satiate his morbid appetite he begins to eat himself. When he has thus rendered himself helpless the lizard lets his wife down again and she escapes.
A few months ago Mr. Coote gave an abstract in the Folk Lore Journal[1] of some modern Greek tales collected by M. Kamponrales. One of these would seem (if we may safely judge by the outline) to be an intermediate link between the two foregoing stories and the Dead Hand type. The Thrice-Accursed (namely, Belzebub) marries a princess who is too proud to accept any one else, and takes her to his mountain abode. There he shows her a woman hanging up, just as the miller's youngest daughter sees her sisters hanging. This was her husband's former wife, to whom he had given a human heart to eat, and on her failing to eat it had killed her. He then goes to hunt, having, as Mr. Coote puts it, tried his new wife with a similar dainty, with the usual result. He subsequently marries her two sisters successively; but the youngest outwits him, and with the aid of strangers escapes from his mountain abode. The Breton story of Redbeard[2] (which betrays in its title that it is connected in the minds of the people with that of Bluebeard) can scarcely be aught else than a similar link; for here, too, everything is present but the Forbidden Chamber. The heroine marries a widower who has had seven wives, lives ten years in harmony with him, and has children. Suddenly and without cause he resolves to kill her. She sends a dog with a note in his ear to her brothers, and contrives to delay until a military troop rescue her and kill Redbeard. She afterwards marries one of her deliverers.
Let us turn now for a moment to the Western World, and examine the Algonquin account of How one of the Partridge's wives became a Sheldrake Duck.[3] A hunter living in the woods keeps an elf in a box, which he keeps closed lest an evil spirit get him. One day he sees a water fairy and tries to catch her, but fails. She is however compelled to return to him and become his wife. Her curiosity is
- ↑ Vol. ii. p. 238, August 1884. Mr. Coote calls attention to the curious fact that the Italian variants of Bluebeard all represent the heroine's escape to be brought about by her own subtilty.
- ↑ Sébillot, Litterature ovale de la Haute Bretagne, p. 41.
- ↑ Leland, op. cit. p. 300.
