men; the daughter of his host falls in love with him, and assists him in the accomplishment of tasks closely resembling those of our folk-tale. The adventure ends in a flight, in which the heroine uses a device to delay her pursuing father. The relationship with the first part of the tale of the Bird-wife is unquestionable, and cannot be accidental; but the first section is wanting; Medea does not appear to have been a bird-maiden, nor do we learn that Jason had made her acquaintance before his journey. If the complete story, containing both sections, had existed in Greece, it is very unlikely that there should be no indication of it. We cannot, therefore, regard this tale as a variant of the story of the Bird-wife; on the contrary, we must consider it as an earlier tale, and as containing evidence of the existence, in Greece, at a time before authentic history, of elements which, at a later date and in another land, entered into the composition of our folk-tale.
On the other hand, the first part of the history is contained in the Hindu legend of Purūruvas and Urvaçi, referred to in a well-known hymn of the Rig Veda. This hymn describes the interview of the hero with the nymph, by whom he has been deserted, at a lake where she and her companions are bathing in bird-form. The fairy remains obdurate to all entreaties of the mortal; but she consoles him with the promise of a son, who shall one day seek out his human parent. It would appear, from the text of the hymn, that Urvaçi had originally been won by being seized, as a swan-maiden who had laid aside her robe of flight, presumably in the same lake at which the scene is laid. The poem accordingly depends upon a folk-tale, answering to the first section of our märchen, but suggesting the non-existence at the time of composition of the second section, that in which the nymph is sought for and recovered from her own heavenly abode. The märchen must therefore be later than the hymn.[1]
Somewhat different from the preceding is the tale of Amor and Psyche, as given by Apuleius. This narrative is a literary recension, altered and confused to such a degree that it is now impossible
- ↑ See the translation of this hymn by K. F. Geldner, in Pischel and Geldner's Vedische Studien, Stuttgart, 1889, p. 253 f. Geldner gives also the later prose tales. These approach the form of our märchen, representing the hero as making a journey to the land of the Gandharvas; he is also related to have recovered Urvaçi.
