fully aside, and so deceives the monster, who accordingly trusts her with the knowledge that he cannot be put to death because his soul is in a certain egg. She persuades him to bring her the egg, and striking it out of his hands, it is broken, and he dies. In a third story,[1] the heroine flies with a king's son, whom she has liberated, and flings in the face of the pursuing ogre the medicine that slays, which, with the medicine that revives, she has stolen from the Forbidden Cupboard.
The flight of the heroine, either alone or in company with a prince whom she rescues from the monster's power, though, as we have seen, not unknown to stories of this type, is not so common as in the next class we shall consider. In the Norse tale of "The Three Sisters who were entrapped into a Mountain,"[2] she dresses up a straw figure in her own clothes, and steals home in the troll's absence. The latter, discovering her fraud, pursues her, and, unable to get back to his cavern before dawn, succumbs to the usual fate of trolls by bursting when the sun rises. In this case, although the fugitive lady is not the direct agent of her gaoler's death, the mythical meaning is doubtless the same. More frequently, however, he is simply foiled, as in the Swabian märchen of "The Hunter and the Miller's Daughters,"[3] where the heroine escapes his search hidden beneath the fodder-sacks in a carrier's cart which she has overtaken on the way; or as in "The Trimmatos,"[4] where she is hidden in a bale of cotton, pierced in vain by the suspicious ghoul's sword. Sometimes he succeeds in flinging after the damsel and her lover a curse which separates them and long retards their happiness.[5] This incident occurs only in one of the stories I have examined. It belongs more properly to the Jasonian cycle; and perhaps is nothing more than a merely accidental confusion of two stories caused by the forgetfulness of a solitary story-teller.[6]
- ↑ Archivio, vol. iii. p. .368.
- ↑ Thorpe, loc. cit.
- ↑ Birlinger, Volksthümliches aus Schwaben, vol. i. No. 593, p. 369.
- ↑ Legrand, loc. cit.
- ↑ Finamore, Tradizioni Popolari Abeuzzesi, vol. i. Story No. 12, p. 55.
- ↑ This can only be determined by a fuller comparison. Other stories of this type point to a connection with the Jason stories—for example, that of Petrosina cited above from the Archivio, where the heroine has to let down her hair for the monster to ascend by into his castle.
