Page:A book of folk-lore (1913).djvu/62

Rh The frog is finally disenchanted and appears as a prince in his original form.

Here the story is told in its dryest and least poetical form. The prince had been bewitched into the form of a frog and could not recover his original shape till a girl had promised to be his wife, taken him into her chamber, and finally, in the English version of the tale, had cut off his head.

So in the Countess D’Aulnoy’s story of The White Cat, the damsel has to cut off the cat’s head before it can be transformed into a prince. In Beauty and the Beast we have much the same theme.

Professor Max Müller tried to establish that the story of the Frog Prince rose out of a misconception of the name of the sun in the Sanskrit. But it has too many analogies for us to explain it thus. In the Story of Seven Ravens the seven brothers of a damsel are bewitched into these forms till they obtain release through their sister. In an old Danish ballad a youth is transformed into a raven by a cruel stepmother, till his sister releases him by giving her child, that he may pick out its eyes and drink its heart’s blood before he can recover human form.

I was shown a cavern in the Vorarlberg where I was told that a hideous monster like