“Her head touched the roof-tree of the house;
Her middle ye weel mot span;
Each frighted huntsman fled the ha’,
And left the king alane.
“Her teeth were a’ like tether stakes,
Her nose like a club or mell;
And I ken naething she appeared to be,
But the fiend that wons in hell.”
In Torfœus: “Expergefactus igitur, recluso ostio, informe quoddam mulieris simulacrum, habitu corporis fædum, veste squalore obsita, pallore, macie frigorisque tyrannide prope modum peremptum, deprehendit.”—In Grim’s Saga: Not taller than a child of seven years; Grim’s arms could not go round her; misshapen, bald, black, ugly, and disgusting in every particular.—In the Turkish analogue (which occurs in a story-book not yet fully done into English) a poor orphan girl marries an exceedingly ugly old man for the sake of a home, and one day, while he is at the bazar, she begins, for the first time, to long for his return. When he came home she “ran to meet him with such joy as if the world had become her own, and when he beheld her longing, and her countenance glowing with delight, he suddenly shook himself, and became a young man of seventeen years—a sun of the world, a darling of the age; and he clasped her round the neck and blessed her.” Then he explained that he was a king of the fairies, whose mother, because of an idle word he had uttered, changed him to a man of seventy years, and he was not to return to his original shape until he was beloved by a daughter of the children of Adam.—In one of the Kaffir analogues, a youth had been changed to a crocodile by the enemies of his father’s house; in the other, to a snake with five heads. It is not easy to decide on the question of whether the transformation was originally to a beast-shape or to that of a hideous old woman.—The ending of the German tale, where the frog becomes a handsome young
