Page:The Folk-Lore Journal Volume 3 1885.djvu/208

 200 conclusion is somewhat similar to Fitcher's Bird, but without the avenging kinsmen. One mentioned in Grimm's notes gives the captors as three dwarfs; and there the heroine, when she has sent them home with her sisters, dresses up a clout in her clothes, disguises herself by rolling in blood and feathers, and when the dwarfs find out the trick flies home before them, but slamming the door behind her cuts off her heel. In one of Arnason's Icelandic legends, cited before, the heroine escapes disguised with soot and ashes and riding on a poker witch-fashion. She meets the giant, her captor, and his friends, coming to the wedding feast and holds a dialogue with them, but they fail to recognise her. Have we here a relic of an earlier form of the Fitcher's Bird-story, in which the heroine may have been changed into a bird in order to escape? The doves in the two Tirolese tales referred to above point perhaps to this. It is obvious to remark that the story doubtless originated long before the art of writing was invented. Nor can we fail to be reminded of the flight of Odin in eagle guise from Suptung's hall, and of that of Loki in hawk-plumage with Idwyn from the giant Thiazzi. These incidents of course do not belong to the myth we are now considering; but they show the idea of the transformation to have been familiar in a certain stage of civilisation. The conjecture receives confirmation from a North American Indian story detailed later on, where the heroine actually becomes a sheldrake duck.

This mode of escape is, however, an unusual one. The heroine is generally carried home by the ogre in the same way as her sisters, a doll in most cases being made up and placed in her bed to deceive him when he fetches the chest that really contains her. In this way the Devil is deceived in a Mantuan story given by Visentini, and in a Venetian story given by Bernoni. The heroine in Cuelho's Portuguese tale cited above persuades the Moor to take three successive barrels of sugar to her father, which really inclose her two sisters and herself; and she dresses up a straw figure with her own clothes and places it on the watch-tower, thus deceiving the Moor, who believes it to be herself. So in Fitcher's Bird and the variant