he obtained power to become a bird. He then established himself in the city, met the princess with the result that they fell in love, and flew to her chamber as a bird. He obtained from her not only his desire but an ornament which he gave to the strange knight, who had again joined him. Later he overcame this knight in the tourney, but the latter was mistaken for himself. Again he flew to the princess, who gave him a crown, and again, after giving it to the stranger, he overcame him in a fight. The princess now gave him a helmet, which he kept; and he was proclaimed victor of the jousting. Once more he flew to the princess, and obtained from her an ornament for his helmet, made by herself. Thus he won her as wife.
In Harz II. our primary motive is far less obscure than in the version just summarized. A youth pays his all, thirty-eight dollars, to free a dead man from indebtedness. He goes his way, and meets a young fellow, who accompanies him. They fall in with a man bearing two trees, a man with a hat on one side, a man with a wooden leg, and a man with a blind eye. The six go together to a city, where the princess can be won only by performing feats, with the penalty of death attached to failure. The companions aid the hero by bringing water from a distant spring and by keeping a fiery furnace habitable, so that he wins the princess.
These nine variants are, it will be seen, related in very different degrees to The Grateful Dead. What a debased type of the märchen they represent is shown by the fact that in no less than five[1] the burial of the corpse, which is the most fundamental trait of the theme, has been lost. Yet for two reasons it is clear that they are really scions of the stock. In the first place, wherever the burial has been cut away, other elements of
- ↑ Hungarian I., Rumanian II., Straparola II., Sicilian, and Treu Heinrich.
