The Science of Fairy Tales / An Inquiry into Fairy Mythology

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 Widow and her Daughters, the heroine decapitates the horse-ogre, who thereupon returns to his true form as a king's son, and marries her. A large number of parallel instances might easily be given; but they would lead us too far afield. The lady of the Princess Hill, near Warin, in Mecklenburg, has to be held fast from midnight until one o'clock in spite of all frightful apparitions of snakes, dragons, and toads which crowd around and threaten the adventurer. In the same way Peleus, desiring to secure Thetis, had to hold her fast through her various magical changes until she found resistance useless, and returned to her true form. In a modern Cretan tale the hero, by the advice of an old woman, seizes at night a Nereid by the hair and holds her until the cock crows, in spite of her changes successively into a dog, a snake, a camel, and fire. The process of disenchanting Tam Lin, in the ballad of that name, was for his lady-love to take him in her arms and hold him, notwithstanding his transformation into a snake, a bear, a lion, a red-hot iron, and lastly into a ?burning gleed,? when he was to be immediately flung into a well.[176]