, who relate this story, have hardly yet passed out of
the stage of thought in which no steadfast boundary is set between men
and the lower animals. The amphibious maiden, who dwelt in the bottom of
the river, could not be drowned by jumping into the stream; and it is
evident that she only resumes her true aquatic form in escaping from her
husband, who, it should be added, is himself called Partridge and seems
to be regarded as, in fact, a fowl of that species. A still more
remarkable instance is to be found among the Welsh of Carnarvonshire,
who, it need hardly be said, are now on a very different level of
civilization from that of the Passamaquoddies. They tell us that when
the fairy bride of Corwrion quitted her unlucky husband, she at once
flew through the air and plunged into the lake; and one account
significantly describes her as flying away _like a wood-hen_. Can it
have been many generations since she was spoken of as actually changing
into a bird?[194]

We may now pass to wholly different types of the tradition. In all the
stories where the magical dress appears, whether as a feather-skin, the
hide of a quadruped, or in the modified form of wings, a robe, an apron,
a veil or other symbol, the catastrophe is brought about by the wife's
recovery, usually more or less accidental, of the article in question.
But it is obvious that where the incident of the dress is wanting, the
loss of the supernatural bride must be brought about by other means. In
some traditions, the woman's caprice, or the fulfilment of her fate, is
deemed enough for this purpose; but in the most developed stories it is
caused by the breach of a _taboo_. _Taboo_ is a word adopted from the
Polynesian languages, signifying, first, something set apart, thence
holy and inviolable, and lastly something simply forbidden. It is
generally used in English as a verb of which the nearest equivalent is
another curious verb--to boycott. A person or thing _tabooed_ is one
avoided by express or tacit agreement on the part of any class or number
of persons; and _to taboo_ is to avoid in pursuance of such an
agreement. In Folklore, however, the word is used in a different and
wider sense. It includes every sort of prohibition, from the social or
religious boycott (if I may use the word), to which it would be more
properly applied, down to any injunction addressed by a supernatural
being to the hero or heroine of a tale. Folklore students of the
anthropological school are so apt to refer these last prohibitions for
their origin to the more general prohibitions of the former kind, that
perhaps this indiscriminate use of the word may be held to beg some of
the questions at issue. It is certain, however, that the scholars who
originally applied it to what I may call private prohibitions, had no
such thought in their minds. They found it a convenient term, applicable
by no great stretch of its ordinary meaning, and they appropriated it
to the purposes of science. I shall therefore use it without scruple as
a well recognized word, and without any question-begging intent.

Having premised so much, I will proceed to set forth shortly the balder
type of the story, where there is no taboo, then the fuller type. Their
relations to one another will be dealt with in the next chapter.

An Algonkin legend relates that a hunter beheld a basket descend from
heaven, containing twelve young maidens of ravishing beauty. He
attempted to approach, but on perceiving him they quickly re-entered the
basket and were drawn up again out of his sight. Another day, however,
he succeeded, by disguising himself as a mouse, in capturing the
youngest of the damsels, whom he married and by whom he had a son. But
nothing could console his wife for the society of her sisters, which she
had lost. So one day she made a small basket; and having entered it with
her child she sang the charm she and her sisters had formerly used, and
ascended once more to the star from whence she had come. It is added
that when two years had elapsed the star said to his daughter: "Thy son
wants to see his father; go down, therefore, to the earth and fetch thy
husband, and tell him to bring us specimens of all the animals he
kills." This was done. The hunter ascended with his wife to the sky; and
there a great feast was given, in which the animals he brought were
served up. Those of the guests who took the paws or the tails were
transformed into animals. The hunter himself took a white feather, and
with his wife and child was metamorphosed into a falcon.[195] I will
only now remark on the latter part of the tale that it is told by the
same race as the Sheldrake Duck's adventures; and if we deem it probable
that the heroine of that narrative simply resumed her pristine form in
becoming a duck, the same reasoning will hold good as to the falcons
here. This type of the myth we may call the "Star's Daughter type."

The other type may be named after Melusina, the famous Countess of
Lusignan. The earliest writer to mention the legend which afterwards
became identified with her name, was Gervase of Tilbury, who relates
that Raymond, the lord of a certain castle a few miles from Aix in
Provence, riding alone on the banks of the river, unexpectedly met an
unknown lady of rare beauty, also alone, riding on a splendidly
caparisoned palfrey. On his saluting her she replied, addressing him by
name. Astonished at this, but encouraged, he made improper overtures to
her; to which she declined to assent, intimating, however, in the most
unabashed way, that she would marry him if he liked. He agreed to this;
but the lady imposed a further condition, namely, that he should never
see her naked; for if once he did so, all the prosperity and all the
happiness with which he was about to be blessed would depart, and he
would be left to drag out the rest of his life in wretchedness. On these
terms they were married; and every earthly felicity followed,--wealth,
renown, bodily strength, the love of his fellow-men, and children--boys
and girls--of the greatest beauty. But one day his lady was bathing in
the bedroom, when he came in from hunting and fowling, laden with
partridges and other game. While food was being prepared the thought
struck him that he would go and see her in her bath. So many years had
he enjoyed unalloyed prosperity that, if there ever were any force in
her threat, he deemed it had long since passed away. Deaf to his wife's
pleadings, he tore away the curtain from the bath and beheld her naked;
but only for an instant, for she was forthwith changed into a serpent,
and, putting her head under the water, she disappeared. Nor ever was she
seen again; but sometimes in the darkness of night the nurses would
hear her busy with a mother's care for her little children. Gervase adds
that one of her daughters was married to a relative of his own belonging
to a noble family of Provence, and her descendants were living at the
time he wrote.[196]

The story, as told of Melusina, was amplified, but in its substance
differed little from the foregoing. Melusina does not forbid her husband
to see her naked, but bargains for absolute privacy on Saturdays. When
Raymond violates this covenant he finds her in her bath with her lower
extremities changed into a serpent's tail. The lady appears to be
unconscious of her husband's discovery; and nothing happens until, in a
paroxysm of anger and grief, arising from the murder of one of his
children by another, he cries out upon her as an odious serpent, the
contaminator of his race. It will be remembered that in the Esthonian
tale cited in Chapter VIII the youth is forbidden to call his mistress
mermaid; and all goes well until he peeps into the locked chamber, where
she passes her Thursdays, and finds her in mermaid form. Far away in
Japan we learn that the hero Hohodemi wedded Toyotamahime, a daughter of
the Sea-god, and built a house for her on the strand where she might
give birth to her child. She strictly forbade him to come near until the
happy event was over: he was to remain in his own dwelling, and on no
account to attempt to see her until she sent for him. His curiosity,
however, was too much for his happiness. He peeped, and saw his wife
writhing to and fro on the floor in the shape of a dragon. He started
back, shocked; and when, later on, Toyotamahime called him to her, she
saw by his countenance that he had discovered the secret she had thought
to hide from all mankind. In spite of his entreaties she plunged into
the sea, never more to see her lord. Her boy, notwithstanding, was still
the object of her care. She sent her sister to watch over him, and he
grew up to become the father of the first Emperor of Japan. In a Maori
tale the hero loses his wife through prematurely tearing down a screen
he had erected for her convenience on a similar occasion. A Moravian
tale speaks of a bride who shuts herself up every eighth day, and when
her husband looks through the keyhole, he beholds her thighs clad with
hair and her feet those of goats. This is a _märchen_; and in the end,
having paid the penalty of his rashness by undergoing adventures like
those of Hasan, the hero regains his love. A Tirolese _märchen_ tells us
of a witch who, in the shape of a beautiful girl, took service with a
rich man and made a conquest of his son. She wedded him on condition
that he would never look upon her by candlelight. The youth, like a
masculine Psyche, breaks the taboo; and a drop of the wax, falling on
her cheek, awakens her. It was in vain that he blew out the taper and
lay down. When he awoke in the morning she was gone; but a pair of shoes
with iron soles stood by the bed, with a paper directing him to seek her
till the soles were worn out, and then he should find her again. By the
aid of a mantle of invisibility, and a chair which bore him where he
wished, he arrived in the nick of time to prevent her marriage with
another bridegroom. The proper reconciliation follows, and her true
husband bears her home in triumph. Not so happy was the hero of a
Corsican saga, who insisted on seeing his wife's naked shoulder and
found it nothing but bones--the skeleton of their love which he had thus
murdered.[197]

At the foot of the steep grassy cliffs of the Van Mountains in
Carmarthenshire lies a lonely pool, called Llyn y Fan Fach, which is the
scene of a variant of Melusina, less celebrated, indeed, but equally
romantic and far more beautiful. The legend may still be heard on the
lips of the peasantry; and more than one version has found its way into
print. The most complete was written down by Mr. William Rees, of Tonn
(a well-known Welsh antiquary and publisher), from the oral recitation
of two old men and a woman, natives of Myddfai, where the hero of the
story is said to have dwelt. Stated shortly, the legend is to the
following effect: The son of a widow who lived at Blaensawdde, a little
village about three-quarters of a mile from the pool, was one day
tending his mother's cattle upon its shore when, to his astonishment, he
beheld the Lady of the Lake sitting upon its unruffled surface, which
she used as a mirror while she combed out her graceful ringlets. She
imperceptibly glided nearer to him, but eluded his grasp and refused the
bait of barley bread and cheese that he held out to her, saying as she
dived and disappeared:

    "Cras dy fara;
    Nid hawdd fy nala!"
    ("Hard-baked is thy bread;
    It is not easy to catch me!")

An offer of unbaked dough, or _toes_, the next day was equally
unsuccessful. She exclaimed:

    "Llaith dy fara!
    Ti ni fynna'."
    ("Unbaked is thy bread!
    I will not have thee.")

But the slightly baked bread, which the youth subsequently took, by his
mother's advice, was accepted: he seized the lady's hand and persuaded
her to become his bride. Diving into the lake she then fetched her
father--"a hoary-headed man of noble mien and extraordinary stature, but
having otherwise all the force and strength of youth"--who rose from the
depths with _two_ ladies and was ready to consent to the match, provided
the young man could distinguish which of the two ladies before him was
the object of his affections. This was no small test of love, inasmuch
as the maidens were exactly alike in form and features. One of them,
however, thrust her foot a little forward; and the hero recognized a
peculiarity of her shoe-tie, which he had somehow had leisure to notice
at his previous interviews. The father admits the correctness of his
choice, and bestows a dowry of sheep, cattle, goats, and horses, but
stipulates in the most business-like way that these animals shall return
with the bride, if at any time her husband prove unkind and strike her
thrice without a cause.

So far Mr. Rees' version. A version published in the "Cambro-Briton" is
somewhat different. Three beautiful damsels appear from the pool, and
are repeatedly pursued by the young farmer, but in vain. They always
reached the water before him and taunted him with the couplet:

    "Cras dy fara,
    Anhawdd ein dala!"

One day some moist bread from the lake came floating ashore. The youth
seized and devoured it; and the following day he was successful in
catching the ladies. The one to whom he offers marriage consents on the
understanding that he will recognize her the next day from among the
three sisters. He does so by the strapping of her sandal; and she is
accompanied to her new home by seven cows, two oxen, and a bull from the
lake. A third version presents the maiden as rowing on New Year's Eve up
and down the lake in a golden boat with a golden oar. She disappears
from the hero's gaze, without replying to his adjurations. Counselled by
a soothsayer, who dwells on the mountain, he casts loaves and cheese
night after night from Midsummer Eve to New Year's Eve into the water,
until at length the magic skiff again appears, and the fairy, stepping
ashore, weds her persistent wooer.

In all three versions the bridegroom is forbidden to strike "three
causeless blows." Of course he disobeys. According to the
"Cambro-Briton" version it happened that one day, preparing for a fair,
he desired his wife to go to the field for his horse. Finding her
dilatory in doing so, he tapped her arm thrice with his glove, saying,
half in jest: "Go, go, go!" The blows were slight, but they were blows;
and, the terms of the marriage contract being broken, the dame
departed--she and her cattle with her--back into the lake. The other two
accounts agree in spreading the blows over a much greater length of
time. Mr. Rees' version relates that once the husband and wife were
invited to a christening in the neighbourhood. The lady, however, seemed
reluctant to go, making the feminine excuse that the distance was too
far to walk. Her husband told her to fetch one of the horses from the
field. "I will," said she, "if you will bring me my gloves, which I left
in the house." He went, and, returning with the gloves, found that she
had not gone for the horse, so he jocularly slapped her shoulder with
one of the gloves, saying: "Go, go!" Whereupon she reminded him of the
condition that he was not to strike her without a cause, and warned him
to be more careful in future. Another time, when they were together at a
wedding, she burst out sobbing amid the joy and mirth of all around her.
Her husband touched her on the shoulder and inquired the cause of her
weeping. She replied: "Now people are entering into trouble; and your
troubles are likely to commence, as you have the second time stricken me
without a cause." Finding how very wide an interpretation she put upon
the "causeless blows," the unfortunate husband did his best to avoid
anything which could give occasion for the third and last blow. But one
day they were together at a funeral, where, in the midst of the grief,
she appeared in the highest spirits and indulged in immoderate fits of
laughter. Her husband was so shocked that he touched her, saying:
"Hush, hush! don't laugh!" She retorted that she laughed "because
people, when they die, go out of trouble"; and, rising up, she left the
house, exclaiming: "The last blow has been struck; our marriage contract
is broken, and at an end! Farewell!" Hurrying home, she called together
all her fairy cattle, walked off with them to the lake, and vanished in
its waters. Even a little black calf, slaughtered and suspended on the
hook, descended alive and well again to obey his mistress' summons; and
four grey oxen, which were ploughing, dragged the plough behind them as
they went, leaving a well-marked furrow, that remains to this day "to
witness if I lie." The remaining version, with some differences of
detail, represents the same eccentric pessimism on the lady's part
(presumably attributable to the greater spiritual insight of her
supernatural character), as the cause of the husband's not unwarranted
annoyance and of his breach of the agreement. She had borne him three
fair sons; and although she had quitted her husband for ever, she
continued to manifest herself occasionally to them, and gave them
instruction in herbs and medicine, predicting that they and their issue
would become during many generations the most renowned physicians in the
country.[198]

Such is the legend of the Van Pool. It has a number of variants, both in
Wales and elsewhere, the examination of which I postpone for the
present. Hitherto I have been guided in the mention of variants of this
myth chiefly by the desire of showing how one type insensibly merges
into another. The only type I have now left for examination may be
called the "Nightmare type." It is allied not so much to the stories of
Melusina and the Lady of the Van Pool as to stories like that of the
Croatian wolf-maiden. According to German and Slavonic belief the
nightmare is a human being--frequently one whose love has been slighted,
and who in this shape is enabled to approach the beloved object. It
slips through the keyhole, or any other hole in a building, and presses
its victim sometimes to death. But it can be caught by quickly stopping
the hole through which it has entered. A certain man did so one night;
and in the morning he found a young and lovely maiden in the room. On
asking her whence she came, she told him from Engelland (angel-land,
England). He hid her clothes, married her, and had by her three
children. The only thing peculiar about her was that she used constantly
to sing while spinning:

    "Now calls my mother (_or_, blows my father) in Engelland,
    Mary Catharine,
    Drive out thy swine."

One day her husband came home and found that his wife had been telling
the children that she had come as a nightmare from Engelland. When he
reproached her for it, she went to the cupboard where her clothes were
hidden, threw them over herself, and vanished. Yet she could not quite
forsake her husband and little ones. On Saturdays she came unseen and
laid out their clean clothes; and every night she appeared while others
slept, and taking the baby out of the cradle quieted it at her breast.
The allusion to the nightmare's clothes is uncommon; but it is an
unmistakable link with the types we have been considering. In other
tales she is caught in the shape of a straw; and she is generally
released by taking the stopper out of the hole whereby she entered. The
account she gives of herself is that she has come out of England, that
the pastor had been guilty of some omission in the service when she was
baptized, and hence she became a nightmare, but to be re-christened
would cure her. She often hears her mother call her. In one story she
vanished on being reproached with her origin, and in another on being
asked how she became a nightmare.[199]

An Esthonian tale speaks of a father who found his little boy one night
in an unquiet slumber. He noticed over the bed a hole in the wall
through which the wind was whistling, and thought it was this which was
disturbing him. Wherefore he stopped it up; and no sooner had he done so
than he saw on the bed by the boy's side a pretty little girl, who
teased and played with him so that he could not sleep in peace. The
child was thus forced to stay in the house. She grew up with the other
children, and being quick and industrious was beloved by all. Specially
was she dear to the boy in whose bed she was found; and when he grew up
he married her. One Sunday in church she burst out laughing during the
sermon. After the service was over the husband inquired what she was
laughing at. She refused to tell him, save on condition of his telling
her in return how she came into his father's house. When she had
extracted this promise from him, she told him she saw stretched on the
wall of the church a great horse-skin, on which the Evil One was writing
the names of all those who slept or chattered in church, and paid no
heed to God's word. The skin was at last full of names; and in order to
find room for more the Devil had to pull it with his teeth, so as to
stretch it further. In so doing he bumped his head against the wall, and
made a wry face: whereat she, who saw it, laughed. When they got home
her husband pulled out the piece of wood which his father had put into
the hole; and the same instant his wife was gone. The husband was
disconsolate, but he saw her no more. It was said, however, that she
often appeared to his two children in secret, and brought them precious
gifts. In Smaland a parallel legend is current, according to which the
ancestress of a certain family was an elf-maid who came into the house
with the sunbeams through a knot-hole in the wall, and, after being
married to the son and bearing him four children, vanished the same way
as she had come. In North Germany it is believed that when seven boys,
or seven girls, are born in succession, one among them is a nightmare. A
man who had unknowingly wedded such a nightmare found that she
disappeared from his bed at nights; and on watching her he discovered
that she slipped through the hole for the strap by which the latch was
lifted, returning the same way. So he stopped up the opening, and thus
always retained her. After a considerable time he wanted to use the
latch, and thinking she had forgotten her bad habit and he might safely
take the peg out, he did so; but the next night she was missing, and
never came back, though every Sunday morning the man found clean linen
laid out for him as usual.[200]

A Pomeranian tradition relates the adventure of an officer who was much
troubled by the nightmare. He caught her in the usual manner and wedded
her, although he could not persuade her to say whence she came. After
some years she induced her husband to open the holes he had stopped up;
and the next morning she had disappeared. But he found written in chalk
on the table the words: "If thou wilt seek me, the Commander of London
is my father." He sought her in London and found her; and having taken
the precaution to rechristen her he lived happily with her ever
after.[201] This is the only instance I have met with where the
nightmare-wife is recovered. It would be interesting to know why England
is assigned as the home of these perturbed spirits.


FOOTNOTES:

[185] Burton, "Nights," vol. viii. p. 7.

[186] Thorpe, vol. ii. p. 69, quoting Afzelius; Haltrich, p. 15;
Hapgood, p. 214; Meier, "Volksmärchen," p. 39; Baring-Gould, p. 575. No
authority is given by Mr. Baring-Gould, and I have been unable to trace
the Hessian tale; but I rely on his correctness. He also cites an
incoherent Swan-maiden tale from Castrén, of which he manages to make
more sense than I can (Castrén, "Altaischen Völker," p. 172). In an
Irish tale Oengus, the son of the Dagda, falls in love, through a dream,
with Caer ib Ormaith, who is one year in the form of a swan and the next
in human shape. After union with her he seems to have undergone the same
alternation of form (_Revue Celtique_, vol. iii. p. 342, from a MS. in
the British Museum).

[187] Schreck, p. 35; Vernaleken, pp. 274, 287; Jones and Kropf, p. 95;
"Bahar-Danush," vol. ii. p. 213 (an abstract of this story will be found
in Keightley, p. 20); Burton, "Nights," vol. v. p. 344; Steere, p. 349;
Cavallius, p. 175, freely translated by Thorpe, "Yule-Tide Stories," p.
158. Mr. Morris turns the doves into swans. _Cf._ a South-Slavonic tale
from Varazdina, Krauss, vol. i. p. 409.

[188] Brett, "Legends and Myths," p. 29. This legend is told with
further details by Im Thurn, p. 381.

[189] Rink, p. 145; Prym und Socin, p. 51.

[190] Knoop, p. 104.

[191] "F. L. Españ." vol. i. p. 187.

[192] Keightley, p. 169, from Hibbert, "Description of the Shetland
Islands"; Wratislaw, p. 290; "F. L. Journal," vol. vi. p. 165. As a
point of resemblance with the Lady of the Van Pool, quoted further on,
it may be noted that these seal-women (the legend of their capture is a
common one in the Shetland Islands) had the power to conjure up from the
deep a superior breed of horned cattle, many of whose offspring are
still to be seen (Dr. Karl Blind in "Contemp. Rev." 1881, quoted by Mac
Ritchie, p. 4).

[193] Kirby, p. 319; "Arch. Rev." vol. ii. p. 90; Schmidt, p. 133; Bent,
p. 13; Von Hahn, vol. i. p. 295 (_cf._ vol. ii. p. 82); Garnett, p. 352,
translating Dozon's "Chansons Populaires Bulgares"; Cosquin, vol. ii. p.
18. _Cf._ Ralston, "Tibetan Tales," p. 53; Landes, p. 123; Comparetti,
vol. i. p. 212, translated "F. L. Record," vol. ii. p. 12; Grimm,
"Tales," vol. ii. p. 331; Poestion, p. 55; Vernaleken, p. 274; Pitré,
vol. iv. p. 140; Sastri, p. 80.

[194] Leland, p. 300. _Cf._ ibid. p. 140, where the maidens are called
weasels, and ultimately marry stars. "Y Cymmrodor," vol. iv. p. 201. In
a tale rendered from the modern Greek by Von Hahn the name Swan-maiden
is preserved in the title, though the plumage has disappeared from the
text. Stress can hardly be laid upon this, as the title is no part of
the tale. Von Hahn, vol. i. p. 131.

[195] "La Tradition," March 1889, p. 78, quoting the Abbé Domenech,
"Voyage pittoresque dans les déserts du Nouveau Monde," p. 214. Mr.
Farrer gives the same story from "Algic Researches" (Farrer, "Primitive
Manners," p. 256).

[196] Gerv. Tilb. Dec. i. c. 15.

[197] Brauns, p. 138; White, vol. ii. p. 141; Vernaleken, p. 294;
Schneller, p. 23; Ortoli, p. 284.

[198] "The Physicians of Myddfai--Meddygon Myddfai," translated by John
Pughe, Esq., F.R.C.S., and edited by Rev. John Williams ab Ithel, M.A.
(1861), p. xxi. "Cambro-Briton," vol. ii. p. 315; Sikes, p. 40. Mr.
Sikes gives no authority for the third version. I have assumed its
genuineness, though I confess Mr. Sikes' methods are not such as to
inspire confidence.

