Page:The Science of Fairy Tales.djvu/255

 from her mouth and flinging it into the Alzet. No one, however, has yet succeeded in doing this; and meantime when a calamity threatens the town, whose faithful guardian she is, she gives warning by gliding round the Bockfels uttering loud laments.

But in many of the sagas the princess meets her hero in her own proper shape, and then the feat to be performed varies much more. In a Prussian tale she comes out of a deep lake, which occupies the site of a once-mighty castle, at sunset, clothed in black, and accompanied by a black dog. The castle belonged to the young lady's parents, who were wicked, though she herself was pious; and it was destroyed on account of their evil doings. Since that time she has wandered around, seeking some bold and pious man who will follow her into the depths of the lake, and thus remove the curse. This would seem but another form of the tradition of the lake at the foot of the Herthaburg on the isle of Rügen. In another story the lady must be brought an unbaptized child to kiss. In yet another the deliverer is led down through a dark underground passage into a brilliantly lighted room, where sit three black men writing at a table, and is bidden to take one of two swords which lie on the table and strike off the enchanted lady's head. To cut off the head of a bewitched person is an effectual means of destroying the spell. So, in the Gaelic story of the