[320] Jamieson, in Illustrations of Northern Antiquities, p. 398: 'Child Rowland and Burd Ellen.'
[321] Niedersächsische Sagen und Märchen, Schambach und Müller, p. 373. Shakspere has this: "They are fairies; he that speaks to them shall die;" Falstaff, in Merry Wives of Windsor, V, 5. Ancient Greek tradition is not without traces of the same ideas. It was Persephone's eating of the pomegranate kernel that consigned her to the lower world, in spite of Zeus and Demeter's opposition. The drinking of Circe's brewage and the eating of lotus had an effect on the companions of Ulysses such as is sometimes ascribed to the food and drink of fairies, or other demons, that of producing forgetfulness of home: Odyssey, X, 236, IX, 97. But it would not be safe to build much on this. A Hebrew tale makes the human wife of a demon charge a man who has come to perform, a certain service for the family not to eat or drink in the house, or to take any present of her husband, exactly repeating the precautions observed in Grimm, Deutsche Sagen, Nos 41, 49: Tendlan, Das Buch der Sagen und Legenden jüdischer Vorzeit, p. 141. The children of Shem may probably have derived this trait in the story from the children of Japhet. Aladdin, in the Arabian Nights, is to have a care, above all things, that he does not touch the walls of the subterranean chamber so much as with his clothes, or he will die instantly. This again, by itself, is not very conclusive.
[322] Historia Danica, l. viii: Müller et Velschow, I, 420-25.
[38]
THE WEE WEE MAN
[A]. a. 'The Wee Wee Man,' Herd's MSS, I, 153; Herd's Scottish Songs, 1776, I, 95.
[B]. Caw's Poetical Museum, p. 348.
[C]. 'The Wee Wee Man,' Scott's Minstrelsy, II, 234, ed. 1802.
[D]. 'The Wee Wee Man,' Kinloch MSS, VII, 253.
[E]. a. 'The Wee Wee Man,' Motherwell's Note-Book, fol. 40; Motherwell's MS., p. 195. b. Motherwell's Minstrelsy, p. 343.