received short shrift, being possessed of a poisonous glance or bite, or of snakes ready to destroy the man who married her.[1] In The Grateful Dead she was innocent, but had to be divided to satisfy the claims of a being who had helped her husband.[2] The part of the friend was less well motivated in The Poison Maiden than in The Grateful Dead, so that it was natural for the themes to unite at a common point and produce a compound at once more complete and more thrilling than were the simpler forms. This combination must have been made not by a conscious literary worker, for, had it been, Tobit would surely stand less independent of the later versions than is actually the case, but by the tellers of folk-tales, in a manner quite unconscious and altogether unstudied. The stories combined of themselves, so to say.
From Semitic lands, if it was indeed there made, the compound seems to have travelled into Europe as well as into other parts of Asia.[3] It has spread during the intervening centuries throughout the length and breadth of Europe, always remaining a genuinely popular tale. As far as my knowledge goes, it did not appear in literature from the time when the Hebrew book of Tobit was written till Peele's Old Wives' Tale was presented some fifteen centuries later on the English stage. In the nineteenth century it again appeared to the reading public in the version which the Dane Andersen made from a Norse folk-tale. Yet the story in all versions of the compound extant is unmistakably the same, though it has suffered more changes in detail than would be worth while to enumerate here,
- ↑ For examples, see Hertz, pp. 106-115.
- ↑ It is not clear whether she was actually divided in the primitive forms, or merely threatened. In either case the union would take place as stated.
- ↑ Armenian and Siberian give adequate evidence as to the truth of the latter statement, though more Asiatic variants of this type are to be desired.