[199] Jahn, p. 364, _et seqq._; Knoop, pp. 26, 83, 103; Kuhn, pp. 47,
197, 374; Kuhn und Schwartz, pp. 14, 91, 298; Schleicher, p. 93; Thorpe,
vol. ii. p. 169, quoting Thiele. Note the suggestion of Pope Gregory's
pun in the name of the native land of the nightmare. Elsewhere a child
becomes a nightmare who is born on a Sunday and baptized on a Sunday at
the same hour, or one at whose baptism some wicked person has secretly
muttered in response to one of the priest's questions some wrong words,
or "It shall become a nightmare" (Lemke, p. 42). Similar superstitions
attached to somnabulism; see Lecky, "History of Rationalism," vol. i. p.
81, note 2.

[200] Jannsen, vol. i. p. 53; Thorpe, vol. iii. p. 70, quoting Afzelius,
vol. ii. p. 29, quoting Müllenhoff. It is a common Teutonic belief that
knot-holes are attributable to elves (Grimm, "Teut. Myth." p. 461).

[201] "Am Urds-Brunnen," vol. vi. p. 58.




CHAPTER XI.

SWAN-MAIDENS (_continued_).

     The incident of the recovery of the bride not found in all the
     stories--New Zealand sagas--Andrianòro--Mother-right--The father
     represented under a forbidding aspect--Tasks imposed on the
     hero--The Buddhist theory of the Grateful Animals--The
     feather-robe a symbol of bride's superhuman character--Mode of
     capture--The Taboo--Dislike of fairies for iron--Utterance of
     name forbidden--Other prohibitions--Fulfilment of fate--The taboo
     a mark of progress in civilization--The divine ancestress--Totems
     and Banshees--Re-appearance of mother to her children--The lady
     of the Van Pool an archaic deity.


I hope I have made clear in the last chapter the connection between the
various types of the Swan-maiden group of folk-tales. The one idea
running through them all is that of a man wedding a supernatural maiden
and unable to retain her. She must return to her own country and her own
kin; and if he desire to recover her he must pursue her thither and
conquer his right to her by undergoing superhuman penance or performing
superhuman tasks,--neither of which it is given to ordinary men to do.
It follows that only when the story is told of men who can be conceived
as released from the limitations we have been gradually learning during
the progress of civilization to regard as essential to humanity--only
when the reins are laid upon the neck of invention,--is it possible to
relate the narrative of the recovery of the bride. These conditions are
twice fulfilled in the history of a folk-tale. They are fulfilled,
first, when men are in that early stage of thought in which the
limitations of man's nature are unknown, when speculations of the kind
touched upon in our second chapter, and illustrated repeatedly in the
course of this work, are received as undisputed opinions. They are
fulfilled again when the relics of these opinions, and the memories of
the mythical events believed in accordance with such opinions, are still
operative in the mind, though no longer with the vividness of primitive
times; when some of them still hold together, but for the most part they
are decaying and falling to pieces, and are only like the faded rags of
a once splendid robe which a child may gather round its puny form and
make believe for the moment that it is a king. To the genuine credulity
of the South-Sea Islander, and to the conscious make-believe of the Arab
story-teller and the peasant who repeats the modern _märchen_, all
things are possible. But to the same peasant when relating the
traditional histories of his neighbours, and to the grave mediæval
chronicler, only some things are possible, though many more things than
are possible to us. The slow and partial advance of knowledge destroys
some superstitions sooner, others later. Some branches of the tree of
marvel flourish with apparently unimpaired life long after others have
withered, and others again have only begun to fade. Hence, where the
adventures of Tawhaki, the mythical New Zealander, are incredible, the
legend of the origin of the Physicians of Myddfai from the Lady of the
Lake may still be gravely accepted. Gervase of Tilbury would probably
have treated the wild story of Hasan's adventures in the islands of Wák
as what it is; but he tells us he has seen and conversed with women who
had been captives to the Dracs beneath the waters of the Rhone, while a
relative of his own had married a genuine descendant of the serpent-lady
of that castle in the valley of Trets.

Accordingly, the episode of the recovery of the bride is scarcely ever
found in the sagas of modern Europe, or indeed of any nation that has
progressed beyond a certain mark in civilization. But it is common in
their _märchen_, as well as in the sagas of more backward nations. In
the sagas of the advanced races, with rare exceptions, the most we get
is what looks like a reminiscence of the episode in the occasional
reappearance of the supernatural wife to her children, or as a Banshee.
Putting this reminiscence, if it be one, aside for the present, we will
first discuss some aspects of the bride's recovery. In doing so, though
the natural order may seem to be inverted, we shall in effect clear the
ground for the proper understanding of the main features of the myth.

Many variants of the legend of Tawhaki are current among the Maories.
According to that adopted by Sir George Grey, he was a hero renowned for
his courage, whose fame had reached to heaven. There Tango-tango, a
maiden of heavenly race, fell in love with him from report; and one
night she descended to the earth and lay down by his side. She continued
to do this nightly, stealing away again before dawn to her home. But
when she found herself likely to become a mother she remained with him
openly; and when her daughter was born she gave her to her husband to
wash. Evidently he did not like the work, for while carrying out his
wife's instructions, Tawhaki made a very rude remark about the child.
Hearing this, Tango-tango began to sob bitterly, and at last rose up
from her place with the child and took flight to the sky. Her husband
determined to seek her. He found his way to the place where a creeper
hung down from heaven and struck its roots into the earth. It was
guarded there by a blind old ancestress of his, whom he restored to
sight, and from whom he obtained directions how to climb the plant.
Arrived in heaven, he disguised himself and had to undergo the
indignity--he, a mighty chieftain--of being enslaved by his wife's
relatives, for whom he was compelled to perform menial work. At length,
however, he manifested himself to his wife and was reconciled to her.
He is still in heaven, and is worshipped as a god. Another version
represents a cloud swooping upon the wife and taking her away. Tawhaki
endeavoured in vain to follow her by mounting on a kite. A third version
simply relates that the lady returned to her friends. Her husband, on
arriving at the _pa_, or settlement, where she dwelt, found among the
children his own son, by whom he sent his wife a love-token she had
formerly given him. This led to recognition, and she eventually returned
with him to his home. A more interesting variant tells us that the fame
of the nobleness of Tini-rau was heard by Hine-te-iwaiwa, who determined
to set her cap (or whatever might be its equivalent in her scanty
costume) at him. She obtained an interview with him, by a device
recalling the conduct of the ladies in The Land East of the Sun, for she
broke and destroyed some bathing-pools belonging to the hero. A quest of
the intruder naturally followed, with the result that Tini-rau took her
to live with him. She made short work of her rivals, his elder wives;
and all went smoothly until Hine, one unlucky day, asked her husband to
perform an operation upon her head as necessary as familiar in some
strata of civilization. In doing this he made disrespectful observations
about her, when lo! a mist settled down upon them, from the midst of
which her elder brother came and took his sister away. Tini-rau, unable
to endure her absence, determined to go after his wife, accompanied by a
flight of birds, by whose cries he was informed, as he passed one
settlement after another, whether or not his wife was there. At length
he discovered her whereabouts, and made himself known to her sister by a
token which Hine understood. Then he came to her, and she announced his
arrival to all the people, who assembled and welcomed him. He abode
there; and when his wife's relatives complained that he did not go and
get food, he obtained it in abundance by the exercise of magical
powers; and so they lived happy ever after.[202]

Now let us turn to the Malagasy tale of the way in which Andrianòro
obtained a wife from heaven. There three sisters, whose dwelling-place
is in heaven, frequent a lake in the crystal waters whereof they swim,
taking flight at once on the approach of any human being. By a diviner's
advice the hero changes into three lemons, which the youngest sister
desires to take; but the others, fearing a snare, persuade her to fly
away with them. Foiled thus, the hero changes into bluish water in the
midst of the lake, then into the seed of a vegetable growing by the
waterside, and ultimately into an ant. He is at length successful in
seizing the youngest maiden, who consents to be his wife in spite of the
difference of race; for, while her captor is a man living on the earth,
her father dwells in heaven, whence the thunderbolt darts forth if he
speak, and she herself drinks no spirits, "for if spirits even touch my
mouth I die." After some time, during his absence, his father and mother
force _tòaka_, or rum, into the lady's mouth, and she dies; but on his
return he insists on opening her grave, and, to his joy, finds her alive
again. But she will not now stay on earth: she must return to her father
and mother in the sky. They are grieving for her, and the thunder is a
sign of their grief. Finding himself unable to prevail upon her to stay,
he obtains permission to accompany her. She warns him, however, of the
dangers he will have to encounter,--the thunderbolt when her father
speaks, and the tasks her father will lay upon him. Before he goes he
accordingly calls the beasts and the birds together; he slays oxen to
feed them; he tells them the tests he is about to undergo, and takes
promises from them to accomplish the things that trouble him. Obedient
to his wife, he displays great humility to his father-in-law; and by
the aid of the lower animals he comes triumphant out of every trial. The
beasts with their tusks plough up the spacious fields of heaven; the
beasts and birds uproot the giant trees; from the Crocodile Lake the
crocodiles themselves bring the thousand spades; between cattle which
are exactly alike the cattle-fly distinguishes the cows from the calves;
and the little fly, settling on the nose of the heroine's mother,
enables the hero to point her out among her daughters. The wife's father
is astonished, and gives his daughter anew to the hero to be his wife,
dismissing them with a dower of oxen, slaves and money.[203]

It will be observed that the adventures undergone by Andrianòro in
heaven are very different from those of the Maori heroes. Tawhaki and
Tini-rau have certainly to submit to hardships and indignities before
they can be reunited to their wives; and they perform actions of
superhuman power. But these actions are not performed as the condition
of reunion; nor are the tasks and the indignities laid upon them by any
parental ogre. In fact the parental ogre is as conspicuous by his
absence from the New Zealand stories as he is by his presence in those
of Andrianòro and the Marquis of the Sun. How is this to be explained?
The reason seems to lie in the different organization of society under
which the tale attained its present form in either case. At an early
period of civilization, kinship is reckoned exclusively through the
mother: even the father is in no way related to his children. This is a
stage hardly ever found complete in all its consequences, but of which
the traces remain in the customs and in the lore of many nations who
have long since passed from it, becoming, as we might expect, fainter
and fewer as it recedes into the distance. Such traces are abundant in
Maori tradition; and they point to a comparatively recent emergence
from female kinship. Among these traces is the omission of the heavy
father from the stories before us. Tango-tango and Hine-te-iwaiwa were
both maidens of more than mortal race; and presumably their parents
would be conceived of as still alive. But they are not so much as
alluded to--a sure sign that there was no paternal authority to which
these ladies would be accountable. Indeed, if accountable at all, they
are so to the whole circle of their relatives, or to their tribe in
general. It is their brothers who assist them in time of need. Tawhaki
becomes the slave of his brothers-in-law. To her "people" Hine announces
her husband's arrival: she simply announces it; nor does it appear that
any consent on their part is required. Tini-rau takes his place at once
as a tribesman, and is expected to contribute by his labour and skill to
the sustenance of the whole brotherhood.

One of the consequences of reckoning descent only through females, which
may be noticed here, is that the children belong to the mother and the
mother's family. A trace of this lingers about the story of Tawhaki in
the affront to Tango-tango caused by her husband's offensive remark upon
their little one. In a society where the offspring are the father's, or
even where, as in modern civilized life, they are treated as belonging
to both parents and partaking of the nature of both, no such offence
could be taken. Another consequence is that in the organization of
society the wife still continues after marriage to reside with, and to
be part of, the community to which she belongs by birth. The man leaves
his father and his mother and cleaves to his wife. Hence it would be
natural for her to return home to her own kindred, and for him to seek
her and dwell with her there. This is illustrated not only in the Maori
legends just cited, but also in the Arawàk story given in the last
chapter, where the husband is received into the vulture race until he
desires to visit his mother. He is then discarded as if he had
committed some unpardonable breach of custom; and he cannot be restored
to his former privileges. Although the Greeks had before the dawn of
history ceased to practise mother-right, a trace of it lingers in a
modern folk-tale from Epirus. There a man had by the ordinary device
obtained an elf as a wife; and she bore him a child. After this her own
kinsmen came and begged her to return to them; but she refused on the
ground that she had a husband and child. "Then bring them with you,"
they replied. Accordingly, she took her husband and child, and went back
with them to dwell among the elves. It seems, however, to be felt that
this was an unusual proceeding; otherwise it would have been needless to
plead with the lady to return, and to extend a special invitation to
those whom she would not abandon: an indication, this, that the story
has been adapted to a higher plane of civilization, in which it was no
longer the custom for the husband to go and dwell among his wife's
people.[204]

On the other hand, Andrianòro's wife lives under patriarchal government.
The Malagasy have advanced further on the path of civilization than the
Maories; and at the stage of progress they have reached, the father is
much more like an absolute monarch. In the story referred to, the lady
had married without her father's consent. Accordingly her marriage is
ignored, and her lover has to perform a number of services for his
father-in-law, and so purchase formal consent to their union. Nor will
it escape the reader that when the wielder of the thunderbolt at last
gives his daughter to her husband, he dismisses them back to the home of
the latter. Hasan, too, it will be remembered, returns to Bagdad with
his wife and children, though we probably have a survival of an older
form of the story in his relations with her redoubtable sister. This
lady holds a position impossible in an Arab kingdom. Her father is a
mere shadow, hardly mentioned but to save appearances; so much more
substantial is her power and her opposition to the match. The variants
of the Marquis of the Sun are found chiefly among European nations,[205]
whose history, institutions, and habits of thought lead them to attach
great value to paternal authority. In the tasks performed in _märchen_
of this type, and the precipitate flight which usually takes place on
the wedding night from the ogre's secret wrath, it would seem that we
have a reminiscence of the archaic institutions of marriage by purchase
and marriage by capture,--both alike incidents of the period when
mother-right (as the reckoning of descent solely through females is
called) has ceased to exist in a pure form, and society has passed, or
is passing, into the patriarchal stage. The Marquis of the Sun type is,
therefore, more recent than the other types of the Swan-maiden
tradition, none of which so uniformly in all their variants recognize
the father's supreme position.[206]

If the tasks and the flight be a reminiscence of purchase and capture,
we may find in that reminiscence a reason why nearly all the stories
concur in representing the father under a forbidding aspect. As his
daughter's vendor,--her unwilling vendor,--as her guardian from capture,
he would be the natural foe of her lover. He is not always so ready as
the Bird Simer to give up to another his rights over her; but perhaps
the Bird Simer's readiness may be partly explained by the husband's
having already performed the feat of rescuing the maiden from a giant,
beside slaying his own brother for her sake. Usually the father is a
frightful ogre or giant; not infrequently he is no less a personage than
the Devil himself. And the contrast between him and his lovely daughter
would be more and more strongly felt as purchase and capture ceased to
be serious methods of bride-winning. Hence, probably, the thought of
real relationship would be abandoned, and the maiden would often be
conceived of as enchanted and captive in the hands of a malevolent
being.

We will not now stop to discuss the tasks in detail: we can only afford
time to glance at one of them, namely, that of distinguishing the maid
from her sisters. There are three chief means by which the lover or
husband is enabled to identify the object of his devotion. Two of these
depend upon the lady herself: in the one she slily helps her lover; in
the other he recognizes an insignificant peculiarity of her person or
attire. The third means is an indication given by one of the lower
animals, which has better means of knowledge than the suitor, due
probably to its greater cleverness--a quality, as I have already pointed
out in Chapter II., universally credited in a certain stage of culture
to these creatures. We will deal first with the second means.

The most usual personal idiosyncrasy of the damsel is the want of a
finger, or some deformity in it, the result of her previous efforts to
aid the hero. Thus, in a Basque tale the lad is set to find a ring lost
by the ogre in a river. This is accomplished by cutting up the maiden
and throwing the pieces into the stream; but a part of the little finger
sticks in his shoe. When he afterwards has to choose between the ogre's
daughters with his eyes shut, he recognizes his love by the loss of her
little finger. The giant's daughter, in a West Highland tale, makes a
ladder with her fingers for her lover to climb a tree to fetch a
magpie's eggs; and, in the hurry, she leaves her little finger at the
top. This accident arises sometimes, as in the Marquis of the Sun, from
the dropping of a piece of flesh on the ground when the hero cuts up his
beloved; or, according to a story of the Italian Tirol, from spilling
some of her blood. In the latter case, three drops of blood fall into
the lake, instead of the bucket prepared to receive them, and thereby
almost cause the failure of his task. When the magician afterwards leads
the youth to his daughters and bids him choose, he takes the youngest by
the hand, and says: "I choose this one." We are not told that there was
any difference in the maidens' hands, but this is surely to be inferred.
In the Milanese story of the King of the Sun the hero also chooses his
wife blindfold from the king's three daughters by touching their hands;
and here, too, we must suppose previous help or concert, though it has
disappeared from the text. In a story from Lorraine, John has to take
the devil's daughter, Greenfeather, to pieces to find a spire for the
top of a castle that he is compelled to build; and in putting her
together again he sets one of her little fingers clumsily. With bandaged
eyes he has to find the lady who has assisted him; and he succeeds by
putting his hand on hers. The lad who falls into the strange gentleman's
hands in a Breton tale, forgets to put the little toe of the girl's left
foot into the caldron; and when she and her two sisters are led before
him veiled and clad in other than their ordinary garb, he knows her at
once by the loss of her toe. As it is told in Denmark the enchanted
princess agrees with the king's son to wind a red silken thread around
her little finger; and by this means he identifies her, though in the
form of a little grey-haired, long-eared she-ass, and again of a
wrinkled, toothless, palsied old woman, into which the sorceress, whose
captive she is, changes her. In a Swedish story the damsel informs her
lover that when the mermaid's daughters appear in various repulsive
forms she will be changed into a little cat with her side burnt and one
ear snipped. The Catalonian _märchen_ of Joanescas represents the
heroine as wanting a joint of her finger, from her lover having torn off
some of her feathers by accident when he stole her robe. "Monk" Lewis in
his "Journal of a West India Proprietor" gives an Ananci tale in which
the heroine and her two sisters are changed into black cats: the two
latter bore scarlet threads round their necks, the former a blue
thread.[207] According to the Carmarthenshire saga, the lady is
recognized by the strapping of her sandal.

In several of the stories just cited, and many of their congeners, the
maiden forewarns her suitor how she will be disguised, or by what marks
she will be known. Sometimes, however, she makes a sign to him on the
spot. The Lady of the Van Pool only thrusts her foot forward that he may
notice her shoe-tie; but Cekanka in a Bohemian tale is bold enough to
wink at him. In a Russian variant of the Marquis of the Sun, to which I
have already referred, the hero is in the power of the Water King. On
his way to that potentate's palace he had, by the advice of the Baba
Yaga, gone to the seashore and watched until twelve spoonbills alighted,
and, turning into maidens, had unrobed for the purpose of bathing. Then
he had stolen the eldest maiden's shift, to restore it only on her
promise to aid him against her father, the Water King. She redeems the
pledge by performing for him the usual tasks, the last of which is to
choose the same bride thrice among the king's twelve daughters. The
first time she secretly agrees with him that she will wave her
handkerchief; the second time she is to be arranging her dress; and the
third time he will see a fly above her head.[208]

Here we are led to the third means of recognition. The incident of help
rendered by one or more of the lower animals to man is a favourite one
in folk-tales; and it has furnished a large portion of the argumentative
stock-in-trade of those scholars who contend for their Indian origin. We
are assured that every tale which contains this incident must be
referred to a Buddhist source, or at least has been subjected to
Buddhist influence. This theory is supported by reference to the
doctrine of love for all living creatures which Buddha is said to have
promulgated. The command to overcome hatred by love, the precepts of
self-sacrifice and devotion to others' good were not limited in the
Buddha's discourses, if those discourses be correctly reported, to our
conduct towards our fellow-men: they included all creation. And they
were enforced by parables which represented good as done in turn to men
by all sorts of creatures, even the wildest and the most savage. Stories
of grateful beasts, of the type familiar to us in Androcles and the
Lion, became favourites among the disciples of the Light of Asia.
Scholars, therefore, have told us that wherever a grateful beast thrusts
his muzzle into the story, that story must have come from India, and
must have come since the rise of Buddhism. Nay, they go further. In
every instance where a beast appears as helping the hero, we are taught
to presume that the hero has first helped the beast, even though no
trace of such an incident be actually found. It must have been so,
otherwise the beast would have had no motive for helping the hero,--and,
it may be added, the theorist would have had no ground for claiming the
story as proceeding from a Buddhist source.

Now all this would have been seen at once to be very poor reasoning, but
for one fact. A number, sufficient to be called large, of parables, have
actually made their way from India to Europe in historic times, and
since the age of Gautama. The literary history of these parables can be
traced; and it must be acknowledged that, whatever their origin, they
have been adopted into Buddhist works and adapted to Buddhist doctrine.
Further, it seems demonstrated that some of them have descended into the
oral tradition of various nations in Europe, Asia, and even Africa. But
when so much as this is conceded, it still fails to account for the
spread of the story of the Grateful Beasts and, even more signally, for
the incident of the Beast-helpers where there is no gratitude in the
case. A very slight examination of the incident as it appears in the
group of legends now before us will convince us of this.

First of all, let it be admitted that in several of these tales the
service rendered by the brute is in requital for a good turn on the part
of the hero. Andrianòro, as we have seen, begins by making friends with
various animals by means of the mammon of unrighteousness in the shape
of a feast. Jagatalapratâpa, in the narrative already cited from the
Tamil book translated into English under the title of "The Dravidian
Nights Entertainments," pursuing one of Indra's four daughters, is
compelled by her father, after three other trials, to choose her out
from her sisters, who are all converted into one shape. He prays
assistance from a kind of grasshopper; and the little creature, in
return for a previous benefit, hops upon her foot. But it is somewhat
curious, if the theory be true, that even in stories told among peoples
distinctly under Buddhist influence the gratitude is by no means an
invariable point. Thus the princess in the Burmese drama is betrayed by
"the king of flies" to her husband, though the abstract we have of the
play gives us no hint of any previous transaction between the puny
monarch and the hero; and it is worthy of note that the Tibetan version
of the same plot given by Mr. Ralston from the Kah-Gyur knows nothing of
this entomological agency. There the hero is a Bodisat, who, if he does
not recognize his beloved among the thousand companions who surround
her, at least has a spell the utterance of which compels her to step out
from among them. It does not appear that Kasimbaha, the Bantik
patriarch, is required to undergo this particular test. But he is
indebted to a bird for indicating the lady's residence; a glow-worm
places itself at her chamber door; and a fly shows him which of a number
of dishes set before him he must not uncover. M. Cosquin, who is an
adherent of the Buddhist hypothesis, in relating this instance, is
compelled expressly to say that "one does not see why" these animals
should render such services. Neither, on M. Cosquin's principle, can one
see why, in the Arawàk story, the spiders should spin cords to help the
outcast husband down from heaven, or the birds take his part against the
vulture-folk to enable him to recover his wife.[209] The proof of
Buddhist influence must rest heavily on its advocates here, both on
account of the absence of motive for gratitude, and of the distance of
the Arawàk people from India and the utter disparity of civilizations.

