Then she told him everything that had happened. They began to kiss and embrace each other, to pour forth tears of joy.
“And who is this man?” says the priest.
“That is my betrothed. He brought me back into the white world; if it hadn’t been for him I should have remained down there for ever!”
After this the fair maiden untied her bundle, and in it were gold and silver dishes: she had carried them off from the devils. The merchant looked at them and said:
“Ah! those are my dishes. One day I was feasting with my guests, and when I got drunk I became angry with my wife. ‘To the devil with you!’ I exclaimed, and began flinging from the table, and beyond the threshold, whatever I could lay my hands upon. At that moment my dishes disappeared!”
And in reality so had it happened. When the merchant mentioned the devil’s name, the fiend immediately appeared at the threshold, began seizing the gold and silver wares, and flinging in their place bits of pottery.
Well, by this accident the youth got himself a capital bride. And after he had married her he went back to his parents. They had long ago counted him as lost to them for ever. And indeed it was no subject for jesting; he had been away from home three whole years, and yet it seemed to him that he had not in all spent more than twenty-four hours with the devils.
[A quaint version of the legend on which this story is founded is given by Gervase of Tilbury in his “Otia Imperialia,” whence the story passed into the “Gesta Romanorum” (chap. clxii.) and spread widely over mediæval Europe. A certain Catalonian was so much annoyed one day “by the continued and inappeasable crying of his little daughter, that he commended her to the demons.” Whereupon she was immediately carried off. Seven years after this, he learnt (from a man placed by a similar imprecation in the power of the demons, who used him as a vehicle) that his daughter was in the interior of a neighboring mountain, and might be recovered if he would demand her. So he ascended to the summit of the mountain, and there claimed his child. She straightway appeared in miserable plight, “arida, tetra, oculis vagis, ossibus et nervis et pellibus vix hærentibus,” etc. By the judicious care, however, of her now cautious parent she was restored to physical and moral respectability. For some valuable observations on this story see Liebrecht’s edition of the “Otia Imperialia,” pp. 137-9. In the German story of “Die sieben Raben” (Grimm, No. 25) a father’s “hasty word” turns his six sons into ravens.]
When devils are introduced into a story of this class, it always assumes a grotesque, if not an absolutely comic air. The evil spirits are almost always duped and defeated, and that result is generally due to their remarkable want of intelligence. For they display in their dealings with their human antagonists a deficiency of intellectual power which almost amounts to imbecility. The explanation of this appears to be that the devils of European folk-lore have nothing in common with the rebellious angels of Miltonic theology beyond their vague denomination; nor can any but a nominal resemblance be traced between their chiefs or “grandfathers” and the thunder-smitten but still majestic “Lucifer, Son of the Morning.” The demon rabble of “Popular Tales” are merely the lubber fiends of heathen mythology, beings endowed with supernatural might, but scantily provided with mental power; all of terrific manual clutch, but of weak intellectual grasp. And so the hardy mortal who measures his powers against theirs, even in those cases in which his strength has not been intensified by miraculous agencies, easily overcomes or deludes the slow-witted monsters with whom he strives—whether his antagonist be a Celtic or Teutonic Giant, or a French Ogre, or a Norse Troll, or a Greek Drakos or Lamia, or a Lithuanian Laume, or a Russian Snake or Koshchei or Baba Yaga, or an Indian Rákshasa or Pisácha, or any other member of the many species of fiends for which, in Christian parlance, the generic name is that of “devils.”
There is no great richness of invention manifested in the stories which deal with the outwitting of evil spirits. The same devices are in almost all cases resorted to, and their effect is invariable. The leading characters undergo certain transmutations as the scene of the story is shifted, but their mutual relations remain constant. Thus, in a German story[474] we find a schoolmaster deceiving the devil; in one of its Slavonic counterparts[475] a gypsy deludes a snake; in another, current among the Baltic Kashoubes, in place of the snake figures a giant so huge that the thumb of his glove serves as a shelter for the hero of the tale—one which is closely connected with that which tells of Thor and the giant Skrymir.