Page:The Folk-Lore Journal Volume 3 1885.djvu/211

 Rh Another termination of the flight in which the monster plans deliberate revenge I shall treat more fully hereafter.

Before leaving the type that we have been examining, it may be well just to glance at the mode in which the heroine gets into the evil being's power. In the typical story, as in many of the variants, it is a case of proposal by a stranger, and marriage. Where, as often happens, three or more sisters are taken, the stranger either marries them successively (usually under different disguises), or fetches the younger ones to be companions to the eldest, his wife. In Fitcher's Bird the heroine and her sisters are stolen by a sorcerer who lives in a gloomy wood. Sometimes the maiden is caught in the ogre's garden stealing, or her mother is so caught and gives her daughter (even an unborn daughter) as the price of her own life. Sometimes the maiden's father incurs the vengeance of the monster by cutting down a tree. Sometimes she is bought for money. In one of Grimm's tales already cited three dwarfs mislead the heroine to their cavern: in Asbjörnsen's tale three sisters, successively going out to look for a missing hen, hear a voice in the mountain side, and, approaching, fall through a trapdoor into a troll's subterranean dwelling. Three sisters, in Campbell's story, are caught one after another in their own kailyard by an enchanted grey horse by magical power, and dragged to his dwelling in a hill which opens at the utterance of certain words. Disobedience to parents yields an awful example in one of Miss Busk's Tirolese variants. From Iceland we have a version, the heroine of which is a kind of Cinderella. Her two elder sisters are successively wooed and won by a man who, on the way home, changes into a three-headed giant, and asks his wife whether he shall carry or drag her. In their pride they both choose the former, and are made to sit on one of his heads and thus carried in state to his cave. There, however, their pride has a fall: their husband thrusts them into an underground cellar with their hands tied behind them, and locks them up. The youngest sister, in her