The Science of Fairy Tales / An Inquiry into Fairy Mythology

There remain the demand for an unbaptized child to kiss, the torture to which the heroes of the two Bohemian sagas submit, the requirement in the Pomeranian tale to place seven brothers on the stone haunted by the seven mice, and lastly the personal violence to the damsel involved in striking her with a birch-rod or a bunch of juniper and in beheadal. In all these we probably have traces of sacrifice. The offering of an innocent child is familiar, if not comprehensible, enough to any one who has the most superficial acquaintance with savage rites. We have already seen that an unbaptized child is regarded as a pagan, and is an object of desire on the part of supernatural beings. The same reasons which induce fairies to steal it would probably render it an acceptable offering to a pagan divinity. No words need be wasted on the torture, or the tale of the mice. But the personal violence, if indeed the remnant of a tradition of sacrifice, involves the slaughter of the divinity herself. This might be thought an insuperable objection; but it is not really so. For, however absurd it may seem to us, it is a very widespread custom to sacrifice to a divinity his living representative or incarnation, whether in animal or human form. It is believed in such cases that the victim's spirit, released by sacrifice, forthwith finds a home in another body. The subject is too vast and complex to be discussed here at length; the reader who desires to follow it out can do so in Mr. Frazer's profoundly interesting work on ?The Golden Bough.? Assuming, however, the custom and belief, as here stated, to be admitted, it will be seen that the underlying thought is precisely that which we want in order to explain this mode of disenchantment. For if, on the one hand, what looks like murder be enjoined in a number of stories for the purpose of disenchanting a bewitched person; and if, on the other hand, the result of solemnly slaughtering a victim be in fact held to be simply the release of the victim's spirit?nay, if it was the prescribed mode of releasing that spirit?to seek a new, sometimes a better, abode in a fresh body, we may surely be satisfied that both these have the same origin. We may then go further, and see in this unspelling incident, performed, as in the Enchanted Princess stories, in this way, at a haunted spot, frequently on a day of special sanctity, one more proof that the princess herself was in the earlier shape of the traditions no other than a goddess.

Finally: the myth of the Enchanted Princess has preserved in many of its variants a detail more archaic than any in that of the Sleeping Hero, and one which is decisive as to the lady's real status. If Frederick were to arise and come forth from his sleeping-place, the Kyffhäuser itself would remain. If Arthur were to awake and quit the Castle Rock, the rock itself wherein he lay would still be there. But the lake or mountain haunted by an enchanted maiden often owes its very existence, if not to her, at least to the spell which holds her enthralled. When she is delivered the place will be changed: the lake will give way to a palace; the earth will open and a buried castle will reascend to the surface; what is now nothing but an old grey boulder will forthwith return to its previous condition of an inhabited and stately building; or what is now a dwelling of men will become desolate. One of the best examples of this is the superstition I have already cited concerning Melusina. When she finishes her needlework she will be disenchanted, but only to die; and the ruins of the town of Luxemburg will be her grave and monument. In other words, the existence of the town is bound up with her enchantment,?that is to say, with her life. In the same way the bespelled damsel of the Urschelberg, near Pfullingen, in Swabia, is called by the very name of the mountain?the Old Urschel. This can only be the survival of a belief in the enchanted lady as the indwelling spirit, the soul, the real life of the spot she haunted: a belief which goes back to a deeper depth of savagery than one that regards her as a local goddess, and out of which the latter would be easily developed.[184]