give the wooer to guess, if he will not lose his head, as nine wooers have lost theirs before him. The hero overhears the demon's suggestions, and answers next day to the princess's questions, "What am I thinking of?" with first "Of thy father's white horse," next Of thy father's battle-sword," and lastly "Of this," showing her the demon's head, which he has cut off after the princess and he had parted. On the wedding night the bridegroom must dip the princess three times in water; from which she emerges first as a raven, next as a dove, and lastly, the spell quite broken, as a maiden.
This is plainly identical with Asbjörnsen's Norse "Follower" or "Companion," familiar through Dasent's translation, and with the still more familiar "Travelling Companion" of Hans Christian Andersen. These three stories, whilst all of them lacking the proposed division of property, present a number of seemingly new episodes. Not one, however, of those episodes is probably of German, Norwegian, or Danish invention; they can always be paralleled by stories current in India, Persia, or South-eastern Europe. Thus we get the riddling princess in a long Persian story cited by Benfey (Panchatantra, vol. i., pp. 445-448), in Hahn's No. 114, "The Princess who would not Wed,"[1] and in another of Paspati's Turkish-Gypsy stories, which matches Campbell's hitherto unmatched Gaelic story of "The Knight of Riddles." The invisible hat of Asbjörn-
- ↑ This Greek folktale illustrates the old adage that "There is nothing new under the sun." According to so well-informed a work as Chambers's Encyclopædia, "an anæsthetic was first employed to deaden the pain of a dentistry operation in 1846 by Mr. Morton, a dentist of Boston." Yet here we find a prince taking a pair of tongs and filling a basket with a soporific herb (Schlafkraut), then applying this herb to each of forty-one dragons, and from each extracting a front tooth. "When the dragons woke up the next morning, one dragon remarked the gap in his fellow's mouth, and cried, 'Eh! what! you've lost a front tooth!' And when they came to look, they found that each had lost one, whereupon they were dreadfully frightened, and said: 'The man who can pull out our teeth could cut our throats just as easily'" (Griechische Märchen, vol. ii., p. 173).
