Page:Folk-lore - A Quarterly Review. Volume 16, 1905.djvu/480

 422 You will observe that one of the incidents which cause the angel to laugh is absolutely identical with the incident in the legend of Merlin, and as I have already pointed out forms part of the older version of the Solomon Ashmedai cycle. The Rumanian story goes back, as does all Rumanian religious literature, either directly, or indirectly through Slavonic intermediaries, to a Greek source, and from thence it could have reached England at an early period, sufficiently early to form part of the literary repertory of the church or cloister. By means of this religious literature the legends of the East travelled and found a ready home in the West.

But there are still incidents in the life of Merlin which require elucidation. He is forcibly summoned before the king because he is to explain the reason of the falling of the foundations of the new castle. The suggestion of the magicians to sprinkle the foundations with his blood reminds one forcibly of similar devices and legends in the East and in the West. They go back to the practice of human sacrifices which have been practised far and wide and have not yet entirely died out, though in modern times the shadow is immured in the foundation in the belief that the person whose shadow is laid in the foundation of a house is sure to die within the year of the erection, and he would then be the protecting genius of the house. I know this practice as a living one in Rumania, where the gipsies, who are the bricklayers, try to take the measure of the shadow of any person that passes by and build it into the foundation.

More important is the solution of the riddle by Merlin, who orders the builders to dig up the foundations, where they would find two dragons fighting one another, and sure when thus liberated to destroy another and thus remove the cause of the constant falling in of the walls. There is a curious old legend connected with the building of the Temple according to which when they dug for