Page:Folk-lore - A Quarterly Review. Volume 10, 1899.djvu/431

Rh forms of miraculous conception or impregnation, and that his mother experiences a miraculous or at least a remarkable term of pregnancy. He is a substituted child, in one instance, by an accident which curiously brings out an allusion to an old custom of registering princely births, and in another by his own act, as a mode of magnanimous self-sacrifice. Now, substitution of children in folktales is usually an act of malice, and its attribution to a mere chance occurrence is, so far as I know, a novel feature. He is a child of predestination, fated in one case to slay the ogre who is to devour his hostess's son, the ogre being aware of the predestination. In such case he would appear to be a variant of the avenging hero, pre-ordained to set right what is wrong in this world, a belief common apparently to the whole world of religious notion. As regards this last idea, the form it usually assumes in this collection is the common one of predestination to kill his own parents, who try as usual to avert their fate by imprisoning their uncanny offspring in a pit, necessarily to no purpose. He is the victim of calumny everywhere, the stock cause being jealousy or ill-will begotten of unrequited love. Versions of Potiphar's Wife are common in Indian and all Oriental folklore. He of course assists the grateful animal to his own subsequent advantage, and obtains access to the heroine by disguising himself as her husband with success. He is endowed with extraordinary and impossible strength or skill. His identification is almost always due to miraculous intervention of some sort; and we have more than one instance of the corollary to that idea in the signs of the coming hero with which he has to comply, a notion not far removed from that of fulfilment of prophecy. The "signs" are in themselves, however, as might be expected, childish and not very dignified.

The hero has companions of the conventional sorts, human beings, beasts, birds, and insects, who talk to him and assist him in his difficulties. His human companions, however,