[18] It is curious to observe the story pass through all the stages of the supernatural agency traditional in the locality; first the good genius of the Etruscans merging next into the Germanic woodsprite, then assuming the vulgar characteristics of later imaginings about witchcraft, and then the Christian teaching ‘making use of it,’ as Professor de Gubernatis says, ‘for its own moral end.’
[19] A collection of the ‘Costumi’ of Tuscany I have, without a title-page, but I think published about 1835, laments the growing disuse in Lunigiana (i.e. the country round the Gulf of Spezia, so called from Luna, an Etruscan city, but ‘not one of the twelve,’ and including Carrara, Lucca, and Pisa) of the practice of recounting popular traditions at the Focarelli there. These seem to be autumn evening gatherings round a fire, but in the open air, often on a threshing-floor; while the able-bodied population is engaged in the preparation of flax, and some are spinning, the boys and girls dance, wrestle, and play games, and the old crones gossip; but now, says the writer, they begin to occupy themselves only with scandalous and idle reports, instead of old-world lore.
[20] My readers will perhaps not recognize at first sight that this is a corruption of Frau Bertha, the Perchtl whom we met in North Tirol. In the Italian dialects of the Trentino she is also called la brava Berta and la donna Berta.
[21] ‘Your servant! Mistress Bertha of the long nose.’ Such was supposed to be the correct form of addressing the sprite.
[22] Many of these concern the earthly wanderings of Christ and his apostles. I have given one of the most sprightly and characteristic of Schneller’s, too long to be inserted here, in The Month for September, 1870, entitled ‘The Lettuce-leaf Barque.’
[23] Gathered for the above-named collection by Herr Zacchea of the Fassathal, in the Val di Non, Lederthal, and Val Arsa.
[24] I have mentioned the only other wolf-stories that I have met with in the chapter on Excursions round Meran; and at p. 31 of this volume.
[25] Cox’s Aryan Mythology, vol. i. p. 405.
[26] I have thought this one of the best specimen tales, as the two stories of the Three Wishes and the Three Faithful Beasts are leading ones in every popular mythology. I have named a good many variants in connexion with their counterparts in the Folklore of Rome, and a more extensive survey of them, together with a most interesting analysis of their probable origin, will be found in Cox’s Mythology of Aryan Nations, vol. i. pp. 144 and 375. I had thought that these, being strung together in the text version, was owing to a freak of memory of some narrator who, having forgotten the original conclusion of the former story, takes the latter one into it; but, curiously enough, in the note to the last-named page of Mr. Cox’s work, he happens actually to establish an intrinsic identity of origin in the two stories. The Three Wishes story has also a strangely localized home in the Oetzthal, which, though properly belonging to the division of North Tirol, I prefer to cite here, for the sake of its analogies. Its particular home is in the so-called Thal Vent, on the frozen borders of the Gletscher described by Weber, as appalling to a degree in its loneliness, and in the roaring of its torrents, and the stern rugged inaccessibility of its peaks. Here, he says, three Selige Fräulein (Weber, like Schneller, translates everything inexorably into German; this may have been an Enguana) have their abode in a sumptuous subterranean palace, which no mortal might reach. They are also called die drei Feyen, he says, forming a further identification with the normal legend, but he does not account for the penetration of the French word into this unfrequented locality. They were kind and ancillary to the poor mountain folk, but the dire enemies of the huntsman, for he hunted as game the creatures who were their domestic animals (here we have the nucleus of a heap of various tales and legends of the pet creatures of fairies and hermits becoming the intermediaries of supernatural communication). The Thal Vent legend proceeds that a young shepherd once won the regard of the drei Feyen; they fulfilled all his wishes, and gave him constant access to their palace under the sole condition that he should never reveal its locality to any huntsman. After some years the youth one day incautiously let out the secret to his father, and from thenceforth the drei Feyen were inexorable in excluding him from their society. He pleaded and pleaded all in vain, and ultimately made himself a huntsman in desperation. But the first time he took aim at one of their chamois, the most beautiful of the three fairies appeared to him in so brilliant a light of glory, that he lost all consciousness of his actual situation and fell headlong down the precipice.
[27] They are called ‘Lustige Geschichte,’ ‘Storielle da rider.’ The Germans have a saying that ‘in jeder Sage haftet eine Sache;’ the ‘Sache’ is perhaps more hidden in these than in others. I have pointed out counterparts of the following at Rome and elsewhere in Folklore of Rome.