This story especially belongs to the class in which an ancient ground-work seems to survive. The witch is a giant woman who has captured a couple of the children of the gods and wants to destroy them. When, according to one saga, the maiden spits and the spittle answers, we must, perforce, remember that saga in which earthly shapes are created from the spittle of the gods. But the bean also, which according to the French saga (in D'Aulnoy, No. 8) is baked into a cake, and in Kuhn, is put into a pan on the fire, and gives the answer, represents the creative principle, which in our story is still more clearly expressed by the drops of blood. For the transformations of the fugitives, who, to save themselves continually assume another shape, compare the Eyrbiggiasage, c. 20, where Katla is always changing her son in order to protect him.
57.—The Golden Bird.
From Hesse; but this story is frequently found here, and also in Paderborn, where it is told in the older but not better form that a certain King had become ill (according to others, blind), and nothing in the world could cure him, until at last he heard (or dreamed), that in a far distant place the phœnix was to be found, and by its piping (or singing) alone could he be cured. And now the sons set out one after the other; and the various stories differ from each other only in the various tasks which the third son has to perform. The singing of the phœnix, being so necessary, is certainly a better foundation. One version also relates that the fox after having at last been shot, vanishes entirely and does not become a man. The fall into the well (instead of which a quarry sometimes occurs), is remarkably allied to the saga of Joseph; the deliverance from it by the Fox to that of Aristomenes (after Pausanias); to Sindbad (in The 1001 Nights); and to Gog and Magog (after Montevilla). The warning to buy no gallows-flesh is also contained in the Knight of Thurn's Lehre: "In the third place thou shalt beg off no thief or any other malefactor from death." Agricola's Sprichwörter (Wittenb. 1582), 97. There are other stories like this in the Erfurt Kindermärchen; pp. 94–150; in Wolf's Hausmärchen, pp. 230–242; and in Meier, 5; also in Zingerle, p. 157, but it is weaker
"Oh, if I let my weeping be
I'd sooner to the wayside go,
And as a humble field-flower grow.
*****
Before the noon I'll blossom fair,
'Fore eve I'll stand so sadly there
When all the folk are passing by,
There will I stand so piteously."—Tr.
