Page:Grimm's household tales, volume 2 (1884).djvu/395

 she is not the merchant's daughter, but has been substituted for her by an enchantress.

In the Leipzig collection it is the seventh story (pp. 113-130); in the Büchlein fur die Jugend, No. 4. For a story from Silesia, see Wolfs Zeitschrift, 1.310. For one from the Tyrol, see Zingerle, p. 391. In Swedish, see Meier, No. 57. The story of The Iron Stove (No. 127) is allied, and so are those given in the notes to it. The Singing Ringing Tree, in the Brunswick Collection, should be mentioned here, and also The Three Beasts, in Musäus. In Swedish there is Graumantel (see further on); in Netherlandish, No. 3; in Wodana; in Hungarian, No. 15; in Gaal. Several stories in the Pentamerone are similar; The Magic Coffer (2.9); Pintosmauto (5.1) and The Golden Root, 5.4. In D'Aulnoy, The Blue Bird (No. 3.); The Ram (No. 10); and the Green Snake (No. 15). Beauty and the Beast, in the 5th Conversation, in Madame de Beaumont's stories, also belongs to this group. Finally, we must point out the story of the Woodcutter's Daughter, taken from an Indian popular saga of the present day, which is given in Somadeva's appendix, 2.191, 211.

These various conceptions of the story always bear the impress of the story of Psyche, so well known from Apuleius. The heart is tried, and everything earthly and evil falls away in recognition of pure love. Our story also agrees with it in this, that light brings down misfortune, and that night, which loosens all bonds, dissolves the spell. The incident of the unhappy girl travelling over the world and begging help from everything in nature, and at last from the stars also, which speak in antique forms and sayings, is beautiful. Their energy and sympathy likewise appear in the story of Eve, in Rudolf’s Weltchronik (Cass. MS. folio 21a). She entreats the sun and moon to tell Adam of her misery when they come to the East, and they do it. Just as the maiden seeks help from the sun, moon, and wind, a man in a Hungarian story, whose wife has been stolen from him, seeks it, first from the sea-king, then from the moon-king, and finally from the star-king (Molbech’s Udvalgte Eventyr, No. 14), and the same is told in a Servian tale, Wuk, No. 10. In connection with this, Rhesa’s Popular Songs of Lithuania should be looked at. The feathers and falling drops of blood remind us of the folk-lore of the feathered pink, one species of which has a dark purple spot in its heart, which people say is a drop of blood which fell from the Redeemer on the cross. Furthermore the feathers are to show the way, and the drops of blood to preserve the remembrance of the bewitched person, and thus we are led to the saga of the drops of blood, over which Parcifal ruminates, and which call back his wife to his memory; see ''Altd. Wälder,'' vol. i. 1. Roses in winter remind us of one of the Kühländchen songs, where three roses grown on one stalk, and blooming between