Page:Folk-lore - A Quarterly Review. Volume 27, 1916.djvu/364

336 the work has some nobler ideals, and is of value as a source of popular tradition.

In Václav Beneš-Třebízský's On the Eve of the Five-petalled Rose of 1884, an elegy on the end of the house of Rosenberg, the tale is used to strengthen the sorrowful feeling evoked by the dying out of a famous family. Evička, the sister of the last Rosenberg, reminds the servants of Krumlov of the White Lady Bertha, whose figure is seen in the castle corridor, and is regarded as the guardian spirit of the family, and so on. His version of the story uses the name Bertha von Rosenberg, following Balbín. Similarly he adorns his story of the end of the Svanbergs, the Rosenbergs' successors, with the White Lady story.

ŻofiaŽofie [sic] Podlipská, The White Lady, a three-act play, Prague, 1887. This is a very considerable rehandling of the usual material, raising the idea of the White Lady to the highest levels of ideality as an instrument of Providence.

A later version, in 1808, by J. Koštálek, as a children's play, makes the White Lady the living Bertha von Rosenberg, and takes features of the story from Sedláček and Pecírek.

2. The oldest literary studies of the tale are of secondary rank and, though set out by the writer, need not appear here, as they rather concern the history of Bohemian literary criticism.

3. The tale is traced through various disguises in borrowed plumes in various collections of popular tales, which need not be set out here.

II. Bohemian popular tradition relating to the White Lady. It was too late set down to show many variants.

1. (a) The White Lady in Nature. She is met with as accompanying a traveller on part of his way, or appearing at a chapel, a bridge, a cross, the moat of a city, etc. A number of local variants of this story, (b) Another class of appearances is connected with wells or springs, out of or into which she comes; here again certain named wells are indicated in the Slany district and elsewhere. Certain versions have a religious twist.

2. The White Lady becomes in certain cases the guardian of a treasure on a hill. This is found in German as well as Bohemian sources. Sometimes she brings out the treasure herself, sometimes merely shows where it is.