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.