Page:Fairy Tales Their Origin and Meaning.djvu/109

III.] people;" and the Pooka, which comes in the form of a wild colt; and the Leprechaun, a dwarf who makes himself look like a little old man, mending shoes; and the Banshee, which cries and moans when great people are going to die.

To all these, and more, whom there is no room to mention, we must add other dwellers in Fairyland—forms, in one shape or other, of the great Sun-myths of the ancient Aryan race—such as Arthur and the Knights of the Round Table and Vivien and Merlin, and Queen Morgan le Fay, and Ogier the Dane, and the story of Roland, and the Great Norse poems which tell of Sigurd, and Brynhilt, and Gudrun, and the Niblung folk. And to these, again, there are to be added many of the heroes and heroines who figure in the Thousand-and-one Nights—such, for example, as Aladdin, and Sindbad, and Ali Baba, and the Forty Thieves, and the Enchanted Horse, and the Fairy Peri Banou, with her wonderful tent that would cover an army, and her brother Schaibar, the dwarf, with his beard thirty feet long, and his great bar of iron with which he could sweep down a city. Even yet we have not got to the end of the long list