Page:Folk-lore - A Quarterly Review. Volume 24, 1913.djvu/208

 19- The Romance of J\Ic^lusine.

her on his knees to forgive him. She may forgive him, but the curse is stronger than her love, and with the tenderest words and embraces they part for ever.

Such, in brief, is M. Baudot's analysis of the tale as developed by Jehan d'Arras. We may pass over the heroine's lengthy and didactic farewells to her children, which, as the commentator observes, form a most judicious compendium of political economy and morals. Whatever Jehan d'Arras' indebtedness to Gervase of Tilbury, it is probable that the story in its essentials was current in Lusignan, a survival of ancient pagan myths. How much it owes in the romancer's hands to Celtic tradition from the British Islands, there may be a difference of opinion. The union of a mortal man with a supernatural lady upon conditions which are inevitably broken is a frequent inci- dent in the folklore at least of Whales. Sir John Rhys, in his Celtic Folklore Wels/i and Jilanx, has given a number of these stories. In some of them there is the same curious indecision between aerial and aqueous characteristics of the lady that we meet with in the tale of Melusine. Like Melusine and Pressine, she is usually connected with water. She comes out of a lake or pool, just as those heroines are found at fountains. But, when the taboo is infringed, she sometimes flies away, like Melusine, through the air, like a wood-hen {iar goed), as one of the stories puts it. In all this, however, there is nothing peculiar to Celtic folklore. In the Shetland Islands she is actually a seal, in Sutherland- shire a mermaid. Whether these legends are Celtic in origin may be doubted. They belong more specifically to the swan-maiden cycle, in which, instead of a broken taboo, the catastrophe depends on the recovery by the super- natural wife of her magical garment. Once more possessed of this, the swan-maiden resumes her bird-form, the seal or the mermaid her aquatic nature. In Scandinavian folk- lore the swan-maiden first appears in the Lay of Weyland the Smith ; as a seal she is familiar down to modern times