child beauty, goodness, and wisdom and in addition the gift that all her tears would be changed into gold. A fine prince would marry her and she would lead a happy life with him in love. The youngest did not revoke the blessings of her sisters. But she added as a penalty for her poor reception that the princess would become a sparrow on her wedding night and only for a short time during the first three nights should she regain her human form. If some one did not then quickly burn the sparrow skin, she must always remain a bird (compare "Kisa" and the Icelandic Cinderella).
The story then goes on to the fulfillment of the blessings and the curse and the final deliverance.
Prophetic dreams, as in this example, occur very frequently in fairy tales and their content itself is also dream-like.
That the third woman (or the thirteenth in "The Sleeping Beauty") should, out of anger, add a bad wish to the good wishes, is a common fairy tale motive.
One sees the wonderful impregnation under the symbol of transposition meet with a significant fate, and we often find characteristically the same motive in the bible, the children of long barren women become prominent men, or the procreation and birth of great men is represented as wonderful and mysterious. (Annunciation by the Angel Gabriel, conception by the Holy Ghost, vision of Zacharias, see Evang. Luke, I; promise of Isaac, Moses I, 17 and 18 Chap.; promise of Samson's birth, Judges, 13 and 14 Chap.; the whole history of Samson presents a great many fairy-story-like signs. Compare also the Hercules saga.)
The same motive appears in the beginning of the fairy tale "The Carnation" (Grimm, 76). There was a queen to whom God had denied children. She went every morning into the garden and prayed to God in heaven that he would bestow on her a son or a daughter. An angel came from heaven and said: "Be content, you shall have a son with wishful thoughts, for what he wishes for from this world that will he obtain." She went to the king and told him the happy news, and when the time came she bore a son, and the king was greatly rejoiced, etc.
Rittershaus, in his collection cited, gives still other examples of impregnation by the swallowing of fish. It occurs in other Icelandic sagas, in the Greek, Albanian and Sicilian fairy tales,
