BOOK
dc;-eis in the Forest that of the Soaring Lark, except that the oil dropped from the • : — - maiden's lamp is made to bring about the catastrophe. The prince is, of course, under the power of the sorceress, who wishes to marry h'm, like Odysseus in the house of Kirke or the cave of Kalypso ; but when on the wedding morning he displays a fine shirt with three drops of tallow on it, and declares that he will marry only the woman who can wash them out, the Trolls, vainly attempting the task, see the prize snatched Irom their hand by the maiden whom they had despised as a stranger and a beggar.^
The Wan- The myth passed into other forms. In every case the bonds of true love were severed ; but the persons thus separated were some- times brothers and sisters, sometimes parents and children. In the German story of the Twelve Brothers, the sister goes forth to search for the lost children in that great forest which reappears in almost all tales of Teutonic folk-lore, the forest of the night or the Avinter, in which the huntsman or the king's daughter, or the two babes, or Tanhaiiser or True Thomas, the prince, the tailor, or the soldier, lose their way, to fall in every instance into the hands of witches, or robbers, or magicians, sometimes malignant, sometimes merciful and almost genial. It is perhaps no exaggeration to say that under this type of solar legend (for, as turning on the presence or the absence of light and warmth, these are all solar legends), four-fifths of the folk- lore of northern Europe may be ranged. The inhabitants of this dark forest are the Panis, by whom the wanderers are sometimes welcomed, sometimes slain. These wanderers, or stolen youths or maidens, can be recovered only through much suHering on the part of those who seek them. In the tales of the Twelve Brothers and the Six Swans, the sister must not utter a word for seven or for six years, an incident which, in the story of the Woodcutter's Child, is changed into loss of voice, inflicted as a punishment by the angel who has charged her not to look into the thirteenth door of the palace in the land of Happiness, or in other words, into the treasure- house of Ixion or Tantalos. But the appetite for mythical narratives was easily gratified. Incidents repeated a thousand times, with different names and slight differences in their sequence or arrange- ment, never palled upon it. If Psyche has hard tasks to perform
• In the German stor}' of Bearskin, to be the victim, s.nying that a promise the soldier is not turned into a beast, which has been made must be kept, but is under compact with the e il one The transformation is more complete in not to comb his hair or vash his face the storj' of Hans the Hedgehog, whose for seven years, but to wear a bear sark enchantment is brought to an end by or cloak. In this disguise he compels burning his skin, as in the Deccan story the king to give hini one of his daughters of the enchanted rajah, in marriage, and the youngest consents
