Page:Folk-lore - A Quarterly Review. Volume 9, 1898.djvu/259

Rh has to promise that on his return he will share all he has gained with the knight. Thus richly equipped, Bertuccio pleases the king and obtains his beloved. On the way home the knight again meets him and claims the half of everything. Bertuccio duly divides everything; then the stranger knight claims one-half of the bride as well.

"How divide her?" asks Bertuccio.

Says the knight, "We must cleave her in twain."

"Nay, sooner than that, take the whole of her; I love her far too dearly to consent to that."

Then the stranger knight said: "Brother, take wife, clothes, horse, and treasure; I give you all I might claim. And know that I am the spirit of him who was slain by the robbers, and to whom you gave burial."

This said, he vanished.

It is the selfsame story, if somewhat changed, a good deal rationalised, as has often befallen folktales in their westward wanderings. For example, Grimm's "Master Thief," which might quite well have happened, corresponds to the Greek story of "Beauty and the Dragon," where Beauty has to steal, first, the winged horse of the dragon, next, his bell-hung bed-cover, and lastly, the Dragon himself. And Grimm's "Robber Bridegroom," our "Mr. Fox," to which Shakespeare makes reference in Much Ado about Nothing, meets us in Greece as the story, not of a robber, but of a vampire. But Ey, in his Harzmärchenbuch (Stade, 1862), gives a German version which is more, not less, supernatural than any of the Eastern forms of our story:—

A peasant's son with his small inheritance pays the debts of a dead man, and buries him. There is a princess bewitched by a mountain demon to whom she flies by night. The spirit of the dead man furnishes the peasant's son with a feather-shirt, a rod, and a sword, without, however, any stipulation as to division; and, thus furnished, the hero flies after the princess, flogging her. The demon suggests to the princess what she shall