Page:The Science of Fairy Tales.djvu/312

 the lower animals, is ordinarily an insect; but the reason is, as often as not, a prior arrangement with the lady, as in the Russian story of the Water King. The Polish märchen of Prince Unexpected follows this line. In it, the princess warns her lover that she will have a lady-bird over her right eye. When a thousand maidens all alike are produced to poor Hans in a Bohemian tale, he has no difficulty in selecting the right one; for a witch has bidden him "choose her on whom, from the roof of the chamber, a spider descends."

These considerations are sufficient to prove that the incident of the Helpful Beasts, as found in the Swan-maiden group of stories, cannot be attributed to a Buddhist origin.

We have now dealt with an episode of the mythical narrative, necessary, indeed, to its completion, but found only under certain conditions which I have pointed out. We have seen this episode in two distinct forms whose respective sources we have assigned to two distinct stages of culture. The form characteristic of the European märchen is apparently more barbarous in several respects than that yielded by the islanders of the Southern Ocean; but the latter bears testimony to a state of society more archaic than the other. Presumably, therefore, it represents more nearly the primitive form of the story.

We turn next to the central incidents. In the previous chapter I have taken pains to show the unmistakable relation between the different types of the myth, in spite of the omission of the feather-robe, or indeed of any substitute for it. The truth is that the feather-robe is no more than a symbol of the wife's superhuman nature. From the more archaic variants it is absent; but frequently the true form of the lady is held to be that of a member of what we contemptuously call "the brute creation." Men in savagery, as we have