The Science of Fairy Tales / An Inquiry into Fairy Mythology

Fire, however, was not the only element efficacious for turning to flight these troublesome aliens. Water's antagonism to witches is notorious; and ample use was made of it in the old witch trials. It is equally obnoxious to fairies and their congeners. In a Welsh story from Radnorshire, when the mother has been by the egg-shell device convinced of the exchange of her own twin children, she takes the goblin twins and flings them into Llyn Ebyr; but their true kinsmen clad in blue trousers (their usual garb) save them, and the mother receives her own again. In other tales she drops the twins into the river; but in one case the witch who has been credited with the change bathes the child at a mountain spout, or pistyll, and exacts a promise from the mother to duck him in cold water every morning for three months. It is not very surprising to learn that ?at the end of that time there was no finer infant in the Cwm.?[94]

There is an oft-quoted passage in Luther's ?Table Talk,? in which he relates that he told the Prince of Anhalt that if he were prince he would venture homicidium upon a certain changeling with which he had been brought into contact, and throw it into the river Moldaw. The great Reformer was only on a level with his countrymen in their superstitions in reference to changelings, or Killcrops, as they were then called. I have already quoted his opinion of them as devils; and the test of their true nature, which he seems to have thought infallible, was their inordinate appetite; nor did he attach any value to baptism as a means of exorcism. One excellent tale he tells on the subject concerns a peasant who lived near Halberstadt, in Saxony. This good man, in accordance with advice, was taking the child to Halberstadt to be rocked at the shrine of the Virgin Mary, when in crossing a river another devil that was below in the river called out ?Killcrop! Killcrop!? Then, says Luther, the child in the basket, that had never before spoken one word, answered ?Ho, ho!? The devil in the water asked, ?Whither art thou going?? and the child replied, ?I am going to Halberstadt to our Loving Mother, to be rocked.? In his fright the man threw the basket containing the child over the bridge into the water, whereupon the two devils flew away together and cried ?Ho, ho, ha!? tumbling themselves one over another, and so vanished.[95] This may be taken as a type of many a story current in North Germany and the neighbouring Slavonic lands. It is not, however, unknown in this country. Mr. Hunt has versified a Cornish tale in which the mother took her brat to the chapel well to plunge it at dawn and pass it round slowly three times against the sun, as she had been advised to do on the first three Wednesdays in the month of May. Reaching the top of the hill on one of these occasions, she heard a shrill voice in her ear: ?Tredrill, Tredrill! thy wife and children greet thee well.? The little one of course replied, much to her astonishment, repudiating all concern for his wife and children, and intimating his enjoyment of the life he was leading, and the spell that was being wrought in his behalf. In the end she got rid of him by the homely process of beating and leaving him on the ground near the old church stile. A Sutherlandshire tradition tells of a child less than a year old who suddenly addressed his mother in verse as he was being carried through a wild glen. Translated, the youth's impromptu lines run thus:?

At that moment his remarks were interrupted by the terrified woman throwing him down in the plaid which wrapt him, and scampering home, where to her joy she found her true babe smiling in the cradle.[96]