The agency of recognition, when attributed to one of the lower animals,
is ordinarily an insect; but the reason is, as often as not, a prior
arrangement with the lady, as in the Russian story of the Water King.
The Polish _märchen_ of Prince Unexpected follows this line. In it, the
princess warns her lover that she will have a ladybird over her right
eye. When a thousand maidens all alike are produced to poor Hans in a
Bohemian tale, he has no difficulty in selecting the right one; for a
witch has bidden him "choose her on whom, from the roof of the chamber,
a spider descends."[210]

These considerations are sufficient to prove that the incident of the
Helpful Beasts, as found in the Swan-maiden group of stories, cannot be
attributed to a Buddhist origin.

We have now dealt with an episode of the mythical narrative, necessary,
indeed, to its completion, but found only under certain conditions which
I have pointed out. We have seen this episode in two distinct forms
whose respective sources we have assigned to two distinct stages of
culture. The form characteristic of the European _märchen_ is apparently
more barbarous in several respects than that yielded by the islanders of
the Southern Ocean; but the latter bears testimony to a state of society
more archaic than the other. Presumably, therefore, it represents more
nearly the primitive form of the story.

We turn next to the central incidents. In the previous chapter I have
taken pains to show the unmistakable relation between the different
types of the myth, in spite of the omission of the feather-robe, or
indeed of any substitute for it. The truth is that the feather-robe is
no more than a symbol of the wife's superhuman nature. From the more
archaic variants it is absent; but frequently the true form of the lady
is held to be that of a member of what we contemptuously call "the brute
creation." Men in savagery, as we have already seen, have quite
different feelings from those of contempt for brutes. On the contrary,
they entertain the highest respect and even awe for them. They trace
their descent from some of them; and a change of form from beast to man,
or from man to beast, while still preserving individual identity, would
not seem at all incredible, or even odd, to them. By and by, however,
the number of creatures having these astonishing powers would decrease,
as the circle of experience widened. But there would linger a belief in
remarkable instances, as at Shan-si, in China, where it is believed that
there is still a bird which can divest itself of its feathers and become
a woman. Not every swan would then be deemed capable of turning when it
pleased into a fair maiden; and when this change happened, it would be
attributed to enchantment, which had caused the maiden merely to assume
the appearance of a swan for a time and for a special purpose. This
often occurs, as we have seen, in _märchen_, where the contrast between
the heroine and her father, or, as it is then often put, her master, is
very strong. It occurs, too, in tales belonging to other types. A
_märchen_ told by Dr. Pitré relates that a man had a pet magpie, which
by enchantment had the power of casting its wings and becoming a woman.
She always practised this power in his absence; but he came home one day
and found her wings on the chair. He burnt them, and she remained
permanently a woman and married him. In a saga from Guiana a warlock's
daughter persuades her father to transform her into a dog that she may
venture near a hunter whom she loves. He accordingly gives her a skin,
which she draws over her shoulders, and thus becomes a hound. When the
hunter finds her in his hut as a maiden, the charmed skin hanging up and
revealing her secret, he flings the skin into the fire and weds
her.[211]

But enchantment is not the only explanation. The lady may, like Hasan's
bride, be held to belong to a superior race to men, though properly in
human form. In either case the peltry would be a mere veil hiding the
true individuality for a while. It would thus acquire a distinct magical
efficacy; so that when deprived of it, the maiden would be unable to
effect the change. A remarkable instance of this occurs in an Arab saga.
There a man, at Algiers, puts to death his three daughters, who
afterwards appear to a guitar-player and dance to his playing. As they
dance they throw him the rind of the oranges they hold in their hands;
and this rind is found the next day changed into gold pieces and into
jewels. The following year the maidens appear again to the
guitar-player. He manages to get hold of their shrouds, which he burns.
They thereupon come back to life, and he weds the youngest of them. This
is said to have happened no longer ago than sixty years before the
French conquest of Algiers.[212]

Nothing of the sort is found in the Maori tales. To the natives of New
Zealand no change seemed needful: the lady was of supernatural birth and
could fly as she pleased. The same may be said of Andrianòro's wife,
notwithstanding that the Malagasy variant, as a whole, bespeaks a higher
level of culture than the adventures of Tawhaki and Tini-rau. As little
do we find the magical robe in the Passamaquoddy story of the Partridge
and the Sheldrake Duck. The Dyaks of Borneo are unconscious of the need
of it in the saga of their ancestral fish, the _puttin_, which was
caught by a man, and when laid in his boat turned into a girl, whom he
gave to his son for a bride. The Chinese have endless tales about foxes
which assume human form; but the fox's skin plays no part in them. And
in a Japanese tale belonging to the group under consideration, the lady
changes into a fox and back again into a lady without any apparatus of
peltry.[213]

Again, in the nursery tales of the higher races, the dress when cast
seems simply an article of human clothing, often nothing but a girdle,
veil, or apron; and it is only when donned by the enchanted lady, or
elf, that it is found to be neither more nor less than a complete
plumage. Thence it easily passes into a mere instrument of power, like
the mermaid's belt and pouch in the Scottish story, or the book of
command in the _märchen_ of the Island of Happiness, and is on its way
to final disappearance.

The maiden's capture is effected in those types of the tale where the
enchanted garment is worn, by the theft of the garment. These cases will
not detain our attention: we will pass at once to the discussion of
those where there is no transformation to be effected or dreaded.
Perhaps the most interesting of all are the Welsh sagas; and of these
not the least remarkable is the suit by offerings of food. Andrianòro
tried this device in the Malagasy story; but it was unsuccessful. In a
Carnarvonshire analogue from Llanberis, the youth entices his beloved
into his grasp by means of an apple:[214] in the Van Pool variants the
offering assumes almost a sacramental character. Until the fairy maiden
has tasted earthly bread, or until her suitor has eaten of the food
which sustains her, he cannot be united to her. Here we are reminded on
the one hand of the elfin food considered in a former chapter, to
partake of which sealed the adventurer's fate and prevented him for ever
from returning to his human home; and on the other hand of the ceremony
of eating together which among so many nations has been part of the
marriage rites.

Walter Map relates a curious story of Llangorse Lake having affinities
for the Land East of the Sun, and still more with one of the Maori
sagas. Wastin of Wastiniog watched, the writer tells us, three clear
moonlit nights and saw bands of women in his oat-fields, and followed
them until they plunged into the pool, where he overheard them
conversing, and saying to one another: "If he did so and so, he would
catch one of us." Thus instructed, he of course succeeded in capturing
one. Here, as in many of the stories, the lady has obviously designs
upon the mortal of opposite sex, and deliberately throws herself in his
way. But she lays a taboo upon him, promising to serve him willingly and
with all obedient devotion, until that day he should strike her in anger
with his bridle. After the birth of several children he was unfortunate
enough on some occasion, the details of which Walter Map has forgotten,
to break the condition; whereupon she fled with all her offspring, of
whom her husband was barely able to save one before she plunged with the
rest into the lake. This one, whom he called Triunnis Nagelwch, grew up,
and entered the service of the King of North Wales. At his royal
master's command, Triunnis once led a marauding expedition into the
territory of the King of Brecknock. A battle ensued, when he was
defeated and his band cut to pieces. It is said that Triunnis himself
was saved by his mother, and thenceforth dwelt with her in the lake.
"But, indeed," adds the truth-loving Walter, "I think it is a lie,
because a delusion of this kind is so likely to account for his body not
having been found."[215]

In spite, however, of such unwonted incredulity, Map, having once begun
by telling this story, proceeds to tell another like it, which he seems
to have no difficulty in believing. The second tale concerns a hero of
the Welsh border, Wild Edric, of whose historic reality as one of the
English rebels against William the Conqueror there is ample proof. It
appears that Edric, returning from hunting, lost his way in the Forest
of Dean, and accompanied only by one boy, reached about midnight a large
house which turned out to be a drinking-shop, such as the English, Map
says, call a _guildhouse_. On approaching it he saw a light, and looking
in, he beheld a number of women dancing. They were beautiful in
countenance, bigger and taller than ordinary women. He noticed one among
them fairer than the rest, and (Walter, perhaps, had Fair Rosamund in
his mind when he says) more to be desired than all the darlings of
kings. Edric rushed round the house and, finding an entrance, dashed in
and with the help of his boy dragged her out, despite a furious
resistance in which the nails and teeth of her companions made
themselves felt. She brooded in sullen silence for three whole days; but
on the fourth day she exclaimed to her new master: "Bless you, my
dearest, and you will be blessed too, and enjoy health and prosperity
until you reproach me on account of my sisters, or the place, or the
grove whence you have snatched me away, or anything connected with it.
For the very day you do so your happiness will forsake you. I shall be
taken away; and you will suffer repeated misfortune, and long for your
own death." He pledged himself to fidelity; and to their splendid
nuptials nobles came from far and near. King William heard of the
wonder, and bade the newly wedded pair to London, where he was then
holding his court, that he might test the truth of the tale. They proved
it to him by many witnesses from their own country; but the chief
testimony was that of the lady's superhuman beauty; and he dismissed
them in admiration to their home. After many years of happiness Edric
returned one evening late from hunting, and could not find his wife. He
spent some time in vainly calling for her before she came. "Of course,"
he began, angrily, "you have not been detained so long by your sisters,
have you?" The rest of his wrath fell upon the empty air; for at the
mention of her sisters she vanished. And neither her husband's
self-reproaches, nor his tears, nor any search could ever find her
again.[216]

A point far more interesting than the actual mode of capture is the
taboo. The condition on which the heroine remains with her captor-spouse
is, in stories of the Hasan of Bassorah type, his preservation of the
feather-garb; in those of the Melusina type (with which we are now
dealing), his observance of the taboo. In the tales just cited from
Walter Map we have two important forms of the taboo, and in the legend
of Melusina herself we have a third. The latter is an example of the
ordinary objection on the part of supernatural beings to be seen
otherwise than just how and when they please, which we have dealt with
in a previous chapter; and little need be added to what I have already
said on the subject. The other two are, however, worth some
consideration.

In the account of Wastin of Wastiniog we are told that he was forbidden
to strike his wife with the bridle. Let us compare this prohibition with
that of the fairy of "the bottomless pool of Corwrion," in Upper
Arllechwedd, Carnarvonshire, who wedded the heir of the owner of
Corwrion. The marriage took place on two conditions--first, that the
husband was not to know his wife's name, though he might give her any
name he chose; and, second, that if she misbehaved towards him, he might
now and then beat her with a rod, but that he should not strike her with
iron, on pain of her leaving him at once. "This covenant," says
Professor Rhys in repeating the tale, "was kept for some years, so that
they lived happily together, and had four children, of whom the two
youngest were a boy and a girl. But one day, as they went to one of the
fields of Bryn Twrw, in the direction of Penardd Gron, to catch a pony,
the fairy wife, being so much nimbler than her husband, ran before him
and had her hand in the pony's mane in no time. She called out to her
husband to throw her a halter; but instead of that he threw towards her
a bridle with an iron bit, which, as bad luck would have it, struck her.
The wife at once flew through the air, and plunged headlong into
Corwrion Lake. The husband returned sighing and weeping towards Bryn
Twrw (Noise Hill), and when he reached it, the _twrw_ (noise) there was
greater than had ever been heard before, namely, that of weeping after
'Belene'; and it was then, after he had struck her with iron, that he
first learnt what his wife's name was."[217]

The perusal of this saga will raise a suspicion that the original form
of the taboo in Wastin's case was a prohibition against striking with
iron, and that the prohibition was eventually infringed by means of a
bridle. Whether the alteration was due to a blunder on Map's part in
relating the story is of no importance; but the suspicion will be raised
to a certainty by turning to some other sagas in Professor Rhys'
admirable collection. It is related at Waenfawr, near Carnarvon, that a
youth broke, like Wild Edric, into a dance of the fairies on the banks
of the Gwyrfai, near Cwellyn Lake, one moonlit night, and carried off a
maiden. She at first refused to wed him, but consented to remain his
servant. One evening, however, he overheard two of her kindred speaking
of her, and caught her name--Penelope. When she found that he had learnt
her name she gave way to grief: evidently she now knew that her fate was
sealed. On his importunity being renewed, she at length consented to
marry him, but on the condition that he should not strike her with iron.
Here again the taboo was broken by the flinging of a bridle while
chasing a horse. A similar tale was related in the vale of Beddgelert,
wherein the stolen lady would only consent to be the servant of her
ravisher if he could find out her name. When he had discovered it, she
asked in astonishment; "O mortal, who has betrayed my name to thee?"
Then, lifting up her tiny folded hands, she exclaimed: "Alas! my fate,
my fate!" Even then she would only marry him on condition that if ever
he should touch her with iron she would be free to leave him and return
to her family. Catastrophe, as before. In a variant the maiden, pressed
by her human lover, promises to marry, provided he can find out her
name. When he succeeds in doing this she faints away, but has to submit
to her doom. In doing so, she imposes one more proviso: he is not to
touch her with iron, nor is there to be a bolt of iron, or a lock, on
their door. The servant-girl, in another story cited in Chapter VII.,
who was rescued from Fairyland, could only stay, it will be remembered,
in her master's service so long afterward, as he forebore to strike her
with iron; and the fatal blow was struck accidentally with a bit.[218]

Mr. Andrew Lang has remarked, following Dr. Tylor, that in this taboo
the fairy mistress is "the representative of the stone age." This is so;
and the reason is, because she belongs to the realm of the supernatural.
When the use of metals was discovered, stone implements were discarded
in ordinary life; but for ages afterwards knives of stone were used for
religious purposes. There is evidence, for instance, that the Hebrews,
to seek no further, employed them in some of their sacred rites; an
altar of stone was forbidden to be hewn; and when King Solomon built the
temple, "there was neither hammer, nor axe, nor any tool of iron heard
in the house while it was in building." Although there may be no direct
evidence of such a practice among the Cymric Britons, they were probably
no exception to the rule, which seems to have been general throughout
the world; and the Druids' custom of cutting the mistletoe with a
golden, not with an iron, sickle, points in this direction. The
retention of stone instruments in religious worship was doubtless due
to the intense conservatism of religious feeling. The gods, having been
served with stone for so long, would be conceived of as naturally
objecting to change; and the implements whose use had continued through
so many revolutions in ordinary human utensils, would thereby have
acquired a divine character. Changes of religion, however, brought in
time changes even in these usages. Christianity was bound to no special
reverence for knives and arrowheads of flint; but they seem to have been
still vaguely associated with the discarded deities, or their allies,
the Nymphs and Oreads and Fairies of stream or wood or dell, and with
the supernatural generally. A familiar example of this is the name of
Elfbolts given by the country people in this and other lands to these
old-world objects, whenever turned up by the harrow or the spade. Now
the traditional preference on the part of supernatural beings for stone
instruments is only one side of the thought which would, as its reverse
side, show a distinct abhorrence by the same mythical personages for
metals, and chiefly (since we have long passed out of the bronze age)
for iron. Not only do witches and spirits object to the horseshoe; axes
and iron wedges are equally distasteful to them--at all events in
Denmark. So in Brittany, when men go to gather the _herbe d'or_, a
medicinal plant of extraordinary virtue, they go barefooted, in a white
robe and fasting, and no iron may be employed; and though all the
necessary ceremonies be performed, only holy men will be able to find
it. The magical properties of this plant, as well as the rites requisite
to obtain it, disclose its sacredness to the old divinities. It shines
at a distance like gold, and if one tread on it he will fall asleep, and
will come to understand the languages of birds, dogs, and wolves.[219]

In previous chapters we have already had occasion to note this dislike
for iron and steel. Hence the placing of scissors and fire-steel in an
unchristened babe's cradle. Hence the reason for the midwife's casting a
knife behind her when she left the troll's dwelling laden with his
gifts; and for the Islay father's taking the precaution of striking his
dirk into the threshold when he sought his son in the fairy hill. So,
too, in Sweden people who bathed in the sea were gravely advised to cast
into it close to them a fire-steel, a knife, or the like, to prevent any
monster from hurting them. The bolts and locks to which the fairy of
Beddgelert objected would have prevented her free passage into and out
of the house.

In the Pomeranian saga quoted in the last chapter, the enchanted
princess is unable to open the trunk which contains her magical shift:
she must wait for another to open it and give her the garment. In the
same way Hasan's bride could not herself go to the chest and get her
feather-dress. The key was committed to her mother-in-law's care, and
was forced from the old woman by Zubaydah, the Caliph's wife; nor did it
ever come into the fairy's hands, for her dress was fetched for her by
Masrur at Zubaydah's bidding. It is not unlikely that the reason for the
supernatural wife's difficulty in these and analogous cases is the metal
lock and key. But we must not forget that the robe is not always locked
up in a chest. Sometimes it is hidden in a hole in the wall, sometimes
in a stack of corn, sometimes beneath the main-post of the wooden hut in
which the wedded pair are dwelling. Moreover, we must not leave out of
account that in the Nightmare type the wife cannot herself take the
wooden stopper out of the hole through which she entered; but directly
it is removed by another she vanishes. These things go to show that such
supernatural beings cannot themselves undo charms expressly performed
against them. So evil spirits cannot penetrate a circle drawn around him
by one who invokes them. So, too, the sign of the cross is an efficient
protection against them; and it is therefore made upon churches and
altars at the time of consecration.

But the stipulation made by the lady of Corwrion was twofold. Not only
was her bridegroom to forbear striking her with iron, but he was not
even to know her name. It is so difficult for us to put ourselves into
the mental attitude of savages, that we do not understand the objection
they almost all entertain to the mention of their names. The objection
itself is, however, well known and widely spread; but it is not always
manifested in exactly the same form. In some cases a man only refuses to
utter his own name, while he will utter another's name readily enough.
Sometimes it is deemed an unpardonable thing to call another by name; he
must be addressed, or spoken of by an epithet. And frequently a man's
real name is a profound secret, known only to himself, all others
knowing him only by some epithet or title. Sometimes it is only
forbidden to relatives by marriage to speak one another's names. Thus in
various ways etiquette has prescribed a number of customs limiting the
utterance of names among savage and barbarous peoples all the world
over. The origin of these rules and customs seems to have been the dread
of sorcery. A personal name was held to be a part of its owner; and,
just as the possession of a lock of another's hair, or even a paring of
his nail, was believed to confer power over him, so was the knowledge of
his name. Similarly men in the lower culture have a great fear of having
their likenesses taken; and everybody is familiar with the belief that a
witch, who has made a waxen image and given it the name of any one whom
she wants to injure, can, by sticking pins in it, or melting it in a
flame, inflict pain, and even death, upon the person whom the doll
represents.[220]

Illustrations of this superstition might easily be multiplied from every
nation under heaven. But we need not go so far afield; for if we compare
the taboo in the story of Corwrion with the other stories I have cited
from the same county, we shall have no difficulty in satisfying
ourselves as to its meaning. It can only belong to the stage of thought
which looks with dread on the use that may be made of one's name by an
enemy,--a stage of thought in which the fairy might naturally fear for a
man of another race, albeit her husband, to become possessed of her real
name. What else can we infer from the evident terror and grief with
which the captive ladies hear their names from their suitors' lips? It
is clear that the knowledge of the fairy's name conferred power over her
which she was unable to resist. This is surely the interpretation also
of the Danish tale of a man from whom a Hill-troll had stolen no fewer
than three wives. Riding home late one night afterwards, he saw a great
crowd of Hill-folk dancing and making merry; and among them he
recognized his three wives. One of these was Kirsten, his best beloved,
and he called out to her and named her name. The troll, whose name was
Skynd, or Hurry, came up to him and asked him why he presumed to call
Kirsten. The man explained that she had been his favourite wife, and
begged him with tears to give her back to him. The troll at last
consented, but with the proviso that he should never hurry (_skynde_)
her. For a long time the condition was observed; but one day, as she was
delayed in fetching something for her husband from the loft, he cried
out to her: "Make haste (_skynde dig_), Kirsten!" And he had hardly
spoken the words when the woman was gone, compelled to return to the
troll's abode. Here we have the phenomenon in a double form; for not
only does the husband regain his wife from the troll by pronouncing her
name, but he loses her once more by inadvertently summoning her captor.
It is a German superstition that a mara, or nightmare, can be
effectually exorcised if the sufferer surmises who it is, and instantly
addresses it by name.[221] We can now understand how, in the
Carmarthenshire story mentioned in Chapter VII., the farmer was rescued
from the fairies under whose spell he had been for twelve months. A man
caught sight of him dancing on the mountain and broke the spell by
speaking to him. It must have been the utterance of his name that drew
him out of the enchanted circle.

Returning, however, to the legend of Wastin, we may observe how much
narrower and less likely to be infringed is the taboo imposed on him
than that imposed on the youth of Blaensawdde. Yet the lady of the Van
Pool, whatever her practice, had in theory some relics of old-fashioned
wifely duty. She did not object to the chastisement which the laws of
Wales allowed a husband to bestow. A husband was permitted to beat his
wife for three causes; and if on any other occasion he raised his hand
against her, she had her remedy in the shape of a _sarâd_, or fine, to
be paid to her for the disgrace. But a _sarâd_ would not satisfy this
proud lady; nothing less than a divorce would meet the case. The
Partridge's wife, as we have seen, was still more exacting: she declined
to be struck at all. In the same way the fish who had become a girl, in
the Dyak story, cautioned her husband to use her well; and when he
struck her she rushed back screaming into the water. In another Bornoese
tradition, which is quoted by Mr. Farrer, the heroine is taken up to the
sky because her husband had struck her, there having been no previous
prohibition.[222] A different sort of personal violence is resented in
the Bantik legend cited above. There the husband is forbidden to tear
out one white hair which adorns Outahagi, his wife's head. He disobeys
after she has given birth to a son; and she vanishes in a tempest and
returns to the sky, where her husband is forced to seek her again.

