Page:Folk-lore - A Quarterly Review. Volume 10, 1899.djvu/464

424 to the husband, the husband's sister, and the nurse or duenna.

To the category of malevolent heroines belong the stepmothers, who play a prominent and peculiar part in Indian folktales, due to the polygamy practised by the rulers, the rich and the great. They are nearly always the malignant co-wives with the hero's mother, interfering in his life and story in two main ways—i.e. they either get him into trouble by acting after the manner of Potiphar's Wife, or they seek to ruin him out of jealousy of his mother. From the latter cause the heroine is also frequently made to suffer at the hands of one or more of her stepmothers. The methods of the stepmother of arriving at her ends are, however, generally human, and the women held to be endowed with malevolent supernatural powers are the wise-women, witches, ogresses, and nâgnîs or serpent-women.

So far as the legendary lore is concerned, we may treat witch and wise-woman as synonymous terms for the same class of wicked woman. Both invariably play the same part in a tale and have the same characteristics. They are the marplots, the malignant fiends of the story; and their natural occupation is to place the heroine in the power of her enemies—of which, assistance to the hero to get at the heroine in irregular manner is but a variant. They have disgusting and terrible attributes. They are cannibals, and take out the liver and eat it. They have second sight, and are suspected of knowing things that are hidden. But they are not necessarily ugly or uncomely: often, indeed, they are the reverse. In order to attain their ends they are endowed with the power of metamorphosis and miracle-working—"setting water on fire " being in one instance claimed in the Legends as a difficult feat, which no doubt it is.

The ogress is in every essential merely a female counterpart of the ogre, with the same attributes, the same