Page:The Folk-Lore Journal Volume 3 1885.djvu/244

 236 and float away unnoticed on the stream. Frightened, she cries out. At the same moment the palace trembles, the river and the washer-women disappear. The youth awaking reveals himself as the giant who has been enchanted. He tells her that her prudence would have released him from the spell the very next day, and they would have been happy, but that her cry has undone him, and compelled him either to kill her or to return to his enchantment—to be released God knows when. He refuses to slay her. He takes her to the well, joins the pieces of the dead bodies together, and, anointing them with some unguent, restores them to life. Taking them all to the surface of the earth, he disappears, and the heroine, often though she seeks, is never able to meet with the unselfish giant again.

I have already referred to the legends of Ossian and Olger the Dane, which should perhaps have found their place more fitly here. A Bohemian story relates that the hero, carried off to Hell, is condemned by Lucifer to punishment, whence he is only freed at the intercession of Lucifer's daughter, whom instead he is compelled to marry. His new father-in-law gives the young couple a palace, but forbids the hero to touch a certain tree in the garden. The hero learns from his wife that on the top of that tree is a golden apple which one has only to throw behind him and wish, to be at once in any place he may desire. He accordingly plucks it, and thus escapes to his home. There seems to be an echo in this of the story in the Hitopadesa, but how strangely, grotesquely mingled with recollections of the Garden of Eden!

Can we, before quitting the Forbidden Chamber, find any clue to its origin? Can we trace the growth of the myth through any of its earlier stages? May we catch glimpses of its development from rudimentary forms? With very great diffidence I venture to suggest that there are a few tales scattered up and down the folk-lore of widely-severed countries that seem to exhibit the traces we are seeking. Take, for example, the Swabian tale of The Robber and the Miller's twelve Daughters. Here a robber and magician, who requires the blood of twelve maidens for his witchcraft, or (according