The stipulation made by Wild Edric's bride is still more arbitrary,
according to our notions, than these. Her husband was forbidden to
reproach her on account of her sisters, or the place from which he
snatched her away. In other words, he was forbidden to charge her with
her supernatural character. When Diarmaid, the daughter of King
Underwaves, comes in the form of a beggar to Fionn and insists on
sharing his couch, she becomes a beautiful girl, and consents to marry
him on condition that he does not say to her thrice how he found her. In
a variant, the hero, going out shooting, meets with a hare, which, when
hard pressed by the dogs, turns into a woman. She promises to wed him on
his entering into three vows, namely, not to ask his king to a feast
without first letting her know (a most housewifely proviso), not to cast
up to her in any company that he found her in the form of a hare, and
not to leave her in the company of only one man. Both these are West
Highland tales; and in the manner of the taboo they closely resemble
that given by Map. In an Illyrian story, a Vila is by a youth found one
morning sleeping in the grass. He is astonished at her beauty, and
plants a shade for her. When she wakes she is pleased, and asks what he
wants for such kindness. He asks nothing less than to take her to wife;
and she is content, but, avowing herself a Vila, forbids him to utter
that name, for if he should do so she must quit him at once. Keats has
glorified one of these stories by his touch; and it was a true instinct
that guided him to make Lamia's disappearance follow, not on Apollonius'
denunciation of her real character, but on the echo of the words "A
serpent!" by her astounded husband, Lycius. What matter that the
philosopher should make a charge against her? It was only when her lover
repeated the foul word that she forsook him. The nightmare-wife in one
of the stories mentioned in the last chapter vanishes, it will be
remembered, on being reproached with her origin, and in another on being
asked how she became a nightmare; and the lady in the Esthonian tale
warns her husband against calling her Mermaid. In this connection it is
obvious to refer to the euphemistic title Eumenides, bestowed by the
Greeks on the Furies, and to the parallel names, Good People and Fair
Family, for fays in this country. In all these cases the thought is
distinguishable from that of the Carnarvonshire sagas; for the offence
is not given by the utterance of a personal name, but by incautious use
of a generic appellation which conveys reproach, if not scorn.[223]

The heroine of a saga of the Gold Coast was really a fish, but was in
the form of a woman. Her husband had sworn to her that he would not
allude in any way to her home or her relatives; and, relying on this
promise, his wife had disclosed her true nature to him and taken him
down to her home. He was kindly received there, but was speared by some
fishermen, and only with difficulty rescued by his new relatives, who
enjoined him when he returned to earth with his wife to keep the
spearhead carefully concealed. It was, however, found and claimed by its
owner; and to escape the charge of theft the husband reluctantly
narrated the whole adventure. No evil consequences immediately ensued
from this breach of his vow. But he had lately taken a second wife; and
she one day quarrelled with the first wife and taunted her with being a
fish. Upbraiding her husband for having revealed the secret, the latter
plunged into the sea and resumed her former shape. So in the Pawnee
story of The Ghost Wife, a wife who had died is persuaded by her husband
to come back from the Spirit Land to dwell again with himself and her
child. All goes well until he takes a second wife, who turns out
ill-tempered and jealous of the first wife. Quarrelling with her one
day, she reproaches the latter with being nothing but a ghost. The next
morning when the husband awoke, his first wife was no longer by his
side. She had returned to the Spirit Land; and the following night both
he and the child died in their sleep--called by the first wife to
herself.[224] These sagas bring us back to that of Melusina, who
disappears, it will be recollected, not when the count, her husband,
breaks the taboo, but when, by calling her a serpent, he betrays his
guilty knowledge.

A name, indeed, is the cause of offence and disappearance in many other
of these stories. The chieftain of the Quins, who owned the Castle of
Inchiquin on the lake of that name, near the town of Ennis in Ireland,
found in one of the many caves of the neighbourhood a lady who consented
to become his bride, only stipulating that no one bearing the name of
O'Brien should be allowed to enter the castle gate. When this
prohibition was infringed she sprang through a window with her child
into the lake. The property has long since passed into the hands of the
O'Briens; and amid the ruins of the castle the fatal window is still
shown nearly as perfect as when the supernatural lady leaped through it
into the waters. It may be safely said that the primitive form of the
taboo has not come down to us in this tale, and that it owes its
present form to the fact that the O'Briens have acquired the estates
once owned by the Quins. Probably the utterance of some hateful name was
forbidden. But whatever name may have been able to disturb the
equanimity of the Lady of Inchiquin, we are now familiar enough with
these superstitions to understand why a holy name should be tabooed by
the goat-footed fairy wife of Don Diego Lopez in the Spanish tale
narrated by Sir Francis Palgrave. "Holy Mary!" exclaimed the Don, as he
witnessed an unexpected quarrel among his dogs, "who ever saw the like?"
His wife, without more ado, seized her daughter and glided through the
air to her native mountains. Nor did she ever return, though she
afterwards, at her son's request, supplied an enchanted horse to release
her husband when in captivity to the Moors. In two Norman variants the
lady forbids the utterance in her presence of the name of Death.[225]

These high-born heroines had, forsooth, highly developed sensibilities.
The wife of a Teton (the Tetons are a tribe of American natives)
deserted him, abandoned her infant to her younger brother's care, and
plunged into a stream, where she became what we call a mermaid,--and all
because her husband had scolded her. In another American tale, where the
wife was a snake, she deserted him from jealousy. A Tirolese saga speaks
of a man who had a wife of unknown extraction. She had bidden him,
whenever she baked bread, to pour water for her with his right hand. He
poured it once with the left, to see what would happen. He soon saw, to
his cost; for she flew out of the house. The Queen of Sheba, according
to a celebrated Arab writer, was the daughter of the King of China and a
Peri. Her birth came about on this wise. Her father, hunting, met two
snakes, a black one and a white, struggling together in deadly combat.
He killed the black one, and caused the white one to be carefully
carried to his palace and into his private apartment. On entering the
room the next day, he was surprised to find a lovely lady, who announced
herself as a Peri, and thanked him for delivering her the day before
from her enemy, the black snake. As a proof of her gratitude she offered
him her sister in marriage, subject, however, to the proviso that he
should never question her why she did this or that, else she would
vanish, never to be seen again. The king agreed, and had every reason to
be pleased with his beautiful bride. A son was born to them; but the
lady put it in the fire. The king wept and tore his beard, but said
nothing. Then a daughter of singular loveliness--afterwards Balkis,
Queen of Sheba--was born: a she-bear appeared at the door, and the
mother flung her babe into its jaws. The king tore out not only his
beard, but the hair of his head, in silence. A climax, however, came
when, in the course of a war, he and his army had to effect a seven
days' march across a certain desert. On the fifth day came the queen, a
large knife in her hand, and, slitting the provision-bags and the
waterskins, strewed the whole of the food upon the ground, and brought
the king and his army face to face with death. Her husband could no
longer restrain himself from questioning her. Then she told him that his
vizier, bribed by the enemy, had poisoned the food and water in order to
destroy him and his army, and that his son had a constitutional defect
which would have prevented him from living three days if she had not put
him in the fire. The she-bear, who was no other than a trusty old nurse,
brought back his daughter at her call; but the queen herself
disappeared, and he saw her no more. The Nereid in the Cretan tale
referred to in Chapter IX obstinately refused to speak, although her
lover had fairly conquered her. But after she bore him a son, the old
woman of whom he had previously taken counsel advised him to heat the
oven and threaten his mistress that if she would not speak he would
throw the boy into it. The Nereid seized the babe, and, crying out: "Let
go my child, dog!" tore it from his arms and vanished. It is related by
Apollodorus that Thetis, who was also a Nereid, wished to make her son
immortal. To this end she buried him in fire by night to burn out his
human elements, and anointed him with ambrosia by day. Peleus, her
husband, was not informed of the reason for this lively proceeding; and,
seeing his child in the fire, he called out. Thetis, thus thwarted,
abandoned both husband and child in disgust, and went back to her native
element. In the great Sanskrit epic of the Mahábhárata we are told that
King Sántanu, walking by a riverside one day, met and fell in love with
a beautiful girl, who told him that she was the river Ganges, and could
only marry him on condition that he never questioned her conduct. To
this he, with a truly royal gallantry, agreed; and she bore him several
children, all of whom she threw into the river as soon as they were
born. At last she bore him a boy, Bhíshma; and her husband begged her to
spare his life, whereupon she instantly changed into the river Ganges
and flowed away. Incompatibility of temper, as evidenced by three simple
disagreements, was a sufficient ground of divorce for the fairy of Llyn
Nelferch, in the parish of Ystradyfodwg, in Glamorganshire, from her
human husband. In a variant of the Maori sagas, to which I have more
than once referred, the lady quits her spouse in disgust because he
turns out _not_ to be a cannibal, as she had hoped from his truculent
name, Kai-tangata, or man-eater. Truly a heartrending instance of
misplaced confidence![226]

Many of these stories belong to the Star's Daughter type,--that is to
say, are wanting in the taboo. But in every variant of the Swan-maiden
group, to whatsoever type it may belong, the catastrophe is inevitable
from the beginning. Whether or not it depends on the breach of an
explicit taboo, it is equally the work of doom. A legend of the Loo-Choo
Islands expresses this feeling in its baldest form. A farmer sees a
bright light in his well, and, on drawing near, beholds a woman diving
and washing in the water. Her clothes, strange in shape and of a ruddy
sunset colour, are hanging on a pine-tree near at hand. He takes them,
and thus compels her to marry him. She lives with him for ten years,
bearing him a son and a daughter. At the end of that time her fate is
fulfilled; she ascends a tree during her husband's absence, and, having
bidden her children farewell, glides off on a cloud and disappears. Both
in its approximation to the Hasan of Bassorah type and in its
attributing the separation of husband and wife to fate, this tale agrees
remarkably with the Lay of Weyland Smith, where we are told: "From the
south through Mirkwood, to fulfil their fates, the young fairy maidens
flew. The southern ladies alighted to rest on the sea-strand, and fell
to spinning their goodly linen. First Allrune, Cear's fair daughter,
took Egil to her bright bosom. The second, Swanwhite, took Slagfin. But
Lathgund, her sister, clasped the white neck of Weyland. Seven winters
they stayed there in peace, but the eighth they began to pine, the ninth
they must needs part. The young fairy maidens hastened to Mirkwood to
fulfil their fates." A Vidyádhari, too, who, in the Kathá-sarit-ságara,
is caught in the orthodox manner, dwells with a certain ascetic until
she brings forth a child. She then calmly remarks to her holy paramour:
"My curse has been brought to an end by living with you. If you desire
to see any more of me, cook this child of mine with rice and eat it; you
will then be reunited to me!" Having said this, she vanished. The
ascetic followed her directions, and was thus enabled to fly after her.
In one of the New Zealand variants we are told that the time came for
Whai-tiri to return to her home. The same thing is indicated to the wife
in a Tirolese tale by means of a voice, which her husband hears as he
passes through the forest. The voice cried: "Tell Mao that Mamao is
dead." When he repeated this to his wife she disappeared; and he never
saw or heard of her after. In view of these narratives there can be
little doubt as to the meaning of the Arab tradition of the she-demon,
from whom one of the clans was descended. Her union with their human
father came suddenly to an end when she beheld a flash of
lightning.[227]

The Star's Daughter, however, returned to the sky because she was
homesick. Nor is she the only heroine of these tales who did so; but
homesick heroines are not very interesting, and I pass to one who had a
nobler reason for quitting her love. The saga is told at Rarotonga of a
girl of dazzling white complexion who came up out of a fountain and was
caught. She became the wife of a chief. It was the custom of the
inhabitants of the world from which she came to perform the Cæsarean
operation on females who were ready to give birth; so that the birth of
a child involved the mother's death. When she found on the earth, to her
surprise, that by allowing nature to take its course the mother as well
as the child was saved, she persuaded her husband to go with her to the
lower world to endeavour to put a stop to the cruel custom. He was ready
to accompany her; but after five several efforts to dive with her
through the fountain to the regions below he was obliged to abandon the
attempt. Sorrowfully embracing each other, the "peerless one" said: "I
alone will go to the spirit-world to teach what I have learnt from you."
At this she again dived down into the clear waters, and was never more
seen on earth.[228]

It will not have escaped the reader's attention, that among the more
backward races the taboo appears generally simpler in form, or is absent
altogether. Among most, if not all, of the peoples who tell stories
wherein this is the case, the marriage bonds are of the loosest
description; and there is, therefore, nothing very remarkable in the
supernatural bride's conduct. We might expect to find that as advances
are made in civilization, and marriage becomes more regarded, the reason
for separation would become more and more complex and cogent. Am I going
too far in suggesting that the resumption by the bride of her bird or
beast shape marks a stage in the development of the myth beyond the
Star's Daughter type; and the formal taboo, where the human figure is
not abandoned, a stage later still? In our view, indeed, the taboo is
not less irrational, as a means of putting an end to the marriage, than
the retrieved robe or skin. But we forget how recent in civilization is
the sanctity of the marriage-tie. Even among Christian nations divorce
was practised during the Middle Ages for very slight reasons, despite
the authority of popes and priests. In Eastern countries the husband has
always had little check on his liberty of putting away a wife for any
cause, or no cause at all; and, though unrecognized by the religious
books, which have enforced the husband's rights with so stern a
sanction, this liberty on his part may have been counter-balanced,
oftener than we think, by corresponding liberty on the wife's part.
Beyond doubt this has been so in India, where it is effected by means
of marriage settlements. In Bengal, for instance, a bridegroom is
sometimes compelled to execute a deed in which he stipulates never to
scold his wife, the penalty being a divorce; and deeds are not unknown
empowering the wife to get a divorce if her husband ever so much as
disagree with her.[229] This is incompatibility of temper with a
vengeance! Even the fairy of Llyn Nelferch was willing to put up with
two disagreements; and no taboo in story has gone, or could go, further.

Moreover, some of the taboos are such as the etiquette of various
peoples would entirely approve, though breaches of them might not be
visited so severely as in the tales. I have already pointed out that the
Lady of the Van Pool would have had a legal remedy for blows without
cause. The romance lies in the wide interpretation she gave to the
blows, and their disproportionate punishment. These transfer the
hearer's sympathies from the wife to the husband. Precisely parallel
seems to be the injunction laid upon Hohodemi, by Toyotamahime, daughter
of the Sea-god. I know not what may be the rule in Japan; but it is
probably not different from that which obtains in China. There, as we
learn from the Li Kì, one of the Confucian classics, a wife in
Toyotamahime's condition would, even among the poor, be placed in a
separate apartment; and her husband, though it would be his duty to send
twice a day to ask after her, would not see her, nor apparently enter
her room until the child was presented to him to be named. Curiously
enough the prohibition in the Japanese tale is identical with that
imposed by Pressina, herself a water-fay, the mother of Melusina,
according to the romance of Jean d'Arras written at the end of the
fourteenth century. Melusina and the Esthonian mermaid laid down another
rule: they demanded a recurring period during which they would be free
from marital intrusion. India is not Europe; but it cannot be thought
quite irrelevant to observe that much more than this is commonly secured
to a bride in many parts of India. For by the marriage settlement it is
expressly agreed that she is to go to her father's house as often as she
likes; and if her husband object, she is empowered in the deed to bring
an action against him for false imprisonment.[230]

Here we may leave the subject of the taboo. Something, however, must be
said on the Swan-maiden as divine ancestress. But first of all, let me
advert to one or two cases where divinity is ascribed without
progenitorship. The Maori heroine and her husband are worshipped. They
do not appear to be considered actual parents of any New Zealand clan;
but the husband at all events would be deemed one of the same blood.
Passing over to New Guinea, we find a remarkable saga concerning the
moon. The moon is a daughter of the earth, born by the assistance of a
native of the village of Keile, about twenty miles to the eastward of
Port Moresby. A long while ago, digging deeper than usual, he came upon
a round, smooth, silvery, shining object, which, after he had got it out
and lifted it up, grew rapidly larger and larger until it floated away.
He set out to search for it; nor did he desist until one day he came
upon a large pool in the river and found a beautiful woman bathing. On
the bank lay her grass petticoat where she had cast it off. He sat down
upon it; and when her attention was attracted to him by his dogs, they
recognized one another. She was the moon, and he was the man who had dug
her up out of the earth; and he claimed her as his wife. "If I marry
you," she replied, "you must die; but as you have touched my clothes you
must die in any case, and so for one day I will marry you, and then you
must go home to your village and prepare for death." Accordingly they
were married for one day; and the man then went home, made his funeral
feast and died. The moon in due course married the sun, as it was her
doom to do; but his intolerable jealousies rendered their union so
wretched that they at last agreed to see as little of one another as
possible. This accounts for their conduct ever since. An Annamite legend
relates that a woodcutter found some fairies bathing at a lovely
fountain. He took possession of the raiment of one, and hid it at the
bottom of his rice-barn. In this way he compelled its owner to become
his wife; and they lived together happily for some years. Their son was
three years old when, in her husband's absence, she sold their stock of
rice. On clearing out the barn her clothes were found. She bade farewell
to the child, left her comb stuck in his collar, donned her clothes and
flew away. When her husband returned and learned how matters stood, he
took his son and repaired to the fountain, where happily they fell in
with some of his wife's servants who were sent thither to draw water.
Engaging them in conversation, he caused his son to drop the comb into
one of the water-jars. By this means his wife recognized them, and sent
an enchanted handkerchief which enabled him to fly and follow her
servants to her home. After awhile she sent him and her son back to the
earth, promising to get permission in a short time to return and live
with them. By the carelessness of one of her servants, however, both
father and son were dropped into the sea and drowned. Apprised of the
catastrophe by ravens, the fairy transformed her servant, by way of
punishment, into--or according to a variant, became herself--the morning
star, while father and son became the evening star. And now the morning
star and the evening star perpetually seek one another, but never again
can they meet.[231]

Turning to the instances where ancestry is claimed, we find that the
chiefs of the Ati clan are descended from "the peerless one" of
Rarotonga. The Arawàk Indians of Guiana reckon descent in the female
line. One of their families takes its name from its foremother, the
warlock's daughter who was provided with the dogskin mentioned on a
previous page. Another family deduces its name and pedigree from an
earth-spirit married to one of its ancestors; but it does not appear
whether any Swan-maiden myth attaches to her. The fish _puttin_ is
sacred among the Dyaks. On no account will they eat it, because they
would be eating their relations, for they are descended from the lady
whose first and last form was a _puttin_. In other words, the _puttin_
is their totem. A family of the town of Chama on the Gold Coast claims
in like manner to be descended from the fish-woman of whose story I have
given an outline; and a legend to the same effect is current at the
neighbouring town of Appam; nor in either instance do the members of the
family dare to eat of the fish of the kind to which they believe their
ancestress belonged. The totem superstition is manifest in the case of
the Phoenician, or Babylonian, goddess Derceto, who was represented as
woman to the waist and thence downward fish. She was believed to have
been a woman, the mother of Semiramis, and to have thrown herself in
despair into a lake. Her worshippers abstained from eating fish; though
fish were offered to her in sacrifice, and golden fish suspended in her
temple. Melusina was the mother of the family of Lusignan. She used to
appear and shriek on one of the castle towers as often as the head of
the family, or a King of France, was to die, or when any disaster was
about to happen to the realm, or to the town of Luxemburg. She was also
the author of certain presages of plenty or famine. Similar legends are
told of the castles of Argouges and Rânes in Normandy. If the Irish
Banshee tales could be minutely examined, it is probable that they would
resolve themselves into stories of supernatural ancestresses. To the
Vila of the Illyrian story, and the fairy of Sir Francis Palgrave's
Spanish story, noble families attribute their origin. A family in the
Tirol is descended from the lady who insisted on her husband's pouring
water with his right hand; and the members of a noble Greek family have
the blood of a Nereid in their veins.[232]

Though the heroine of the Van Pool might never return to her husband,
she was drawn back to earth by the care of her three sons, who, by means
of her instructions, became celebrated physicians. On one occasion she
accompanied them to a place still called Pant-y-Meddygon (the hollow, or
dingle, of the physicians), and there pointed out to them the various
herbs which grew around, and revealed their medicinal virtues. It is
added that, in order that their knowledge should not be lost, the
physicians wisely committed the same to writing for the benefit of
mankind throughout all ages. A collection of medical recipes purporting
to be this very work still exists in a manuscript preserved at Jesus
College, Oxford, which is now in course of publication by Professor Rhys
and Mr. J. Gwenogvryn Evans, and is known as the Red Book of Hergest. An
edition of the "Meddygon Myddfai," as this collection is called, was
published by the Welsh MSS. Society thirty years ago, with an English
translation. It professes to have been written under the direction of
Rhiwallon the Physician and his sons Kadwgan, Gruffydd, and Einion; and
they are called "the ablest and most eminent of the physicians of their
time and of the time of Rhys Gryg, their lord, and the lord of Dinevor,
the nobleman who kept their rights and privileges whole unto them, as
was meet." This nobleman was Prince of South Wales in the early part of
the thirteenth century; and his monumental effigy is in the cathedral
of St. David's. Mr. Gwenogvryn Evans, than whom there is no higher
authority, is of opinion that the manuscript was written at the end of
the fourteenth century--that is to say, about two hundred years after
the date at which the marriage between the youth of Blaensawdde and his
fairy love is alleged to have taken place; and it is believed by the
editor of the published volume to be a copy of a still more ancient
manuscript now in the British Museum. Yet it contains no reference to
the legend of the Van Pool. The volume in question includes a transcript
of another manuscript of the work, which is ascribed in the colophon to
Howel the Physician, who, writing in the first person, claims to be
"regularly descended in the male line from the said Einion, the son of
Rhiwallon, the physician of Myddfai, being resident in Cilgwryd, in
Gower." This recension of the work is much later in date than the
former. A portion of it cannot be older than the end of the fifteenth
century; and the manuscript from which it was printed was probably the
result of accretions extending over a long period of time, down to the
year 1743, when it was copied "from the book of John Jones, Physician of
Myddfai, the last lineal descendant of the family." The remedies it
contains, though many of them are antique enough, and superstitious
enough, are of various dates and sources; and, so far from being
attributed to a supernatural origin, they are distinctly said to "have
been proved to be the best and most suitable for the human body through
the research and diligent study of Rhiwallon" and his three sons. The
negative evidence of the "Meddygon Myddfai," therefore, tends to show
that the connection of the Van Pool story with the Physicians is of
comparatively recent date.[233]

And yet it is but natural (if we may use such an expression) that a
mythical creature like the Lady of the Lake should be the progenitor of
an extraordinary offspring. Elsewhere we have seen her sisters the
totems of clans, the goddesses of nations, the parents of great families
and renowned personages. Melusina gave birth to monsters of ugliness and
evil,[234] and through them to a long line of nobles. So the heroine of
the Llanberis legend had two sons and two daughters, all of whom were
remarkable. The elder son became a great physician, and all his
descendants were celebrated for their proficiency in medicine. The
second son was a Welsh Tubal-cain. One of the daughters invented the
small ten-stringed harp, and the other the spinning wheel. "Thus," we
are told, "were introduced the arts of medicine, manufactures, music,
and woollen work!" If, then, there were a family at Myddfai celebrated
for their leechcraft, and possessed of lands and influence, as we know
was the fact, their hereditary skill would seem to an ignorant peasantry
to demand a supernatural origin; and their wealth and material power
would not refuse the additional consideration which a connection with
the legend of the neighbouring pool would bring them.

