Page:Folk-lore - A Quarterly Review. Volume 15, 1904.djvu/80

 66 threefold gaming (an incident still found, though in different connection, in the current folktale), and carries her back to fairyland, whither Eochaid pursues them, ultimately recovering her.

A story, not necessarily the Wooing of Etain, but one constructed on similar lines, was, so Professor Kittredge assumes, amalgamated with the Werewolf's Tale in somewhat the same stage of development as we find the latter in, and thus originated the postulated version X. Werewolf's Tale itself must have passed through different stages of development corresponding to altered feelings respecting the subject matter. Originally we must assume that the werewolf was a sympathetic personage, firstly because in folk-story-telling the hero is sympathetic by definition, secondly, because in the culture stage to which we may fairly refer the first shaping of the story the half-animal nature would not carry with it an idea of the repugnant or unhallowed. But such an idea undoubtedly did arise, and is reflected in the vast mass of werwolf stories and conceptions. A stage may thus be postulated in which the wife (unsympathetic originally as being opposed to the hero, but not morally culpable), becomes the sympathetic personage. Still later, sympathy would be shifted back by exciting pity for the hero (originally an object of envy as possessor of a highly desirable power), as one subject to a degrading liability, and by attaching moral blame to the faithless wife. The oldest recorded version of Marie's Bisclaveret belongs to this stage of development.

The fusion of these two story-types, the one concerned with the love-affairs of a fairy damsel ultimately won and lost by mortal and immortal lover, the other, the Werwolf's Tale, dealing with the separation of husband and wife deliberately effected by the latter, offers, it will be seen, no theoretical difficulty. When it took place the Etain type had already in all likelihood suffered considerable change. In the oldest stratum of Irish fairy mistress romances nothing is more notable than the position of the heroine. She woos; she bestows or withdraws her favours with absolute freedom; the mortal lover neither acquires nor claims any rights. But even within the range of Gaelic romance, closely though it clings to ancient convention, slightly as it is affected by non-Gaelic culture, there can be traced a change from this superb, over-moral attitude on the part of the woman to one more consonant with ordinary human conditions. The free self-centred goddess, regally prodigal of her love, jealously guarding her