Page:Folk-lore - A Quarterly Review. Volume 10, 1899.djvu/468

 428 The Folklore in the Legends of the Panjah.

natural and well-founded suspicion that such co-operation did not exist. Of this there is universal folktale evidence, and it gives occasion to resort to ordeals, both practical and supernatural, more often than anything else — except perhaps the cruel " wisdom " of the witch-finder — by fire, by dice, by water, by impossible tasks and conditions. However, it being on occasion most important to prove the virtue in a hero, ordeals of the same kind are resorted to in tales for that purpose also, and not only has the hero to prove that he is a man of parts, but the saint, too, has to show the peculiar virtue in him by giving a " sign," usually in the form of a miracle. Indeed, many miracles are merely forms of ordeals.

The extravagant extension of any idea for the purposes of story-telling, may be looked for in all the literary pro- ductions of the folk, and in the Legends, by way of empha- sising the grave importance of female chastity, the famous heroine, Hir, before what we, but not the natives, would call her fall, is in one place said to feel polluted, simply because the hero occupied her bed in her absence.

The value to the early intelligence of ordeals for the dis- covery of virtue in mankind has led to their wide employ- ment in folktales, for the intelligible and important purpose of proving the long-lost hero or heroine — for testing claimants, in fact. Tests, natural and supernatural, for their identification are ubiquitous in all folk-stories, and equally so in the Legends, leading in many instances almost imperceptibly into the region of prophecy and its fulfil- ment. Almost the whole stock of folk-ideas is pressed into the service of this most prominent necessity of the progress of a story. Heroes and heroines are identified by marks, personal characteristics, and properties, surviving still as "the signs of royalty," both possible and impossible, and by definite ordeals, such as the answering of riddles and the performance of impossible tasks ; and, further, by resort to such purely mythological ideas as a correct