But for all that the incident of the reappearance by the mother to her
children may have been part of the original story. The Carnarvonshire
fairies of various tales analogous to that of the Van Pool are recalled
by maternal love to the scenes of their wedded life; and the hapless
father hears his wife's voice outside the window chanting pathetically:

    "If my son should feel it cold,
    Let him wear his father's coat;
    If the fair one feel the cold,
    Let her wear my petticoat!"

Whatever he may have thought of these valuable directions, they hardly
seem to us sufficient to have brought the lady up from "the bottomless
pool of Corwrion" to utter. There is more sense in the mother's song in
a Kaffir tale. This woman was not of purely supernatural origin. She was
born in consequence of her (human) mother's eating pellets given her by
a bird. Married to a chief by whom she was greatly beloved, it was
noticed that she never went out of doors by day. In her husband's
absence her father-in-law forced her to go and fetch water from the
river for him in the daytime. Like the woman by the waters of the Rhone,
she was drawn down into the river. That evening her child cried
piteously; and the nurse took it to the stream in the middle of the
night, singing:

    "It is crying, it is crying,
    The child of Sihamba Ngenyanga;
    It is crying, it will not be pacified."

The mother thereupon came out of the water, and wailed this song as she
put the child to her breast:

    "It is crying, it is crying,
    The child of the walker by moonlight.
    It was done intentionally by people whose names are unmentionable.[235]
    They sent her for water during the day.
    She tried to dip with the milk-basket, and then it sank.
    Tried to dip with the ladle, and then it sank.
    Tried to dip with the mantle, and then it sank."

The result of the information conveyed in these words was her ultimate
recovery by her husband with the assistance of her mother, who was a
skilful sorceress.[236]

A Finnish tale belonging to the Cinderella group represents the heroine
as changed into a reindeer-cow by an ogress who takes her place as wife
and mother. But her babe will not be comforted; so a woman, to whose
care he is committed, carries him into the forest, and sings the
following incantation:

    "Little blue eyes, little red-fell,
    Come thou thine own son to suckle,
    Feed whom thou hast given birth to!
    Of that cannibal nought will he,
    Never drinks from that bloodsucker;
    For her breasts to him are loathsome,
    Nor can hunger drive him to them."

The reindeer cannot withstand this appeal. She casts her skin, and comes
in human form to suckle her child. This results, after two repetitions
in the husband's burning the reindeer hide and clasping her in his arms.
But, like Peleus, he has to hold her fast in spite of various
transformations, until he has overcome the charm and has her once more
in her pristine shape![237]

It was not strength so much as boldness and tenacity that conquered
here. In the Kaffir story the husband's first attempt to pull his wife
out of the water by sheer force failed. Thus, too, in one of the
Tirolese stories already mentioned the husband lies in wait for his wife
when she returns, as usual, to comb her little girl's hair on a
Saturday. He catches her by the arm as she enters; and she tells him
that if he can hold her for a little while she must stay: otherwise she
will never come again. All his strength is, however, too little to
struggle successfully with her. The mother's visits to her children are,
indeed, a frequent sequel to the story; and occasionally the tie which
compels her to return is taken advantage of by the forsaken husband to
obtain possession of her again. But fraud, not force, is the means
employed, as in the Lapp story of the Maiden out of the Sea, where the
mermaid's clothes are once more confiscated. In a legend of Llyn y
Dywarchen (the Lake of the Sod), not very far from Beddgelert, the
water-nymph subsequently appears to her husband, conversing with him
from a floating turf while he stands on the shore. Here the motive of
the reappearance is the unusual one of conjugal, rather than parental,
affection.[238]

I must not omit to add that the first Sunday in August is kept in the
neighbourhood of the Van Pool as the anniversary of the fairy's return
to the lake. It is believed that annually on that day a commotion takes
place in the lake; its waters boil to herald the approach of the lady
with her oxen. It was, and still is (though in decreasing force), the
custom for large numbers of people to make a pilgrimage to witness the
phenomenon; and it is said that the lady herself appears in mermaid form
upon the surface, and combs her tresses. I have little doubt that in
this superstition we have the relic of a religious festival in honour of
an archaic divinity whose abode was in the lake. She has, perhaps, only
escaped being an enchanted princess by being a Welsh rather than a
German goddess. If the mermaid form be of genuine antiquity,--about
which I confess to a lurking suspicion,--it is another bond with the
Scottish stories, with Melusina and with Derceto.[239]

We have now considered the principal points of the myth. The
feather-robe, or skin, we found absent from all its more archaic
examples. There, no change of form occurs, or when it does occur it is
accomplished by simple transformation. When present, the robe is a mere
symbol of the lady's superhuman nature, or else the result of
enchantment. These are more recent types, and are all, or nearly all,
_märchen_. In the later sagas, such as those of Melusina and the Lady of
the Van Pool, it is again absent; though relics of the change of form
frequently remain.

Capture of the Swan-maiden proper is effected by theft of her robe: in
other types either by main force, or more frequently with her consent,
more or less willingly given, or by her own initiative.

We then passed to the more important subject of the taboo. The taboo,
strictly speaking, only appears where the peltry is absent. Several of
its forms correspond with rules of antique etiquette. Others recall
special points connected with savage life, such as the dislike of iron
and steel, and the prejudice against the mention of a personal name.
Other prohibitions are against reproaching the wife with her origin,
against reminding her of her former condition, or against questioning
her conduct or crossing her will. But whether the taboo be present or
absent, the loss of the wife is equally inevitable, equally foreseen
from the beginning. It is the doom of the connection between a simple
man and a superhuman female. Even where the feather-robe is absent the
taboo is not always found. Among savages the marriage-bond is often very
loose: notably in the more backward races. And among these the
superhuman wife's excuse for flight is simpler; and sometimes it is only
an arbitrary exercise of will. The taboo grows up with the advance in
civilization.

Lastly, we considered the Swan-maiden as divine ancestress. We found her
resident in heaven, we found her worshipped, we found her as the totem
of a clan. The totemistic stories are widely spread,--so widely, indeed,
as to afford a presumption that we have in them a clue to the whole
meaning of the myth. For not only have we the complete totemistic form,
as among the Dyaks and the tribes of the Gold Coast; but we find the
superstition fading through the goddess Derceto into modern sagas of the
supernatural mother of a family, who to her sometimes owe extraordinary
powers, and over whose fate she continually watches.

Here, then, our study of this beautiful myth must close. I am far from
suggesting that the subject is exhausted. On the contrary, it is so
large and so complex that I have rigidly abstained from anything more
than a very imperfect examination of its principal features. On some of
the points here partially discussed I shall have something more to add
in our final chapter, when discussing certain theories on the fairy
beliefs.


FOOTNOTES:

[202] Grey, p. 66; Taylor, p. 138; White, vol. i. pp. 95, 115, _et
seqq._, vol. ii. p. 127, _et seqq_.

[203] "F. L. Journal," vol. i. p. 202; "Revue des Trad. Pop." vol. iv.
p. 305.

[204] Von Hahn, vol. ii. p. 78. In illustration of these remarks on
marital relations in a society where female kinship only is recognized,
let me quote the following paragraph concerning Maori customs. The
Maories, it must be borne in mind, have only recently emerged from this
stage; and many relics of it remain.

"Sometimes the father simply told his intended son-in-law he might come
and live with his daughter; she was thenceforth considered his wife, he
lived with his father-in-law, and became one of the tribe, or _hapu_, to
which his wife belonged, and in case of war, was often obliged to fight
against his own relatives. So common is the custom of the bridegroom
going to live with his wife's family, that it frequently occurs, when he
refuses to do so, she will leave him, and go back to her relatives;
several instances came under my notice where young men have tried to
break through this custom, and have so lost their wives" (Taylor, p.
337).

[205] Not entirely: see Burton, "Suppl. Nights," vol. vi. p. 363; "F. L.
Journal," vol. i. p. 284; Sastri, p. 148.

[206] In speaking of a type as more or less recent than another, it must
be recollected that I am not speaking of chronological order, but of the
order of development. For aught we know, the story of the Marquis of the
Sun may as a matter of date be actually older, could we trace it, than
the far more archaic story of Tawhaki. But the society in which it took
shape was more advanced than that disclosed in the Maori legend.

[207] Webster, p. 120; Campbell, vol. i. p. 25; "Mélusine," vol. i. p.
446; "F. L. Españ." vol. i. p. 187; Schneller, p. 71; Imbriani, p. 411;
Cosquin, vol. i. pp. 9, 25; Sébillot, "Contes," vol. i. p. 197;
Grundtvig, vol. i. p. 46; Cavallius, p. 255; Maspons y Labros, p. 102;
"F. L. Journal," vol. i. p. 284, quoting Lewis.

[208] Waldau, p. 248; Ralston, "R. F. Tales," p. 120, from Afanasief.

[209] Compare the assistance rendered by the birds to Tini-rau, _suprà_,
p. 286. The Eskimo hero is conveyed to his wife on a salmon's tail
(Rink, p. 145). Where is the Buddhist pedigree of this incident, or the
evidence of Buddhist influence which produced it?

[210] Sastri, p. 80; Cosquin, vol. ii. pp. 19, 18; Ralston, "Tibetan
Tales," p. 72; "F. L. Journal," vol. ii. p. 9; Vernaleken, p. 280.

[211] "F. L. Journal," vol. vii. p. 318; Pitré, vol. iv. pp. 391, 410. A
variant given by Prof. De Gubernatis is nearly allied to the Cinderella
group ("Novelline," p. 29); Brett, p. 176.

[212] Basset, p. 161, quoting Bresnier, "Cours de langue Arabe." In a
Maya story given by Dr. Brinton, the husband prevents his wife's
transformation in a different way--namely, by throwing salt ("F. L.
Journal," vol. i. p. 251).

[213] "Journ. Ethnol. Soc." N. S., vol. ii. p. 26; Giles, _passim_;
Brauns, p. 388.

[214] "Y Cymmrodor," vol. v. p. 94.

[215] Map, Dist. ii. c. 11.

[216] Map, Dist. ii. c. 12.

[217] "Y Cymmrodor," vol. iv. p. 201. Nothing turns on the actual names
in these stories; they have been evidently much corrupted,--probably
past all recognition.

[218] Ibid. p. 189; vol. v. pp. 59, 66; vol. vi. p. 196.

[219] Pliny l. xvi. c. 95; Thorpe, vol. ii. pp. 275, 277; Stephens, p.
248, citing the "Barzas Breiz."

[220] The above paragraphs had scarcely been written when the London
papers (June 1890) reprinted extracts from a letter in the _Vossische
Zeitung_ relating the adventures of Dr. Bayol, the Governor of Kotenon,
who was recently imprisoned by the bloodthirsty King of Dahomey. The
king was too suspicious to sign the letter written in his name to the
President of the French Republic. In all probability he was unwilling to
let the President have his sign manual, for of course M. Carnot would
have no hesitation in bewitching him by its means.

[221] Keightley, p. 121, quoting from Thiele; Thorpe, vol. iii. p. 155.

[222] Ancient Laws and Institutes of Wales (Public Record Comm., 1841)
pp. 44, 252. (The Dimetian code was the one in force at Myddfai; but
that of Gwynedd was similar in this respect.) Farrer, p. 256.

[223] Campbell, vol. iii. p. 403; Mac Innes, p. 211; Wratislaw, p. 314.
_Cf._ a similar story told by a peasant to Dr. Krauss' mother no longer
ago than 1888, as having recently happened at Mrkopolje: he "knew the
parties!" (Krauss, "Volksgl." p. 107).

[224] Ellis, p. 208; Grinnell, p. 129.

[225] "Choice Notes," p. 96; _cf._ Jahn, p. 364, cited above, p. 279.
(Kennedy relates the story of the Lady of Inchiquin differently.
According to him the husband was never to invite company to the castle.
This is probably more modern than the other version. Kennedy, p. 282.)
Keightley, p. 458, quoting the _Quarterly Review_, vol. xxii. Sir
Francis Palgrave, though an accurate writer, was guilty of the
unpardonable sin of invariably neglecting to give his authorities. Ibid.
p. 485, quoting Mdlle. Bosquet, "La Normandie Romanesque."

[226] "Journal Amer. F. L." vol ii. p. 137; vol. i. p. 76; Schneller, p.
210; "Rosenöl," vol. i. p. 162; Child, vol. i. p. 337, quoting Schmidt
and Apollodorus; "Panjab N. & Q.," vol. ii. p. 207. (In this form the
story is found as a tradition, probably derived from the Mahábhárata.)
"Trans. Aberd. Eistedd." p. 225; White, vol. i. p. 126.

[227] Dennys, p. 140; "Corpus Poet. Bor." vol. i. p. 168;
"Kathá-sarit-ságara," vol. ii. p. 453, _cf._ p. 577; White, vol. i. p.
88; Schneller, p. 210; Robertson Smith, p. 50.

[228] Gill, p. 265.

[229] "Indian N. & Q." vol. iv. p. 147.

[230] "Sacred Books of the East," vol. xxvii. pp. 471, 475, 476; "Indian
N. & Q." vol. iv. p. 147.

[231] Romilly, p. 134; Landes, p. 123.

[232] Bent, p. 13. The Nereids in modern Greek folklore are conceived in
all points as Swan-maidens. They fly through the air by means of magical
raiment (Schmidt, p. 133).

[233] See my article on the "Meddygon Myddfai," entitled "Old Welsh Folk
Medicine," "Y Cymmrodor," vol. ix. p. 227.

[234] A certain German family used to excuse its faults by attributing
them to a sea-fay who was reckoned among its ancestors; Birlinger, "Aus
Schwaben," vol. i. p. 7, quoting the "Zimmerische Chronik."

[235] Namely, her husband's father, whose name she was not permitted by
etiquette to utter. See above, p. 309.

[236] Theal, p. 54. The Teton lady who became a mermaid was summoned, by
singing an incantation, to suckle her child; "Journal Amer. F. L." vol.
ii. p. 137.

[237] Schreck, p. 71.

[238] Poestion, p. 55; "Cymru Fu," p. 474.

[239] "Y Cymmrodor," vol. iv. p. 177, vol. vi. p. 203. I have also made
inquiries at Ystradgynlais, in the neighbourhood of the lake, the
results of which confirm the statements of Professor Rhys'
correspondents; but I have failed to elicit any further information.




CHAPTER XII.

CONCLUSION.

     Retrospect--The fairies of Celtic and Teutonic races of the same
     nature as the supernatural beings celebrated in the traditions of
     other nations--All superstitions of supernatural beings
     explicable by reference to the conceptions of
     savages--Liebrecht's Ghost Theory of some Swan-maiden
     myths--MacRitchie's Finn Theory--The amount of truth in
     them--Both founded on too narrow an induction--Conclusion.


We have in the preceding pages examined some of the principal groups of
tales and superstitions relating to Fairies proper,--that is to say, the
Elves and Fays of Celtic and Teutonic tradition.

Dealing in the first instance with the sagas found in this country, or
in Germany, our investigations have by no means ended there; for in
order to understand these sagas, we have found occasion to refer again
and again to the _märchen_, as well as the sagas, of other European
nations,--nay, to the traditions of races as wide apart from our own in
geographical position and culture, as the South Sea Islanders, the
Ainos, and the Aborigines of America. And we have found among peoples in
the most distant parts of the globe similar stories and superstitions.
Incidentally, too, we have learned something of the details of archaic
practices, and have found the two great divisions of Tradition,--belief
and practice,--inseparably interwoven.

I do not pretend to have touched upon all the myths referring to
Fairies, as thus strictly defined; and the Kobolds and Puck, the
Household Spirits and Mischievous Demons, have scarcely been so much as
mentioned. Want of space forbids our going further. It is hoped,
however, that enough has been said, not merely to give the readers an
idea of the Fairy Mythology correct as far as it goes, but, beyond that,
to vindicate the method pursued in the investigation, as laid down in
our second chapter, by demonstrating the essential identity of human
imagination all over the world, and by tracing the stories with which we
have been dealing to a more barbarous state of society and a more
archaic plane of thought. It now remains, therefore, to recall what we
have ascertained concerning the nature and origin of the Fairies, and
briefly to consider two rival theories.

We started from some of the ascertained facts of savage thought and
savage life. The doctrine of Spirits formed our first proposition. This
we defined to be the belief held by savages that man consists of body
and spirit; that it is possible for the spirit to quit the body and roam
at will in different shapes about the world, returning to the body as to
its natural home; that in the spirit's absence the body sleeps, and that
it dies if the spirit return not; further, that the universe swarms with
spirits embodied and disembodied, because everything in the world has a
spirit, and all these spirits are analogues of the human spirit, having
the same will and acting from the same motives; and that if by chance
any of these spirits be ejected from its body, it may continue to exist
without a body, or it may find and enter a new body, not necessarily
such an one as it occupied before, but one quite different. The doctrine
of Transformation was another of our premises: that is to say, the
belief held by savages in the possibility of a change of form while
preserving the same identity. A third premise was the belief in
Witchcraft, or the power of certain persons to cause the transformations
just mentioned, and to perform by means of spells, or symbolic actions
and mystical words, various other feats beyond ordinary human power. And
there were others to which I need not now refer, all of which were
assumed to be expressed in the tales and songs, and in the social and
political institutions, of savages. Along with these, we assumed the
hypothesis of the evolution of civilization from savagery. By this I
mean that just as the higher orders of animal and vegetable life have
been developed from germs which appeared on this planet incalculable
ages ago; so during a past of unknown length the civilization of the
highest races of men has been gradually evolving through the various
stages of savagery and barbarism up to what we know it to-day; and so
every nation, no matter how barbarous, has arisen from a lower stage
than that in which it is found, and is on its way, if left to its
natural processes, to something higher and better. This is an hypothesis
which does not, of course, exclude the possibility of temporary and
partial relapses, such as we know have taken place in the history of
every civilized country, any more than it excludes the possibility of
the decay and death of empires; but upon the whole it claims that
progress and not retrogression is the law of human society. The
different stages of this progress have everywhere left their mark on the
tales and songs, the sayings and superstitions, the social, religious
and political institutions--in other words, on the belief and
practice--of mankind.

Starting from these premises, we have examined five groups, or cycles,
of tales concerning the Fairy Mythology. We have found Fairyland very
human in its organization. Its inhabitants marry, sometimes among
themselves, sometimes into mankind. They have children born to them; and
they require at such times female assistance. They steal children from
men, and leave their own miserable brats in exchange; they steal women,
and sometimes leave in their stead blocks of wood, animated by magical
art, or sometimes one of themselves. In the former case the animation
does not usually last very long, and the women is then supposed to die.
Their females sometimes in turn become captive to men. Unions thus
formed are, however, not lasting, until the husband has followed the
wife to her own home, and conquered his right to her afresh by some
great adventure. This is not always in the story: presumably, therefore,
not always possible. On the other hand, he who enters Fairyland and
partakes of fairy food is spell-bound: he cannot return--at least for
many years, perhaps for ever--to the land of men. Fairies are grateful
to men for benefits conferred, and resentful for injuries. They never
fail to reward those who do them a kindness; but their gifts usually
have conditions attached, which detract from their value and sometimes
become a source of loss and misery. Nor do they forget to revenge
themselves on those who offend them; and to watch them, when they do not
desire to be manifested, is a mortal offence. Their chief distinction
from men is in their unbounded magical powers, whereof we have had
several illustrations. They make things seem other than they are; they
appear and disappear at will; they make long time seem short, or short
time long; they change their own forms; they cast spells over mortals,
and keep them spell-bound for ages.

All these customs and all these powers are asserted of the Fairies
properly so called. And when we look at the superstitions of other races
than the Celts and Teutons, to which our inquiries have been primarily
directed, we find the same things asserted of all sorts of creatures.
Deities, ancestors, witches, ghosts, as well as animals of every kind,
are endowed by the belief of nations all over the world with powers
precisely similar to those of the Fairies, and with natures and social
organizations corresponding with those of men. These beliefs can only be
referred to the same origin as the fairy superstitions; and all arise
out of the doctrine of spirits, the doctrine of transformations, and the
belief in witchcraft, held by savage tribes.

But here I must, at the risk of some few repetitions, notice a theory on
the subject of the Swan-maiden myth enunciated by Liebrecht. That
distinguished writer, in his book on Folklore, devotes a section to the
consideration of the group which has occupied us in the last two
chapters, and maintains, with his accustomed wealth of allusion and his
accustomed ingenuity, that some at least of the Swan-maidens are nothing
more nor less than ghosts of the departed, rescued from the kingdom of
darkness for a while, but bound to return thither after a short respite
here with those whom they love. Now it is clear that if Swan-maiden
tales are to be resolved into ghost stories, all other supernatural
beings, gods and devils as well as fairies and ghosts, will turn out to
be nothing but spectres of the dead. A summary of his argument, and of
the reasons for rejecting it, will, therefore, not only fill up any
serious gaps in our discussion of the main incidents of the myth in
question; but it will take a wider sweep, and include the whole subject
of the present volume.

His argument, as I understand it, is based, first, on the terms of the
taboo. The object of the taboo, he thinks, is to avoid any remark being
made, any question being asked, any object being presented, which would
remind these spirits of their proper home, and awaken a longing they
cannot withstand to return. There is an old Teutonic legend of a knight
who came in a little boat drawn by a swan to succour and wed a
distressed lady, on whom he laid a charge never to ask whence he came,
or in what country he was born. When she breaks this commandment the
swan reappears and fetches him away. So the nightmare-wife, as we have
seen, in one of the tales vanishes on being asked how she became a
nightmare. Again, the fay of Argouges disappears on the name of Death
being mentioned in her presence. A fair maiden in an Indian tale, who is
found by the hero in the neighbourhood of a fountain, and bears the name
of Bheki (Frog), forbids her husband ever to let her see water. When she
is thirsty and begs him for water, the doom is fulfilled on his bringing
it to her. A similar tale may be added from Ireland, though Liebrecht
does not mention it. A man who lived near Lough Sheelin, in County
Meath, was annoyed by having his corn eaten night after night. So he sat
up to watch; and to his astonishment a number of horses came up out of
the lake driven by a most beautiful woman, whom he seized and induced to
marry him. She made the stipulation that she was never to be allowed to
see the lake again; and for over twenty years she lived happily with
him, till one day she strolled out to look at the haymakers, and caught
sight of the distant water. With a loud cry she flew straight to it, and
vanished beneath the surface.[240]

Liebrecht's next reason is based upon the place where the maiden is
found,--a forest, or a house in the forest. In this connection he refers
to the tavern, or drinking-shop, on the borders of the forest, where
Wild Edric found his bride, and points to a variant of the story, also
given by Walter Map, in which she is said, in so many words, to have
been snatched _from the dead_.[241] The forest, he fancies, is the place
of the dead, the underworld. Lastly, he gives numerous legends of the
Middle Ages,--some of which found their way into the "Decameron," that
great storehouse of floating tales, and other literary works of
imagination, as well as into chronicles,--and instances from more modern
folklore, wherein a mistress or wife dies, or seems to die, and is
buried, yet is afterwards recovered from the tomb, and lives to wed, if
a maiden, and to bear children. He supports these by references to the
vampire superstitions, and to the case of Osiris, who returned after
death to Isis and became the father of Horus. And, following Uhland, he
compares the sleep-thorn, with which Odin pricked the Valkyrie,
Brynhild, and so put her into a magic slumber, to the stake which was
driven into the corpse suspected of being a vampire, to prevent its
rising any more from the grave and troubling the living.

