Page:Grimm's Household Tales, vol.1.djvu/67

 being eaten, sometimes by a step-mother, sometimes by a mother, while in the most civilised version they only run away from a step-mother's ill-treatment. Our first example is from Samojedische Märchen (Castren. p. 164). Here the childless wife intends to devour the daughters of her rival, whom she has slain. The daughters escape, and when they reach the sea, they are carried across not by a golden ram, but by a beaver. The Epirote version of the story is given by Von Hahn (Gr. Mär. i. 65). A man brings home a pigeon for dinner, the cat eats it; the wife, to conceal the loss of the pigeon, cooks one of her own breasts; the husband relishes the food, and proposes to kill his own two children and eat them. Exactly as the ram warned Phrixus, according to Philostephanus, so the dog warns the boy hero of the Epirote märchen, and he and his sister make their escape. The tale then shades off into one of the märchen of escape by magical devices, which are the most widely diffused of all stories. But these incidents recur later in the Jason legend. Turning from the Samoyeds and the Epirotes to Africa, we find the motif (escape of brother and sister) in a Kaffir tale, "Story of the Bird that made Milk." Here the children flee into the desert to avoid the anger of their father, who had "hung them on a tree that projected over a river." The children escape in a magical manner, and intermarry with animals (Theal's Kaffir Folk Lore, p. 36). Finally, among the Kaffirs, we find a combination of the form of the stories as they occur in Grimm (ii. 15). Grimm's version opens thus, "Little brother took his little sister by the hand and said, 'Since our mother died our stepmother beats us every day . . . come, we will go forth into the wide world.'" The Kaffir tale (Demane and Demazana) tells how a brother and sister who were twins and orphans were obliged on account of ill-usage to run