enter their cave and find the straw figure, they become aware of how they have been deceived, and run after the girl; but they are not able to overtake her before she reaches her father's house. She slips in safely, but the door cuts off her heel. In Pröhle's Märchen für die Jugend, No. 7, the story is called Fledervogel (Flitter-bird). A very similar Finnish story from Karalän is quoted by Schiefer,[1] p. 609, from Erik Rudbek's Collection (2. 187).
The Icelandic Fitfuglar, Schwimmvogel (swimming-bird), which looked as white as a swan, will help to explain Fitclier's Vogel. The wizard himself having to carry the girl home, reminds us of Rosmer in the Altdänische Lieder (see p. 201 and the following), who also without being aware of it, carries away on his back the first bride he had stolen. The indelible blood appears likewise in a story in the Gesta Romanorum. Four drops of the blood of her innocent child whom she has murdered, fall on a mother's hand, and she cannot remove them, and has always to wear a glove. The fact of a dressed-up doll having to represent the bride is also related in the story of The Hare's bride (No. 66), and shows its relationship. Disguising the girl as a bird seems to have some connection with the ancient custom of persons changing themselves into animals. A passage from Becherer's Thuringian Chronicle, pp. 307, 308, where it is related of the soldiers of the Emperor Adolf of Nassau that "they found an aged woman whom they stripped naked, smeared with tar, rolled in a feather-bed which they had cut open, and then tied her to a rope and led her round the camp and elsewhere as a bear or strange wild-beast, and then carried her away by night and restored her to her original condition," seems to find an appropriate place here. In Madrid, in the year 1824, a woman who had permitted herself to speak in disrespectful terms of the King, was smeared with oil over her whole body, and covered with all kinds of feathers.
Our story visibly contains the saga of Bluebeard. We have indeed heard this in German, and have given it in the first edition, No. 62, but as it only differs from Perrault's La barbe bleue, by one or two omissions, and by one peculiar circumstance, and as the French story may have been known at the place where we heard the story, we have, in our uncertainty, not included it again. Sister Anne is wanting, and the part which varies contains this feature that the distressed girl lays the bloody key in hay, and it is a genuine popular belief that hay draws blood out. The story in Meier, No. 38, seems also to be derived from the French. The saga is likewise evidently to be traced in a beautiful popular ballad, Ulrich and Annchen (Wunderhorn, 1. 274). See Herder's Volkslieder, 1. 79, and Gräter's Idunna, 1812), where however the
- ↑ Qu. Schiefner?