Now it may be admitted that there is much that is plausible, much even
that is true, in this theory. It might be urged in its behalf that (as
we have had more than one occasion in the course of this work to know)
Fairyland is frequently not to be distinguished from the world of the
dead. Time is not known there; and the same consequences of permanent
abode follow upon eating the food of the dead and the food of the
fairies. Further, when living persons are stolen by fairies, mere dead
images are sometimes left in their place. These arguments, and such as
these, might well be added to Liebrecht's; and it would be hard to say
that a formidable case was not made out. And yet the theory fails to
take account of some rather important considerations. Perhaps the
strongest point made--a point insisted on with great power--is that of
the taboo. The case of the lady of Argouges is certainly very striking,
though, taken by itself, it is far from conclusive. It might very well
be that a supernatural being, in remaining here, would be obliged to
submit to mortality, contrary perhaps to its nature; and to remind it of
this might fill it with an irresistible impulse to fly from so horrible
a fate. I do not say this is the explanation, but it is as feasible as
the other. In the Spanish story it was not the utterance of the name of
Death, but of a holy name--the name of Mary--which compelled the wife to
leave her husband. Here she was unquestionably regarded by Spanish
orthodoxy, not as a spirit of the dead, but as a foul fiend, able to
assume what bodily form it would, but bound to none. The prohibition of
inquiry as to the bride's former home may arise not so much from a
desire to avoid the recollection, as from the resentment of impertinent
curiosity, which we have seen arouses excessive annoyance in
supernatural bosoms. The resentment of equally impertinent reproaches,
or a reminiscence of savage etiquette that avoids the direct name, may
account at least as well for other forms of the taboo. Liebrecht
suggests most ingeniously that assault and battery must strike the
unhappy elf still more strongly than reproaches, as a difference between
her present and former condition, and remind her still more
importunately of her earlier home, and that this explains the
prohibition of the "three causeless blows." It may be so, though there
is no hint of this in the stories; and yet her former condition need not
have been that of a ghost of the dead, nor her earlier home the tomb. By
far the greater number of these stories represent the maiden as a
water-nymph; but it is the depths of the earth rather than the water
which are commonly regarded as the dwelling-place of the departed.
Moreover, the correspondence I have tried to point out between the
etiquette of various peoples and the taboo,--such, for instance, as the
ban upon a husband's breaking into his wife's seclusion at a delicate
moment in his family history,--would remain, on Liebrecht's theory,
purely accidental. Nor would the theory account for the absence of a
taboo in the lower savagery, nor for the totemistic character of the
lady, nor, least of all, for the peltry which is the most picturesque,
if not the most important, incident in this group of tales.

In fact, the only direct evidence for Liebrecht's contention is the
variant of Wild Edric's legend alluded to by Map. His words are,
speaking of Alnoth, Edric's son, a great benefactor of the see of
Hereford: "The man whose mother vanished into air openly in the sight of
many persons, being indignant at her husband's reproaching her that he
had carried her off by force from among the dead (_quod cam a mortuis
rapuisset_)." Upon this it is to be observed that the expression here
made use of cannot be regarded as one which had accidentally dropped out
of the narrative previously given; but it is an allusion to an
independent and inconsistent version, given in forgetfulness that the
writer had already in another part of his work related the story at
large and with comments. There he had explicitly called Alnoth--the heir
and offspring of a devil (_dæmon_), and had expressed his wonder that
such a person should have given up his whole inheritance (namely, the
manor of Ledbury North, which he made over to the see of Hereford in
gratitude for the miraculous cure of his palsy) to Christ in return for
his restored health, and spent the rest of his life as a pilgrim.
Mediæval writers (especially ecclesiastics) were in a difficulty in
describing fairies. They looked upon them as having an objective
existence; and yet they knew not how to classify them. Fairies were
certainly neither departed saints nor holy angels. Beside these two
kinds of spirits, the only choice left was between devils and ghosts of
the wicked dead, or, at most, of the dead who had no claims to
extraordinary goodness. They did not believe in any other creatures
which could be identified with these mysterious elves. It is no wonder,
therefore, if they were occasionally perplexed, occasionally
inconsistent, sometimes denouncing them as devils, at other times
dismissing them as ghosts.[242]

This is what seems to have happened to Map. In the two chapters
immediately preceding, he has given two legends illustrating each horn
of the dilemma. One of these relates the marriage of Henno
With-the-Teeth, who found a lovely maiden in a grove on the coast of
Normandy. She was sitting alone, apparelled in royal silk, and weeping.
Her beauty and her tears attracted the gallant knight, to whom, in
response to his questions, she told a cock-and-bull story about her
father having brought her, all unwilling as she was, by sea to be
married to the King of France; but having been driven by a storm on the
shore, she said she had landed, and then her father had taken advantage
of a sudden change of wind to sail away, leaving her to her fate. Henno
was an easy conquest: he took her home and married her. Unluckily,
however, he had a mother who had her suspicions. She noticed that her
fair daughter-in-law, though she went often to church, always upon some
trumpery excuse came late, so as to avoid being sprinkled with holy
water, and as regularly left before the consecration of the elements. So
this virtuous old vixen determined to watch one Sunday morning; and she
discovered that after Henno had gone to church, his wife, transformed
into a serpent, entered a bath, and in a little while, issuing upon a
cloth which her maid had spread out for her, she tore it into pieces
with her teeth before resuming human form. The maid afterwards went
through the like performance, her mistress waiting upon her. All this
was in due course confided to Henno, who, in company with a priest,
unexpectedly burst in the next time upon his wife and her servant, and
sprinkled them with holy water. Mistress and maid thereupon with a great
yell bounded out through the roof and disappeared.

Clearly these ladies were devils: no other creatures with self-respect
would be guilty of such transformations and such constant disregard of
the proprieties at church. Ghosts get their turn in Map's other
narrative. It concerns a man whose wife had died. After sorrowing long
for her death, he found her one night in a deep and solitary dale amid a
number of women. With great joy he seized her, and, carrying her off,
lived with her again for many years and had a numerous progeny. Not a
few of her descendants were living when Map wrote, and were known as
_the children of the dead woman_. This, of course, is not a Swan-maiden
story at all. At the end of Chapter V. I have referred to some similar
tales; and what we learned during our discussion of the subject of
Changelings may lead us to suspect that we have here in an imperfect
form a story of the exchange of an adult woman for a lifeless image, and
her recovery from the hands of her ravishers. This is by no means the
same plot as that of the stories recounted by Liebrecht in which the
wife or the betrothed is rescued from the grave. Those stories, at least
in warm climates where burials are hurried, and in rude ages when
medical skill is comparatively undeveloped, are all within the bounds of
possibility. There does not appear in them any trace of
mythology,--hardly even of the supernatural; and he would be a bold man
who would deny that a substratum of fact may not underlie some of them.
To establish their relationship with the group we are now considering,
links of a much more evident character are wanting. The fact that they
are traditional is not of itself sufficient. The fairy of the Forest of
Dean had not revived after death, or supposed death; nor had she been
recovered from supernatural beings who had stolen her away. Map's
account, to whatever his expression _from the dead_ may point, is
inconsistent with either the one or the other. Rather she was stolen
from her own kindred, to become the wife of him who had won her by his
own right arm.

But a single instance, and that instance either inconsistent with the
analogous traditions, or unable to supply a cogent or consistent
explanation of them, is not a very safe basis for a theory. What is it
worth when it is inconsistent even with the theory itself? Indeed, if
it were consistent with the theory, we might match it with another
instance wholly irreconcilable. Mikáilo Ivanovitch in the Russian ballad
marries a Swan-maiden, who, unlike some of the ladies just mentioned,
insists upon being first baptized into the Christian faith. She makes
the stipulation that when the one of them dies the other shall go living
into the grave with the dead, and there abide for three months. She
herself dies. Mikáilo enters the grave with her, and there conquers a
dragon which comes to feast on the dead bodies. The dragon is compelled
to fetch the waters of life and death, by means of which the hero brings
his dead love back to life. Marya, the White Swan, however, proved
herself so ungrateful that after awhile she took another husband, and
twice she acted the part of Delilah to Mikáilo. The third time she tried
it he was compelled in self-defence to put an end to her wiles by
cutting off her head. This is honest, downright death. There is no
mistaking it. But then it is impossible that Marya, the White Swan, was
a mere ghost filched from the dead and eager to return. Yet the story of
Marya is equally a Swan-maiden story, and is just as good to build a
theory on as Map's variant of Wild Edric.[243]

In replying, however, to the arguments of so learned and acute a writer
as Liebrecht, it is not enough to point out these distinctions and
inconsistencies: it is not enough to show that the terms of the taboo do
not warrant the construction he has put upon them, nor that he has
failed to account for very significant incidents. If he has mistaken the
meaning of the legends, we should be able to make clear the source of
his error. It arises, I hold, from an imperfect apprehension of the
archaic philosophy underlying the narratives. Liebrecht's comparisons
are, with one exception, limited to European variants. His premises were
thus too narrow to admit of his making valid deductions. Perhaps even
yet we are hardly in a position to do this; but at all events the
sources of possible error are diminished by the wider area we are able
to survey, and from the evidence of which we reason. We have compared
the stories, both mediæval and modern, mentioned by Liebrecht, with
_märchen_ and sagas told among nations outside European influence in
various degrees of civilization, down to the savagery of Kaffirs and
Dyaks. We have succeeded in classifying their differences, and in spite
of them we have found all the tales in substantial agreement. They are
all built on the same general plan; the same backbone of thought runs
through them; and between them all there is no greater divergence than
that which in the physical realm separates mammal from bird, or bird
from reptile. It is inevitable to conclude that even the most recently
discovered folk-tale of them has come to us from a distant period when
our forefathers were in the same rude state as Dyaks and South Sea
Islanders. No actual adventure of Wild Edric or Raymond of Lusignan gave
rise to these stories. English patriot and Burgundian Count were only
the names whereon they fastened,--the mountains which towered above the
plain and gathered about their heads the vapours already floating in the
atmosphere. We must therefore go back far beyond the Middle Ages to
learn in what manner we are to understand these stories,--back to the
state of savagery whence the inhabitants of Europe had long emerged when
Map and Gervase wrote, but of which the relics linger among us even yet.

The necessarily meagre exposition of some of the most salient
characteristics of savage thought with which we started has been
illustrated and its outlines filled in to some extent in the course of
the subsequent discussions. I need not, therefore, do more than draw
attention as briefly as possible to those characteristics that are
relevant here. First and foremost, we have found some of the
Swan-maiden tales boldly professing to account for the worship of
totems; and so thoroughly does totemism appear to be ingrained in the
myth that there is some reason for thinking that here we have a clue to
the myth's origin and meaning. But the intellect to which totemism is a
credible theory draws no line of demarcation between humanity and the
life and consciousness it recognizes in the whole encircling universe.
To it, accordingly, a story of union between a man and a fish, a swan or
a serpent, involves no difficulty. When advancing knowledge, and with
knowledge repulsion from such a story, begins to threaten it, another
belief advances to its defence. For nothing is easier to creatures as
clever as the lower animals than a change of form. They can, whenever
they please, assume the appearance of man or woman: it is as natural to
them as the shape under which they are usually seen. Again, the life
that swarms about the savage philosopher does not always manifest itself
visibly. It is often unseen. The world is filled with spirits, of whom
some have inhabited human bodies, others have not. To the savage they
are all alike; for those who have not hitherto inhabited human bodies
may do so at will, or may inhabit other bodies, either animal or
vegetable, and those who have once done so may do so again.

All these--Totemism, the equality and essential identity of nature
between man and all other objects in the universe, the doctrine of
Transformation, the doctrine of Spirits--are phases of savage thought,
every one of which has been incorporated in the myth of the
Swan-maidens, and every one of which, except one special and very
limited development of the doctrine of Spirits, is ignored in
Liebrecht's theory. The theory is, indeed, an admirable illustration of
the danger of reasoning without a sufficiently wide area of induction.
Liebrecht's mistake on the present occasion was twofold: he only dealt
with one or, at most, two types of the myth; and he ignored the savage
variants. Had he taken into consideration other types--such as Hasan,
the Marquis of the Sun, the Star's Daughter;--had he been aware of the
savage variants all over the world, he would not have formed a theory so
inconsistent with the facts, and so little fitted to solve the problems
propounded, not merely by the phenomena of the Swan-maiden group, but by
those of other tales in which supernatural beings intervene.

In reasoning by induction, the greater the number of facts taken into
account, the greater the probability of sound reasoning; and therefore
the greater the number of facts a theory will explain, the more likely
it is to be true. Had Liebrecht's theory touched only the Swan-maiden
group, it would have been more convenient to discuss it in the last
chapter. But inasmuch as its truth would involve much wider issues, it
seemed better to reserve it to be dealt with here. For if the theory be
valid for Melusina, the Lady of the Van Pool, and other water-nymphs, it
is valid also for the "water-woman" who, in a Transylvanian story, dwelt
in a lake in the forest between Mehburg and Reps. She had two sons,
whose father was a man, and the younger of whom became king of that
land. But when the Saxon immigration took place the incomers cut down
the wood; the lake dried up, and as it dried up, the lives of the
water-spirit and her son gradually sank lower and lower, and at last
were extinguished with the extinction of the lake.[244] Now I will
venture to say that this story is to be explained satisfactorily on no
theory yet broached, unless it be the theory that we have in it a
survival of the savage doctrine of Spirits. Least of all it is to be
explained by any adaptation of what I may call the Ghost
theory,--namely, that the water-spirit and her son were already the
spirits of dead human beings.

Leaving this one example of the value of Liebrecht's theory, as applied
to water-spirits, to stand for all, I turn to another order of beings
with supernatural powers referred to several times in the foregoing
pages: I mean Witches. I adduced in Chapter X. a Tirolese tale, a
variant of the Melusina type, wherein the wife was a witch. It will have
been obvious to every reader that the tale is simply that of Cupid and
Psyche with the parts reversed; and I might urge that Cupid and the
witch were beings of precisely the same nature. Waiving this for the
moment, however, no one will deny that the witch takes the place of the
Swan-maiden, or fairy, in other stories of the group. But perhaps it may
be suggested that the name _witch_ (_Angana_, _Hexe_) has got into the
story by accident; and that not a witch in our sense of the word, but a
ghost from the dead, is really meant. There might be something to be
said for this if there were any substantial distinction to be made
between ghosts and witches and fairies. In the tales and superstitions
discussed in the present volume we have found no distinction. Whether it
be child-stealing, transformation, midnight meetings, possession and
gift of enchanted objects, spell-binding, or whatever function, or
habit, or power be predicted of one, it will be found to be common to
the three. I conclude, therefore, that they are all three of the same
nature. This is what a consideration of the superstitions of savages
would lead me to expect. The belief in fairies, ghosts, and witches is a
survival of those superstitions. It is, of course, not found in equal
coherence, equal strength of all its parts, equal logic (if I may so
express it) everywhere. We must not be surprised if, as it is gradually
penetrated by the growing forces of civilization, it becomes
fragmentary, and the attributes of these various orders of supernatural
beings begin to be differentiated. They are never completely so; and the
proof of this is that what is at one place, at one time, or by one
people, ascribed to one order, is at another place, at another time, or
by another people, ascribed to another order. The nature of the
classical deities was identical too; and hence Cupid and the witch of
the Tirolese tale are the masculine and feminine counterparts of the
same conception.

Lastly, a few words must be expended on a totally different theory
lately put forward by Mr. MacRitchie. This theory is not altogether a
new one; it has been before the world for many years. But Mr. MacRitchie
has, first in "The Archæological Review," and since then more
elaborately in a separate book, entitled "The Testimony of Tradition,"
worked it out and fortified it with an array of arguments philological,
historical, topographical, and traditional. He claims to have
established that the fairies of the Celtic and Teutonic races are
neither more nor less than the prehistoric tribes whom they conquered
and drove back, and whose lands they now possess. He identifies these
mysterious beings with the Picts of Scotland, the Feinne of the Scottish
Highlands and of Ireland, and the Finns and Lapps of Scandinavia. And he
suggests that the Eskimo, the Ainos, and I know not what other dwarfish
races, are relics of the same people; while Santa Klaus, the patron
saint of children, is only a tradition of the wealthy and beneficent
character borne by this ill-used folk. Primarily his arguments are
concerned with Scotland and Ireland. He builds much on the howes or
barrows, called in Scotland Picts' houses, which in both countries bear
the reputation of being the haunt of fairies or dwarfs, and some of
which seem to have been in fact dwelling-places. He quotes Dr. Karl
Blind to show that Finns intermarried with the Shetlanders, and that
they were believed to come over in the form of seals, casting aside
their sealskins when they landed. In this connection he relates how the
Finn women were captured by taking possession of their sealskins,
without which they could not get away from their captors. He also shows
that illimitable riches and magical powers were ascribed to the Picts
and to the Finns, and that the Lapps were pre-eminent in witchcraft.

I shall leave it to Celtic scholars to deal with Mr. MacRitchie's
remarkable etymologies and with his historical arguments, confining
myself to one or two observations on the traditional aspect of the
theory. Now I should be the last to undervalue any traces of history to
be found in tradition. I have elsewhere drawn attention to the
importance of the study of this element in folk-tales;[245] and I am
quite ready to admit that nothing is more likely than the transfer to
the mythical beings of Celtic superstition of some features derived from
alien races. Savages and barbarians are in the habit of imputing to
strangers and foes in greatly extended measure the might of witchcraft
they claim for themselves. And the wider the differences between
themselves and the foreigners, the more mysterious to them are the
habits and appearance of the latter, and the more powerful do they
believe them. All this might account for many details that we are told
concerning the dwarfs, the Picts, the Finns, or by whatever other names
the elvish race may have been known to Scots and Irishmen. But further
than this I cannot go with Mr. MacRitchie. I hold his error, like that
of Liebrecht already discussed, to be founded on too narrow an
induction. This volume will have been written in vain, as it appears
that for Mr. MacRitchie the vastly more important works of Dr. Tylor and
Mr. Andrew Lang have been written in vain, unless I have made it clear
that the myths of nations all over the world follow one general law and
display common characteristics. I am not astonished to find the Shetland
tale of marriage with a seal-woman reproduced on the Gold Coast and
among the Dyaks of Borneo. But Mr. MacRitchie ought to be very much
astonished; for he can hardly show that the historical Finns were known
in these out-of-the-way places. It seems to me natural to find that in
Scotland and Ireland fairies dwelt in barrows, and in Annam and Arabia
in hills and rocks; and that both in this country and in the far East
they inveigled unhappy mortals into their dwellings and kept them for
generations--nay, for centuries. That the Shoshone of California should
dread their infants being changed by the Ninumbees, or dwarfs, in the
same way as the Celts of the British Islands, and the Teutons too,
dreaded their infants being changed, does not seem at all incredible to
me. That to eat the food of the dead in New Zealand prevents a living
man from returning to the land of the living, just as Persephone was
retained in Hades by partaking of the pomegranate, and just as to eat
the food of fairies hinders the Manx or the Hebrew adventurer from
rejoining his friends on the surface of the earth, is in no way
perplexing to me. But all these things, and they might be multiplied
indefinitely, must be very perplexing to Mr. MacRitchie, if he be not
prepared to prove that Annamites and Arabs, Hebrews and Shoshone, New
Zealanders and classical Greeks alike, were acquainted with the Picts
and the Finns, and alike celebrated them in their traditions.

The truth Mr. MacRitchie does not reckon with is, that no theory will
explain the nature and origin of the fairy superstitions which does not
also explain the nature and origin of every other supernatural being
worshipped or dreaded by uncivilized mankind throughout the world. And
until he shall address himself to this task, however ingenious his
guesses, however amusing his philology, however delightfully wild his
literary and historical arguments, he will not succeed in convincing any
serious student.

Here then we must pause. Obvious are the differences between the nations
of mankind: differences of physical conformation,--that is to say, of
race; divergences of mental and moral development,--that is to say, of
civilization. Hitherto the task attempted by folklore has been to show
that underlying all these differences there is a broad foundation of
common agreement; that distinctions of race do not extend to mental and
moral constitution; that the highest nation on the ladder of culture has
climbed from the same rung on which the lowest are yet standing; and
that the absurd and incongruous customs and institutions and the equally
absurd and impossible stories and beliefs found imbedded in the
civilization of the more advanced nations are explicable, and explicable
only, as relics of the phases wherethrough those nations have passed
from the depths of savagery.

If it be admitted in general terms that the evidence collected and
marshalled up to the present time has established among sure scientific
facts so much of the past of humanity, this achievement is but the
beginning of toil. A wide field has been opened to the student for the
collection and arrangement of details, before the true meaning of many a
strange custom and stranger tale will be thoroughly understood. I have
tried to do something of the kind in the foregoing pages. But beyond
this there is the more delicate investigation of the ethnic element in
folklore. Can we assign to the various races their special shares in the
development of a common tradition? Can we show what direction each race
took, and how and why it modified the general inheritance?

On the other hand, it is not asserted that the status of savagery was
the primitive condition of men. Of course it may have been. But if not,
there is work to be done in endeavouring to ascertain what lies behind
it. The questions started from this point wander across the border of
folklore into pure psychology; but it is a psychology based not upon
introspection and analysis of the mind of the civilized man, developed
under the complex influences that have been acting and reacting during
untold years of upward struggling, always arduous and often cruel, but a
psychology which must be painfully reconstructed from the simplest and
most archaic phenomena disclosed by anthropological research. Who can
say what light may not thus be thrown as well on the destiny as on the
origin of mankind?

FOOTNOTES:

[240] Liebrecht, p. 54; "F. L. Journal," vol. vii. p. 312.

[241] Map, Dist. iv. c. 10.

