bidden door, and finds three swan-maids bathing in a blue pool. Their clothes are contained in satchels on its margin, and when he has taken the satchel of the youngest he must not look behind until he has reached home. This done, he finds the maiden there and persuades her to marry him. Mikáilo Ivanovich, the hero of a popular Russian ballad, wanders by the sea, and, gazing out upon a quiet bay, beholds a white swan floating there. He draws his bow to shoot her, but she prays him to desist; and rising over the blue sea upon her white wings, she turns into a beautiful maiden. Surprised with love, he offers to kiss her; but she reveals herself as a heathen princess and demands first to be baptized, and then she will wed him. In a Hessian story a forester sees a fair swan floating on a lonely lake. He is about to shoot it when it warns him to desist, or it will cost him his life. Immediately the swan was transformed into a maiden, who told him she was bewitched, but could be freed if he would say a Paternoster for her every Sunday for a twelvemonth, and meantime keep silence concerning his adventure. The test proved too hard, and he lost her.[1]
The swan, however, by no means monopolizes the honour of concealing the heroine's form. In a Finnish tale from Œsterbotten, a dead father appears in dreams to his three sons, commanding them to watch singly by night the geese on the sea-strand. The two elder are so
- ↑ Thorpe, vol. ii. p. 69, quoting Afzelius; Haltrich, p. 15; Hapgood, p. 214; Meier, "Volksmärchen," p. 39; Baring-Gould, p. 575. No authority is given by Mr. Baring-Gould, and I have been unable to trace the Hessian tale; but I rely on his correctness. He also cites an incoherent Swan-maiden tale from Castrén, of which he manages to make more sense than I can (Castrén, "Altaischen Völker," p. 172). In an Irish tale Oengus, the son of the Dagda, falls in love, through a dream, with Caer ib Ormaith, who is one year in the form of a swan and the next in human shape. After union with her he seems to have undergone the same alternation of form (Revue Celtique, vol. iii. p. 342, from a MS. in the British Museum).
