Page:Folk-lore - A Quarterly Review. Volume 27, 1916.djvu/371

Rh pointed out the error of connecting the tale of the Orlamünd enemy of children with the tale of the White Lady: she might he a Valkyrie. W. Wundt, in his Völkerpsychologie revives a view of Balbín's. There are certain Bohemian explanations, resting largely on German views already stated or quoted.

Thus Krolmus represents something confused and quite opposed to the school of Mikšíček and Menšík. J. Fejfalk follows Grimm in part. J. I. Hanus takes more names into the equation. So too Dvorský, whose historical study of the question is, however, of value. Erben and Sedláček follow the German majority.

Everything in Bohemian and German traditions points to the White Lady and Bertha being quite separate ideas and essentially different. Certain appearances of Bertha in Bohemian tradition are quoted, and this was taken into the Bohemian cycle very early, and has nothing in common with the other.

The White Lady has a very varied origin, one of the most important sources being the belief in the soul. The idea of enchantment is a natural answer to the question why she appears. Some traces of metempsychosis come in here. The announcement of the future is possible because a spirit knows what is to come. The appearance in enclosed places is the least popular of the elements of the story: it comes from Bayreuth in 1486.

There are several German versions having elements such as a light carried by the White Lady, gifts made by her, etc.

The messenger of fate was introduced to Bohemia from Germany in the sixteenth century, but was ennobled and modified into a protective ancestress of the family. This idea, so modified, went back to Germany and thence elsewhere, chiefly by literary means.

In Year 8, No. 5–6, Salaba adds some notes on the same matter. He says he attributes the Vítkovec story to the Jesuits only, and Wollman vaguely to "noble circles."

He gives three instances of pre-Jesuit stories of the White Lady announcing the future, but all these three instances are from outside Bohemia and far from the Rosenberg territory. Other points also, besides the silence of quite uncritical adherents of Peter Vok and other Rosenbergs, are against the genuineness of these earlier stories. Thus the account of the change of nurses is given without