Page:The Folk-Lore Journal Volume 3 1885.djvu/245

 Rh to another version) who has had a quarrel with a miller and desires to avenge himself upon his daughters, induces a miller to let him have his twelve daughters one after the other. When at last he gets the twelfth he takes her into the forest and sets himself down under a very high fir to twist a willow-rope, compelling her the while to relieve him of those "familiar beasts to man" doubtless only too well known to the peasants who tell the story. She feels a drop of blood fall from the tree upon her hand, and, looking up, she sees her eleven sisters hanging from the branches. She screams with horror, and the villain bids her say her prayers and prepare for death. She screams thrice—to Jesus, to the Virgin, and to her brother, when a huntsman, who turns out to be her brother, comes up with countless dogs, seizes the robber, sets free his sister, and hands the robber over to the executioner. In this narrative it does not need much imagination to see a half-developed version of Bluebeard,—such an one as might be current among a people less used to houses than to the open forest. How or why the evolution should have stopped and the story should have been handed down to us in this form, I confess I do not know; but we have already seen that the Swabians possess other variants, and the evolutionary tendency is, among folk-tales as among other organic products, toward infinite diversity. Let me go a step further and ask whether the Karen story of the man possessed with a Na or Evil spirit, is not the same tale in even a more primitive form. This man, when the younger of his two daughters follows him one day to the fields, is seized at the foot of a tree by an evil spirit, and under its bewitching power he devours her. He then returns home, and pretending that his younger daughter is unhappy alone he gets his wife to send the elder one to her. On arriving at the tree he eats her also. On the same pretence he fetches his wife and leaves her beneath the tree, while he goes to seek an impaling stick. Meantime a lizard in the tree warns the woman that her husband will eat her, and points out to her her children's skulls in confirmation of his statement. When the husband returns he cannot find her; for the friendly lizard has drawn her up by his tail to the top of the tree; and for want of better food to