[242] The sect of the Cabalists, indeed, believed in the existence of
spirits of nature, embodiments or representatives of the four elements,
which they called respectively gnomes, sylphs, salamanders, and ondines.
To this strange sect some of the savage opinions on the subject of
spirits seem to have been transmitted in a philosophical form from
classical antiquity. They taught that it was possible for the
philosopher by austerity and study to rise to intercourse with these
elemental spirits, and even to obtain them in marriage. But the orthodox
regarded the Cabalists as magicians and their spirits as foul incubi.
See Lecky, "History of Rationalism," vol. i. p. 46.

[243] Hapgood, p. 214.

[244] Müller, p. 33.

[245] "Folklore," vol. i. pp. 113, 116.




APPENDIX.

BIBLIOGRAPHICAL LIST OF SOME OF THE WORKS REFERRED TO IN THE FOREGOING
PAGES.


_Aberd. Eistedd._ See _Trans. Aberd. Eistedd_.

ALPENBURG. See Von Alpenburg.

AMÉLINEAU. Contes et Romans del' Égypte Chrétienne par E. Amélineau. 2
vols. Paris, 1888.

_Amer. F. L._ See _Journal Amer. F. L_.

_Am Urds-Brunnen._ Am Urds-Brunnen. Mittheilungen für Freunde
volksthümlich-wissenschaftlicher Kunde. 6 vols. [The first two volumes
entitled _Am Urds-Brunnen_, _Organ des Vereins für Verbreitung
volksthümlich-wissenschaftlicher Kunde_.] Rendsburg, 1881-89.

_Antiquary._ The Antiquary, a Magazine devoted to the study of the Past.
22 vols. London, 1880-90, still proceeding.

_Archivio._ Archivio per lo studio delle Tradizioni Popolari Rivista
Trimestrale diretta da G. Pitré e S. Salomone-Marino. 9 vols. Palermo,
1882-90, still proceeding.

_Arch. Rev._ The Archæological Review. 4 vols. London, 1888-90.

ARNAUDIN. Contes Populaires recueillis dans la Grande Lande le Born les
Petites Landes et le Marensin par Félix Arnaudin. Paris, 1887.

AUBREY, _Miscellanies._ Miscellanies upon various subjects. By John
Aubrey, F.R.S. 4th edition. London, 1857.

---- _Remaines._ Remaines of Gentilisme and Judaisme. By John Aubrey,
R.S.S. 1686-87. Edited and annotated by James Britten, F.L.S. London,
1881. (Folk-Lore Society.)


_Bahar-Danush._ Bahar-Danush; or Garden of Knowledge. An Oriental
Romance. Translated from the Persic of Einaiut Oollah. By Jonathan
Scott. 3 vols. Shrewsbury, 1799.

BARING-GOULD. Curious Myths of the Middle Ages. By S. Baring-Gould, M.A.
New edition. London, 1869.

BARTSCH. Sagen, Märchen und Gebräuche aus Mecklenburg. Gesammelt und
herausgegeben von Karl Bartsch. 2 vols. Wien, 1879-80.

BASSET. Contes Populaires Berbères recueillis, traduits et annotés par
René Basset. Paris, 1887.

BENT. The Cyclades, or Life among the Insular Greeks. By J. Theodore
Bent, B.A. London, 1885.

BIRLINGER, _Aus Schwaben._ Aus Schwaben Sagen, Legenden, Aberglauben,
Sitten, Rechtsbräuche, Ortsneckereien, Lieder, Kinderreime Neue Sammlung
von Anton Birlinger. 2 vols. Wiesbaden, 1874.

---- _Volksthümliches._ Volksthümliches aus Schwaben. Herausgegeben von
Dr. Anton Birlinger. 2 vols. and Wörterbüchlein. Freiburg im Breisgau,
1861-62.

BLADÉ. Contes Populaires de la Gascogne par M. Jean-François Bladé. 3
vols. Paris, 1886.

_Border Minstrelsy._ Minstrelsy of the Scottish Border: consisting of
Historical and Romantic Ballads, collected in the Southern Counties of
Scotland. 3rd edition. 3 vols. Edinburgh, 1806.

BOWKER. Goblin Tales of Lancashire. By James Bowker, F.R.G.S.I. London,
N.D.

BRAGA. Ethnographia Portugueza. O Povo Portuguez nos seus Costumes,
Crenças e Tradições por Theophilo Braga. 2 vols. Lisboa, 1886.

BRAND. Observations on Popular Antiquities: chiefly illustrating the
origin of our vulgar Customs, Ceremonies, and Superstitions. By John
Brand, M.A., F. and Sec. S.A. Arranged and revised, with additions by
Henry Ellis, F.R.S., Sec. S.A. 2 vols. London, 1813.

BRAUNS. Japanische Märchen und Sagen gesammelt und herausgegeben von
David Brauns. Leipzig, 1885.

BRAY. See Mrs. Bray.

BRETT. The Indian Tribes of Guiana: their condition and habits. By the
Rev. W. H. Brett. London, 1868.

---- _Legends and Myths._ Legends and Myths of the Aboriginal Indians of
British Guiana. Collected and edited by the Rev. William Henry Brett, B.
D. London, N.D.

_Brython._ See _Y Brython_.

BURTON, _Nights._ A plain and literal translation of the Arabian Nights'
Entertainments, now entitled The Book of the Thousand Nights and a
Night, with introduction, explanatory notes, &c. by Richard F. Burton.
10 vols. Privately printed. 1885.

---- _Suppl. Nights._ Supplemental Nights to The Book of the Thousand
Nights and a Night with notes anthropological and explanatory by Richard
F. Burton. 6 vols. Privately printed. 1886-88.

BUSK, _Sagas._ Sagas from the Far East; or Kalmouk and Mongolian
Traditionary Tales. With historical preface and explanatory notes by the
author of Patrañas, &c. [Miss R. H. Busk]. London, 1873.


CAMPBELL. Popular Tales of the West Highlands orally collected with a
translation by J. F. Campbell. 4 vols. Edinburgh, 1860-62.

CAMPBELL, Lord A. See Lord A. Campbell.

CARNOY. Littérature Orale de la Picardie par E. Henry Carnoy. Paris,
1883.

CASTRÉN, _Altaischen Völker._ M. Alexander Castrén's Ethnologische
Vorlesungen über die Altaischen Völker nebst Samojedischen Märchen und
Tartarischen Heldensagen. Herausgegeben von Anton Schiefner. St.
Petersburg, 1857.

CAVALLIUS. Schwedische Volkssagen und Märchen. Nach mündlicher
Ueberlieferung gesammelt und herausgegeben von Gunnar Olof Hyltén
Cavallius und George Stephens. Mit Varianten und kritischen Anmerkungen.
Deutsch von Carl Oberleitner. Wien, 1848.

CERTEUX ET CARNOY. Contributions au Folk-Lore des Arabes. L'Algérie
Traditionnelle Légendes, Contes, &c., par A. Certeux et E. Henry Carnoy.
First vol. only published. Paris, 1884.

CHAMBERS. Popular Rhymes of Scotland. Robert Chambers. London, 1870.

CHILD. The English and Scottish Popular Ballads edited by Francis James
Child. Boston, U.S.A. Privately printed. [The prospectus is dated 1882.
It announced "about 8 parts": only six of these (making three volumes)
have been issued to date.]

_Choice Notes._ Choice Notes from "Notes and Queries." Folk Lore.
London, 1859.

COMPARETTI. Novelline Popolari Italiane pubblicate ed illustrate da
Domenico Comparetti. First vol. only published. Roma, 1875.

_Corpus Poet. Bor._ Corpus Poeticum Boreale. The Poetry of the Old
Northern Tongue from the earliest times to the thirteenth century.
Edited by Gudbrand Vigfusson, M.A., and F. York Powell, M.A. 2 vols.
Oxford, 1883.

COSQUIN. Emmanuel Cosquin. Contes Populaires de Lorraine comparés avec
les Contes des autres Provinces de France et des Pays Étrangers. 2 vols.
Paris, N.D.

_Count Lucanor._ Count Lucanor; or The Fifty Pleasant Stories of
Patronio. Written by the Prince Don Juan Manuel and first done into
English by James York, M.D., 1868. London, 1888.

CROMEK. Remains of Nithsdale and Galloway Song with Historical and
Traditional Notices relative to the Manners and Customs of the
Peasantry, now first published by R. H. Cromek, F.A.S. Ed. London, 1810.
Reprint: Paisley, 1880.

CURTIN. Myths and Folk-Lore of Ireland by Jeremiah Curtin. London, 1890.

_Cymmrodor._ See _Y Cymmrodor_.

_Cymru Fu._ "Cymru Fu"; yn cynwys Hanesion, Traddodiadau, yn nghyda
Chwedlau a Dammegion Cymreig (oddiar lafar gwlad a gweithiau y prif
awduron). Wrexham, N.D. [Preface dated October 1862.]

_Cymru Fu N. and Q._ Cymru Fu: Notes and Queries relating to the past
History of Wales and the Border Countries. 2 vols. Cardiff, 1887-90,
still proceeding.


DAVIES, _Mythology._ The Mythology and Rites of the British Druids by
Edward Davies, author of Celtic Researches. London, 1809.

DAY. Folk-Tales of Bengal by the Rev. Lal Behari Day. London, 1883.

DE GUBERNATIS, _Novelline._ Le Novelline di Santo Stefano raccolte da
Angelo De Gubernatis. Torino, 1869.

---- _Usi Natal._ A. De Gubernatis. Storia comparata degli Usi Natalizi
in Italia e presso gli altri-popoli Indo-Europei. Milano, 1878.

---- _Zool. Myth._ Zoological Mythology or The Legends of Animals by
Angelo De Gubernatis. 2 vols. London, 1872.

DENNYS. The Folk-Lore of China, and its affinities with that of the
Aryan and Semitic Races. By N. B. Dennys, Ph.D., F.R.G.S. London, 1876.

DES MICHELS. Contes Plaisants Annamites traduits en Français pour la
première fois par Abel Des Michels. Paris, 1888.

DORMAN. The Origin of Primitive Superstitions and their Development,
&c., among the Aborigines of America. By Rushton M. Dorman.
Philadelphia, 1881.

DORSA. La Tradizione Greco-Latina negli usi e nelle credenze popolari
della Calabria citeriore per Vincenzo Dorsa. 2a edizione. Cozenza, 1884.


_Early Trav._ Early Travels in Palestine, edited by Thomas Wright Esq.,
M.A., F.S.A., &c. London, 1848.

ELLIS. The Tshi-speaking Peoples of the Gold Coast of West Africa. Their
religion, manners, customs, laws, language, &c. By A. B. Ellis. London,
1887.


FARRER. Primitive Manners and Customs. By James A. Farrer. London, 1879.

_F. L. Españ._ Folk-Lore Español. Biblioteca de las Tradiciones
Populares Españolas. 11 vols. Sevilla, 1883-90, still proceeding.

_Folk-Lore._ Folk-Lore, a quarterly Review of Myth, Tradition,
Institution, and Custom. London, 1890, still proceeding. [Organ of the
Folk-Lore Society.]

_F. L. Journal._ The Folk-Lore Journal. 7 vols. London, 1883-89. [Organ
of the Folk-Lore Society.]

_F. L. Record._ The Folk-Lore Record. 5 vols. N.D. [1878-82. Organ of
the Folk-Lore Society.]

FLEURY. Littérature Orale de la Basse-Normandie (Hague et Val-de-Saire)
par Jean Fleury. Paris, 1883.


GARNETT. The Women of Turkey and their Folklore by Lucy M. J. Garnett.
The Christian Women. London, 1890.

_Gent. Mag. Lib._ The Gentleman's Magazine Library: being a classified
collection of the chief contents of the Gentleman's Magazine from 1731
to 1868. Edited by George Lawrence Gomme, F.S.A. 11 vols. London,
1883-90, still proceeding. [Vols. not numbered, but distinguished by the
title of their contents.]

GERV. TILB. Des Gervasius von Tilbury Otia Imperialia. In einer Auswahl
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_Gesta Romanorum._ Gesta Romanorum translated from the Latin by the Rev.
Charles Swan, revised and corrected by Wynnard Hooper, B.A. London,
1877.

GILES. Strange Stories from a Chinese Studio. Translated and annotated
by Herbert A. Giles. 2 vols. London, 1880.

GILL. Myths and Songs from the South Pacific. By the Rev. William Wyatt
Gill, B.A. London, 1876.

GIRALD. CAMBR. The Itinerary of Archbishop Baldwin through Wales,
translated by Sir Richard Colt Hoare, Bart., in The Historical Works of
Giraldus Cambrensis, edited by Thomas Wright Esq., M.A., F.S.A. London,
1887.

GONZENBACH. Sicilianische Märchen. Aus dem Volksmund gesammelt von Laura
Gonzenbach. 2 vols. Leipzig, 1870.

GREDT. Sagenschatz des Luxemburger Landes. Gesammelt von Dr. N. Gredt.
Luxemburg, 1885.

GREGOR. Notes on the Folk-Lore of the North-East of Scotland. By the
Reverend Walter Gregor, M.A. London, 1881. (Folk-Lore Society.)

GREY. See Sir G. Grey.

GRIMM, _Märchen._ Kinder- und Haus-Märchen gesammelt durch die Brüder
Grimm. 17te Auflage. Berlin, 1880.

---- _Tales._ Grimm's Household Tales. With the author's notes translated
from the German and edited by Margaret Hunt. 2 vols. London, 1884.

---- _Teut. Myth._ Teutonic Mythology by Jacob Grimm translated from the
fourth edition with notes and appendix by James Steven Stallybrass. 4
vols. with continuous pagination. London, 1880-88.

GRINNELL. Pawnee Hero Stories and Folk Tales with notes on the Origin,
Customs, and Character of the Pawnee People by George Bird Grinnell. New
York, 1889.

GROHMANN. Sagen aus Böhmen gesammelt und herausgegeben von Dr. Josef
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GRUNDTVIG. Dänische Volksmärchen von Svend Grundtvig. Übersetzt von
Willibald Leo. Neue Ausgabe. 2 vols. Leipzig, 1885.

GUBERNATIS. See De Gubernatis.


HAHN. See Von Hahn.

HALTRICH. Deutsche Volksmärchen aus dem Sachsenlande in Siebenbürgen.
Gesammelt von Josef Haltrich. 4te Auflage. Wien, 1885.

HAPGOOD. The Epic Songs of Russia by Isabel Florence Hapgood. New York,
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HARLAND and WILKINSON. Lancashire Legends, Traditions, Pageants, Sports,
&c. By John Harland, F.S.A., and T. T. Wilkinson, F.R.A.S. London, 1873.

HAZLITT, _Fairy Tales._ Fairy Tales, Legends and Romances illustrating
Shakespeare and other Early English writers to which are prefixed two
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London, 1875.

HENDERSON. Notes on the Folk-Lore of the Northern Counties of England
and the Borders. New Edition. By William Henderson. London, 1879.
(Folk-Lore Society.)

HOWELLS. Cambrian Superstitions, comprising Ghosts, Omens, Witchcraft,
Traditions, &c. By W. Howells. Tipton, 1831.

HUNT. Popular Romances of the West of England or the Drolls, Traditions
and Superstitions of Old Cornwall collected and edited by Robert Hunt,
F.R.S. 3rd edition, revised and enlarged. London, 1881.


IMBRIANI. La Novellaja Fiorentina fiabe e novelline stenografate in
Firenze dal dettato popolare da Vittorio Imbriani. Ristampa accresciute
di molte novelle inedite, &c., nelle quali è accolta La Novellaja
Milanese dello stesso raccoglitore. Livorno, 1877.

IM THURN. Among the Indians of Guiana being sketches chiefly
anthropologic from the interior of British Guiana. By Everard F. im
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_Indian N. and Q._ Indian Notes and Queries (late "Panjab Notes and
Queries"), a Monthly Periodical conducted by Captain R. C. Temple and
others. 7 vols. Allahabad, 1883-90, still proceeding.

_Irish Folk Lore_, or _Irish F. L._ Irish Folk Lore: Traditions and
Superstitions of the Country; with humorous tales. By "Lageniensis."
Glasgow, N.D. [Preface dated April 1870.]


JAHN. Volkssagen aus Pommern und Rügen. Gesammelt und herausgegeben von
Dr. Ulrich Jahn. Stettin, 1886.

JANNSEN. Märchen und Sagen des estnischen Volkes gesammelt und übersetzt
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JONES and KROPF. The Folk-Tales of the Magyars. Collected by Kriza,
Erdélyi, Pap and others. Translated and edited by the Rev. W. Henry
Jones and Lewis L. Kropf. London, 1889. (Folk-Lore Society.)

_Journal. Amer. F. L._ The Journal of American Folk-Lore. 3 vols.
Boston, 1888-90, still proceeding. [Organ of the American Folk-Lore
Society.]


_Kalewala._ Kalewala, des National-Epos der Finnen, nach der zweiten
Ausgabe ins Deutsche übertragen von Anton Schiefner. Helsingfors, 1852.

_Kathá Sarit Ságara._ The Kathá Sarit Ságara, or Ocean of the Streams of
Story translated from the original Sanskrit by C. H. Tawney, M.A. 2
vols. Calcutta, 1880-84.

KEIGHTLEY. The Fairy Mythology, illustrative of the Romance and
Superstition of various Countries by Thomas Keightley. New Edition,
revised and greatly enlarged. London, 1882.

KENNEDY. Legendary Fictions of the Irish Celts. Collected and narrated
by Patrick Kennedy. London, 1866.

KIRBY. The New Arabian Nights. Select Tales, not included by Galland or
Lane. Translated and edited by W. F. Kirby. London, N.D.

KNOOP. Volkssagen, Erzählungen, Aberglauben, Gebräuche und Märchen aus
dem östlichen Hinterpommern. Gesammelt von Otto Knoop. Posen, 1885.

KNOWLES. Folk-Tales of Kashmir. By the Rev. J. Hinton Knowles. London,
1888.

KRAUSS. Sagen und Märchen der Südslaven. Zum grossen Teil aus
ungedruckten Quellen von Dr. Friedrich S. Krauss. 2 vols. Leipzig,
1883-84.

---- _Volksgl._ Volksglaube und religiöser Brauch der Südslaven.
Vorwiegend nach eigenen Ermittlungen von Dr. Friedrich S. Krauss.
Münster i W. 1890.

KREUTZWALD. Ehstnische Märchen. Aufgezeichnet von Friedrich Kreutzwald.
Aus dem Ehstnischen übersetzt von F. Löwe. Halle, 1869.

KUHN. Märkische Sagen und Märchen nebst einem Anhange von Gebräuchen
und Aberglauben gesammelt und herausgegeben von Adalbert Kuhn. Berlin,
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KUHN UND SCHWARTZ. Norddeutsche Sagen, Märchen und Gebräuche aus
Mecklenburg, &c. Aus dem munde des Volkes gesammelt und herausgegeben
von A. Kuhn und W. Schwartz. Leipzig, 1848.


LADY WILDE. Ancient Legends, Mystic Charms and Superstitions of Ireland.
By Lady Wilde. 2 vols. London, 1887.

LA CROIX. Manners Customs and Dress during the Middle Ages and during
the Renaissance Period by Paul La Croix (Bibliophile Jacob). 4th
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LANDES. Contes et Légendes Annamites par A. Landes. Saigon, 1886.

_La Tradition._ La Tradition Revue Générale des Contes, Légendes,
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LELAND. The Algonquin Legends of New England, or Myths and Folk-Lore of
the Micmac, Passamaquoddy, and Penobscot Tribes by Charles G. Leland.
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LEMKE. Volksthümliches in Ostpreussen von E. Lemke. 2 vols. Mohrungen,
1884-87.

LIEBRECHT. Zur Volkskunde. Alte und neue Aufsätze von Felix Liebrecht.
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_Llyvyr Coch._ See _Y Llyvyr Coch_.

Lord A. CAMPBELL, _Waifs and Strays._ Waifs and Strays of Celtic
Tradition. I. Argyllshire Series. Edited by Lord Archibald Campbell.
London, 1879.

LUZEL, _Contes._ Contes Populaires de Basse-Bretagne par F. M. Luzel. 3
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---- _Légendes Chrét._ Légendes Chrétiennes de la Basse-Bretagne par F.
M. Luzel. 2 vols. Paris, 1881.

---- _Veillées._ Veillées Bretonnes par F. M. Luzel. Morlaix, 1879.


MACINNES. Waifs and Strays of Celtic Tradition. Folk and Hero Tales.
Collected, Edited and Translated by the Rev. D. Mac Innes. With Notes by
the Editor and Alfred Nutt. London, 1890.

MACRITCHIE. The Testimony of Tradition by David MacRitchie. London,
1890.

MALORY. La Mort d' Arthure. The History of King Arthur and of the
Knights of the Round Table. Compiled by Sir Thomas Malory, Knt. Edited
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MAP. Gualteri Mapes De Nugis Curialium Distinctiones Quinque. Edited
from the unique manuscript in the Bodleian Library at Oxford by Thomas
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_Masnavi i Ma'navi._ Masnavi i Ma'navi. The Spiritual Couplets of
Maulána Jalálu-'d-Dín Muhammad i Rúmí. Translated and abridged by E. H.
Whinfield, M.A. London, 1887.

MASPONS Y LABROS. Folk-Lore Catalá. Cuentos Populars Catalans per lo Dr.
Francisco de S. Maspons y Labros. Barcelona, 1885.

MEIER. Deutsche Sagen, Sitten und Gebräuche aus Schwaben, gesammelt von
Ernst Meier. Stuttgart, 1852.

---- _Märchen._ Deutsche Volksmärchen aus Schwaben. Aus dem Munde des
Volks gesammelt und herausgegeben von Dr. Ernst Meier. 3te Auflage.
Stuttgart, N.D.

_Mélusine._ Mélusine Recueil de Mythologie, Littérature Populaire,
Traditions et Usages publié par H. Gaidoz et E. Rolland. [Since vol.
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MICHELS. See Des Michels.

MRS. BRAY. The Borders of the Tamar and the Tavy; their Natural History,
&c., by Mrs. Bray. New Edition. 2 vols. London, 1879.

MÜLLER. Siebenbürgische Sagen gesammelt und herausgegeben von Dr.
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NAPIER. Folk Lore: or Superstitious Beliefs in the West of Scotland
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1879.

NICHOLSON. Folk Lore of East Yorkshire. By John Nicholson. London, 1890.

NIEDERHÖFFER. Mecklenburg's Volkssagen. Gesammelt und herausgegeben von
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ORTOLI. Les Contes Populaires del' Ile de Corse par J. B. Frédéric
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_Panjab N. and Q._ See _Indian N. and Q_.

