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58
WISHFULFILLMENT AND SYMBOLISM IN FAIRY TALES

on and on until the peasant's daughter wakens him in the same manner from his enchanted sleep and after that she rescues him.

The Russian fairy tales contain still more examples of transposition.

In "The Little Bear and the Three Knights, Mustachio, Mover-of-Mountains, and Uprooter-of-Oaks" (Afanassiew—A. Meyer, No. 28) the childless wife buys, at the command of her husband, two turnips. One they ate, the other they put in the oven, in order to dry it. After a while a small voice cries out: "Little mother, open the door, it is too hot in here!" She opened the oven door and there lay a living girl in the stove pipe. "What is that?" asked the husband. "Oh, little father, God has sent us a child!" They named it Little Turnip.

Later the Little Turnip, while searching for berries with other little girls, lost her way in a thick, gloomy forest. They came to a little cottage in which a bear was sitting. He brought some porridge and said: "Eat pretty girls. Who does not eat must be my wife." All the little girls ate except Little Turnip and they were allowed to go. Little Turnip, however, was retained. Little Turnip grew constantly larger, escaped one day, and at home soon had a son, half man, half bear, whom they christened Iwaschko, Little-Bear. He grew, not in years but in hours (as is often the case with fairy tale heroes), accomplished Herculean deeds, and finally rescued a maiden who was held captive in the under world by the great witch. Comment is quite superfluous. The beginning by eating the turnip and the incubation in the stove-pipe instead of the uterus, might as well have its origin in a dream (compare the example of the dream with the stove-pipe). Also here the people are old and childless. The two turnips, instead of only one, correspond to an already pointed out dream phenomenon; the problem here is to unite impregnation and pregnancy in one dream. Turnip is also applied by our peasants in their rude, rough wit as a symbol of the male organ of copulation, of which I know several examples.

The fairy tale of "Little Turnip" gives us the key to unlock the meaning of the beginning of the fairy tale "Rampion," (Grimm, No. 12).

A man and his wife wished a long time in vain for a child. At the back of the house was a little window from which one could