PITRÉ. Biblioteca delle Tradizioni Popolari Siciliane per cura di
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POESTION. Lappländische Märchen, Volkssagen, Rätsel und Sprichwörter.
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POWELL and MAGNUSSON. Icelandic Legends (collected by Jón Arnason)
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PRELLER, _Röm. Myth._ Römische Mythologie von L. Preller. 3te Auflage. 2
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PRYM UND SOCIN. Kurdische Sammlungen. Erzählungen und Lieder im
dialekte des Tûr 'Abdîn. Gesammelt, herausgegeben und übersetzt von
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RADLOFF. Proben der Volkslitteratur der Türkischen Stämme Süd-Sibiriens,
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RALSTON, _R. F. Tales._ Russian Folk-Tales by W. R. S. Ralston, M.A.
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---- _Tibetan Tales._ Tibetan Tales derived from Indian Sources.
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1882.

RAPPOLD. Sagen aus Kärnten. Zusammengestellt und theilweise neu erzählt
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_Revue des Trad. Pop._ Revue des Traditions Populaires. 5 vols. Paris,
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RHYS, _Hibbert Lectures._ The Hibbert Lectures, 1886. Lectures on the
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RINK. Tales and Traditions of the Eskimo by Dr. Henry Rink. Translated
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1875.

ROBERTSON SMITH. Lectures on the Religion of the Semites. First Series.
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ROMERO. Contos Populares do Brazil collegidos pelo Dr. Sylvio Romero.
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ROMILLY. From my Verandah in New Guinea Sketches and Traditions by Hugh
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_Rosenöl._ Rosenöl oder Sagen und Kunden des Morgenländes aus
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RUDDER. A New History of Gloucestershire. Cirencester, Samuel Rudder,
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SASTRI. The Dravidian Nights Entertainments: being a translation of
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SAXO, _Gesta Dan._ Saxonis Grammatici Gesta Danorum, herausgegeben von
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SCHLEICHER. Litaüische Märchen, Sprichwörter, Rätsel und Lieder.
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SCHRECK. Finnische Märchen übersetzt von Emmy Schreck. Weimar, 1887.

SÉBILLOT, _Contes._ Paul Sébillot. Contes Populaires de la Haute
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---- _Litt. Orale._ Littérature Orale de la Haute Bretagne par Paul
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---- _Trad. et Super._ Traditions et Superstitions de la Haute Bretagne
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SHORTLAND. Traditions and Superstitions of the New Zealanders: with
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SIKES. British Goblins: Welsh Folk-Lore, Fairy Mythology, Legends and
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SIMROCK. Handbuch der Deutschen Mythologie mit Einschluss der
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SIR G. GREY. Polynesian Mythology, and Ancient Traditional History of
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SPITTA BEY. Contes Arabes Modernes recueillis et traduits par Guillaume
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STEERE. Swahili Tales, as told by natives of Zanzibar. With an English
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STEPHENS. The Literature of the Kymry: being a critical essay on the
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STERNBERG. The Dialect and Folk-Lore of Northamptonshire. By Thomas
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TAYLOR. Te Ika a Maui; or New Zealand and its Inhabitants. By the Rev.
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TEMPLE, _Legends of the Panjab._ The Legends of the Panjab. By Captain
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Still proceeding.

TETTAU. See Von Tettau.

THEAL. Kaffir Folk-Lore; a Selection from the Traditional Tales current
amongst the people living on the eastern border of the Cape Colony. By
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THOMAS OF ERCELDOUNE. The Romance and Prophecies of Thomas of
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THORBURN. Bannú; or, Our Afghan Frontier. By S. S. Thorburn. London,
1876.

THORPE. Northern Mythology, comprising the principal popular traditions
and superstitions of Scandinavia, North Germany, and the Netherlands.
Compiled by Benjamin Thorpe. 3 vols. London, 1851-52.

---- _Yule-Tide Stories._ Yule-Tide Stories. A collection of Scandinavian
and North German Popular Tales and Traditions. Edited by Benjamin
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_Tradition._ See _La Tradition_.

_Trad. Pop. Revue des._ See _Revue des Trad. Pop_.

TRAIN. An Historical and Statistical Account of the Isle of Man, from
the earliest times to the present date. By Joseph Train, F.S.A. Scot. 2
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_Trans. Aberd. Eistedd._ Eisteddfod Genedlaethol y Cymry. Cofnodion a
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National Eisteddfod of Wales, Aberdare, 1885. Caerdydd, 1887.

TYLOR. Primitive Culture: Researches into the development of Mythology,
Philosophy, Religion, Art, and Custom. By Edward B. Tylor. 2 vols.
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VERNALEKEN. In the Land of Marvels. Folk-Tales from Austria and Bohemia
by Theodor Vernaleken. London, 1889.

_Volkskunde._ See _Zeits. f. Volkskunde_.

VON ALPENBURG. Mythen und Sagen Tirols. Gesammelt und herausgegeben von
Johann Nepomuk Ritter von Alpenburg. Zürich, 1857.

VON HAHN. Griechische und albanesiche Märchen. Gesammelt übersetzt und
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VON WLISLOCKI. Märchen und Sagen der Transsilvanischen Zigeuner
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WALDAU. Böhmisches Märchenbuch. Deutsch von Alfred Waldau. Prag, 1860.

WALDRON. A Description of the Isle of Man by George Waldron, Gent.
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WEBSTER. Basque Legends: collected chiefly in the Labourd by Rev.
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WENZIG. Westslawischer Märchenschatz. Deutsch bearbeitet von Joseph
Wenzig. Neue Ausgabe. Leipzig, 1886.

WHITE. The Ancient History of the Maori, his Mythology and Traditions by
John White. 4 vols. Wellington, 1887-89, still proceeding.

_Wide Awake Stories._ Wide Awake Stories. A collection of tales told by
little children, between sunset and sunrise, in the Panjab and Kashmir.
By F. A. Steel and R. C. Temple. Bombay, 1884.

WILDE. See Lady Wilde.

WIRT SIKES. See Sikes.

WLISLOCKI. See Von Wlislocki.

WRATISLAW. Sixty Folk-Tales from exclusively Slavonic sources.
Translated, with brief introductions and notes, by A. H. Wratislaw, M.A.
London, 1889.

WRIGHT, _Middle Ages._ Essays on subjects connected with the Literature,
Popular Superstitions and History of England in the Middle Ages. By
Thomas Wright, M.A., F.S.A. 2 vols. London, 1846.


_Y Brython._ Y Brython: Cylchgrawn Llenyddol Cymru; dan olygiad y Parch.
D. Silvan Evans. 5 vols. Tremadog, 1858-63.

_Y Cymmrodor._ Y Cymmrodor, embodying the Transactions of the
Cymmrodorion Society of London. 10 vols. London, 1877-90, still
proceeding.

_Y Llyvyr Coch._ Y Llyvyr Coch o Hergest. Y gyvrol I. The Text of the
Mabinogion and other Welsh Tales from the Red Book of Hergest edited by
John Rhys, M.A. and J. Gwenogvryn Evans. Oxford, 1887.

     The Mabinogion, from the Welsh of the Llyfr Coch o Hergest (The
     Red Book of Hergest) in the Library of Jesus College, Oxford.
     Translated, with notes, by Lady Charlotte Guest. London, 1877.


_Zeits. f. Volksk._ Zeitschrift für Volkskunde in Sage und Mär, Schwank
und Streich, Lied, Rätsel und Sprichwörter, Sitte und Brauch
herausgegeben von Dr. Edmund Veckenstedt. 2 vols. Leipzig, 1889-90,
still proceeding.




INDEX.


  Actæon, 71

  Afghan legend, 183

  Alsatian tales, 213, 216

  American Indians, Tales of North, 268, 271, 314, 315

  Ananci tale, 294

  Animism, 25

  Annamite tales, 200, 323

  Arabian Nights Entertainments, 50, 69, 79, 84, 255, 260, 267

  Arab tales (_see_ Arabian Nights Entertainments), 202, 300, 316, 319

  Ardshi-Bordshi, 81

  Arthur, King, 205, 207, 211, 212, 234

  Art of Story-telling, 1, 5, 20.
    In Western Highlands, 5;
    Brittany, 7;
    Portugal, Brazil, Gascony, Wales, England, 8;
    France, Sicily, 9;
    Panjab, 11;
    Cashmere, New Zealand, Polynesia, Greenland, 12;
    among the Malagasy, Ahts, Indian tribes of Guiana, 13;
    in India, 14;
    among the Algonkins, ancient Germans, Anglo-Saxons, ancient Welsh, 15;
    Arabs, Guslars, 16;
    Swahilis, 17;
    Eskimo, 12, 19

  Ascension Day, 90

  Aubrey, John, 148, 244


  Bahar Danush, 260

  Ballafletcher, Cup of, 156

  Bantik. _See_ Celebes

  Bards, Welsh, 15

  Baptism, superstitions concerning, 94, 101

  Barrows, haunted, 141, 142, 146, 231

  Basque tale, 293

  Berchta, Dame, 70, 90

  Blanik mountain, 184, 219, 220

  Blood relationship among savages, 47

  Bohemian tales, 56, 119, 175, 184, 219, 245, 251, 260, 294

  Bona Dea, 84, 87

  Bornoese tales, 300, 311, 324

  Breton tales, 61, 62, 63, 65, 66, 67, 116, 138, 174, 190, 192, 293

  Briar Rose, 247

  Buddhist influence on tales, 295, _et seqq._

  Bulgarian tales. _See_ Slavonic

  Burmese tale, 267, 297

  Burton, Sir Richard F. (_see_ Arabian Nights Entertainments), 16


  Cabalists, the, a mediæval sect, 341

  Carinthian tales, 173, 240

  Cashmere, tales from. _See_ Indian

  Celebes Islands, tale from, 267, 297

  Changelings, 93, _et seqq._

  Chinese superstitions, 97, 98

  Chinese tales, 177, 178, 299, 300

  Christening. _See_ Baptism

  Christmas, 141, 142, 157, 159

  Coals turned to gold, 49

  Cologne, Three Kings of, 149, 150

  Coptic tale, 181

  Corpus Christi Day, 89

  Corsican tale, 274

  Cosquin, Emmanuel, 267, 297

  Coventry, _See_ Godiva

  Cretan tales, _See_ Greek

  Cyclades, tale from, _See_ Greek


  Danish superstitions, 96, 99, 231

  Danish tales, 40, 44, 50, 56, 67, 103, 114, 130, 131, 140, 141, 144,
    151, 185, 213, 294

  Dardistan, tale from, 49

  Davies, Rev. Edward, 136

  Dean, Forest of, _See_ Forest

  Death, savage belief on, 27

  Derceto, a Phoenician goddess, 324

  Devil, the, 42, 47, 69, 263, 280

  Diana, 71

  Diedrich, 213, 233

  Dobocz, the robber chief, 218, 233

  Dracs of the Rhone, 65, 100

  Duffus, story of Lord, 148

  Dyak, _See_ Bornoese


  Edenhall, _See_ Luck

  Edgehill, Battle of, 235

  Edric the Wild, 302, 338, 340

  Eggshells, changelings detected by, 153, _et seqq._, 125

  Elidorus, tale of, 135

  English superstitions, 96, 100, 205

  English tales, 59, 61, 63, 64, 66, 68, 69, 106, 116, 124, 126, 139, 145,
    146, 147, 178, 189, 211, 234, 244

  Epimenides, tale of, 183

  Eskimo tales, 137, 262

  Esthonian tales, 201, 273, 280

  Etiquette of various nations, 309, 321

  Ezra, 182


  Fairy Births and Human Midwives, 37, _et seqq._, 59, _et seqq._

  Fairyland, 43, 47, 161, 196, 222

  Fairy Tales, definition of, 3;
    divisions of, 22;
    principles of explanation of, 32

  Feather-robe, 258, 267, 268, 298, 300, 301

  Females, kinship through, _See_ Kinship

  Finnish tales, 259, 329

  Fire, superstitions respecting, 96, 97

  Forest of Dean, 78

  Folktale (_See_ Art of Story-telling), connection with folk-song, 14;
    how to be reported, 21

  Frazer J. G., 31, 249, 252

  Frederick Barbarossa, 172, 213

  French superstitions, 96

  French tales (_See_ Breton), 42, 47, 65, 114, 119, 272, 293, 324, 342

  Frog, Fairy as, _See_ Toad.


  Gaelic tales, _See_ Scottish

  Gerald, Earl, 210, 233

  German superstitions, 95, 96, 99, 108, 140, 143, 279, 281

  German tales (_See_ Alsatian, Pomeranian, Rügen, Swabian, Transylvanian),
    48, 103, 113, 114, 118, 124, 126, 130, 137, 138, 139, 140, 142, 143,
    149, 152, 172, 177, 185, 188, 192, 212, 214, 215, 216, 217, 238, 240,
    241, 242, 243, 244, 259, 281, 327

  Gervase of Tilbury, 65, 100, 145, 212, 234, 272, 284

  Giraldus Cambrensis, 135

  Gloucestershire (_See_ Forest of Dean, St. Briavels), 145

  Godiva, legend of Lady, 71, _et seqq._

  Gold Coast, custom at, 86

  Gold Coast, tales of, 313, 324

  Gold, fairy, turns to dross, 50

  Grateful animals, _See_ Buddhist

  Gratitude, fairy, 48, 218, 312, 316

  Greek superstitions, 99, 100

  Greek tales, 55, 82, 242, 267, 269, 290, 317

  Grey, Sir George, 12, 285

  Grimm, 120, 140, 212, 213, 216, 233

  Guiana, tales from, 261, 289, 297, 299, 324

  Guernsey, tales from, 62, 66, 114


  Hades, food of, must not be eaten, 43, 44, 45, 47

  Harold II., King, 72, 205

  Hasan of Bassorah, tale of, 255, 291

  Hebrew tale, 41, 55

  Helpful beasts, _See_ Buddhist

  Herla, King, tale of, 178, 234

  Hero, the Hidden, the Sleeping, 205 _et seqq._, 228, 235

  Hertha, a German goddess, 71, 89, 90

  Hindoo customs, tales, _See_ Indian

  Highland tales, _See_ Scottish

  Holle, Dame, 215, 236


  Icelandic tales, 113, 193

  Imagination among savages, 2, 33

  Im Thurn, Everard, 13, 230

  Indian customs, 84

  Indian tales, 82, 227, 268, 296, 317, 318, 338

  Iolo Morganwg, 207

  Irish superstitions, 96, 121, 123, 210, 211

  Irish tales, 50, 52, 63, 107, 116, 118, 122, 128, 196, 198, 202, 210,
    211, 259, 314, 324, 338

  Iron, dislike of supernatural beings to, 50, 97, 126, 164, 306

  Irving, Washington, 177, 181

  Italian superstitions, 99

  Italian tales (_see_ Corsican, Sicilian, Tirolese), 199, 293


  Japanese tales, 174, 178, 194, 273, 301

  Jewish tales, _See_ Hebrew

  Jeremiah the prophet, 181 [TN: out of alphabetical order]


  Kaffir tale, 328

  Kan Püdäi, 42

  Kathá-sarit-ságara, 318

  Keats, 313

  Kinship through females, 228, _et seqq._

  Kirk Malew, Cup of, 155

  Koran, _See_ Mohammed

  Kurdish tale, 262, 292

  Kurroglú, the robber-poet, 80

  Kyffhäuser, 172, 214, 215, 229


  Lady Wilde, _See_ Wilde

  Lapp superstitions, 108

  Lapp tales, 38, 57, 173, 329

  Liebrecht, Felix, 79;
    his Ghost Theory, 337

  Lithuanian superstitions, 96

  Lithuanian tales, 104, 120, 220, 221

  Li Kì, a Chinese classic, 321

  Loo Choo Islands, tale from, 318

  Longfellow, 187

  Luck of Edenhall, 153

  Luther on Changelings, 109, 124

  Luxemburg, 240, 253, 324

  Luzel, F. M., 7, 190


  Mabinogion, 188

  MacRitchie, David, his Finn Theory, 349, _et seqq._

  Mahábhárata, 317

  Magyar tale, 260

  Malagasy tale, 287

  Malory, Sir Thomas, 205

  Manx superstitions, 108, 210

  Manx tales, 41, 106, 117, 155

  Maori customs, 290

  Maori tales, 45, 274, 285, 288, 289, 317, 319

  Map, Walter, 178, 234, 302, 338, 340, 341

  Marko, Prince, _or_ King, tale of, 218

  Marquis of the Sun, tale of, 264, 291, 293

  Marriage settlements, Indian, 321, 322

  Maundeville, Sir John, 111, 239

  Meddygon Myddfai, 325

  Melusina, 240, 253, 272, 273, 321, 324, 327

  Merlin, 209

  Messia, the Sicilian story-teller, 9

  Metamorphosis, 26, 31

  Midsummer Day, _See_ St. John's Day

  Midwives, adventures of, _See_ Fairy Births

  Minstrel in Middle Ages, 15

  Mohammed, 182, 224

  Mohel, adventure of a, 41, 55

  Moravian tale, 274

  Morgan the Fay, 43, 204

  Morris, William, 239, 260, 261

  Mother-right, _See_ Kinship

  Myddfai, Physicians of, _See_ Meddygon


  Names, Savage feeling about, 309

  Napoleon I., 206

  Nereids, 55, 99, 242, 267, 317, 325

  Netherlands, tale from, 188

  New Guinea, tale from, 322

  New Year's Eve and Night, 69, 248

  New Zealand, _See_ Maori

  Nightmare, the, 278, _et seqq._

  Norwegian tales. _See_ Scandinavian


  Odin, _See_ Woden

  Ogier the Dane, _See_ Olger

  Ointment, Magical, 59, _et seqq._

  Oisin, 196, 198

  Oldenburg Horn, 149

  Olger the Dane, 43, 204, 213

  Omens, 30

  Osburg, foundress of nunnery at Coventry, 90

  Ossian, _See_ Oisin

  Ovid, 71

  Owen Glendower, 209

  Owen Lawgoch, 209


  Parsees, _See_ Sad Dar

  Peeping Tom, _See_ Godiva

  Peleus, _See_ Thetis

  Perrault, 247

  Pitré, Dr., 9, 53, 192

  Pliny, 86, 183

  Pomeranian tales, 48, 51, 141, 217, 237, 242, 243, 251, 262, 281

  Polynesian tales, 44, 45, 267, 319, 324

  Portuguese superstition, 206

  Portuguese tale, 181

  Princess, the Enchanted, 237, _et seqq._, 262

  Proserpine, 43, 48


  Revenge, Fairy, 52, 59, _et seqq._, 65, _et seqq._

  Rhys, Professor, 37, 64, 66, 110, 163, 164, 188, 231, 325, 330

  Rip van Winkle, 177

  Robberies from Fairyland, 135, _et seqq._

  Roger of Wendover, _See_ Godiva

  Roman superstition, 96

  Russian tales, 119, 259, 265, 294, 298, 344

  Rügen, Island of, tales from, 71, 89, 127, 152, 236


  Sad Dar, a sacred book of Parsees, 96

  Samoyede tale, 268

  Savage ideas, 22;
    evidence of, 32

  Savages, imagination among, 2

  Saxo Grammaticus, 44

  Scandinavian tales (_see_ Icelandic,
    Danish), 38, 115, 142, 150, 155, 217, 258, 281, 294, 318

  Scottish superstitions, 94, 95, 96, 127, 133

  Scottish tales, 55, 61, 98, 105, 111, 112, 118, 120, 121, 122, 125, 127,
    130, 131, 132, 144, 148, 165, 166, 167, 180, 186, 241, 266, 293, 312

  Sebastian, Don, 206

  Sébillot, Paul, 67

  Seven Sleepers, the, 182

  Siberian tales, 42, 169

  Sicilian superstitions, 100, 111

  Sicilian tales, 53, 192, 212, 299

  Siegfried, _or_ Sigurd, 212, 247

  Sikes, Wirt, 64, 123, 137, 165, 278

  Simrock, Karl, 101, 116

  Slavonic superstitions, 206, 279

  Slavonic tales (_see_ Bohemian, Russian, Lithuanian), 218, 266, 267,
    298, 312

  Southam, procession at, 85

  Southey, 187

  Spanish superstitions, 100, 205

  Spanish tales, 187, 226, 264, 294, 315, 325, 339

  Spirits, doctrine of, 25, 42

  St. Augustine, 100, 235

  St. Briavels, custom at, 78, 87

  Stephens, Professor Dr. Geo., 150

  St. John's Day, 214, 236, 238, 248

  Story-telling, Art of, _See_ Art

  Stoymir, the Knight, 220, 233

  Swabian tales, 39, 52, 147, 244, 245, 253

  Swan-maidens, 202, 255, _et seqq._, 283, _et seqq._, 337

  Swedish tales, _See_ Scandinavian

  Swiss tale, 49


  Taboo, 270, 302, 304, 305, 306, 309, 311, 312, 318, 320, 337

  Tacitus, 15, 71, 89

  Tam Lin, ballad of, 242

  Tawhaki and Tango-tango, tale of, 285, _et seqq._

  Thetis, 242, 317, 329

  Thomas of Erceldoune, 43, 102, 103

  Time, supernatural lapse of, 161, _et seqq._, 196, _et seqq._, 222,
    _et seqq._

  Tini-rau, tale of, 286, _et seqq._

  Tir na n 'Og, _See_ Oisin

  Tirolese tales, 70, 184, 274, 293, 315, 325, 329, 348

  Toad or frog, fairy as (_see_ Princess), 51, 52, 53, 338

  Totemism, 27, 324, 331, 346

  Tradition, definition of, 34

  Traditions, variable value of, 4, 24

  Transformations, doctrine of, 26, 31

  Transylvanian tales, 52, 176, 189, 246, 258, 347


  Ulrich von Rosenberg, 220, 233


  Van Pool, Lady of the, 274, 325, 330

  Vikramâditya, 81

  Vitra, 38


  Wäinämöinen, 45

  Waldron, Geo., 41, 108, 156

  Wastin of Wastiniog, tale of, 302

  Welsh superstitions, 110, 126, 207, 209

  Welsh tales, 37, 62, 63, 103, 113, 115, 122, 123, 126, 128, 135, 136,
    162, 163, 164, 165, 166, 167, 168, 187, 188, 207, 209, 225, 269, 274,
    294, 301, 302, 304, 305, 317, 325, 327, 330

  Wenzel, King, 184, 219

  Western Highlands, story-telling in, 5

  Weyland Smith, 318

  Wilde, Lady, 102, 128

  Wild Edric, _See_ Edric

  Wild Hunt, the, 233, 234, 236

  William of Newbury, 146

  Witchcraft, 29

  Witches, 99, 143, 173, 336, 348

  Woden, 212, 233, 247, 339


  Yatsh, _or_ demon, wedding, 49

  York, custom at, 90

  Yorkshire, 189, 211


  Zoroaster, 96


UNWIN BROTHERS, THE GRESHAM PRESS, CHILWORTH AND LONDON.