of sexual rival as the stepmother. Both play a quite analogous rôle.
Similarly with the already referred to tales ("Oda," "The Lark," "The Prince Transformed into a Dog"), in the variant "The Black Dog" ("The Black Dog of the Prince," Rittershaus, p. 25) the youngest daughter Ingibjörg wishes for a golden apple. The father gets lost on the way home in mist in the forest (enchanted place), comes to a beautiful garden, and finds, after he has let himself be lodged in the castle by invisible beings, golden apples upon a wonderful tree. When he has picked the most beautiful one and is about to leave the castle, a great, black dog blocks the way and makes the familiar demand.
Ingibjörg is then taken away in a splendid carriage by the dog. When she goes to bed in the enchanted castle the dog comes to her, and as he lies by her in bed he has become a man.
In two Norwegian fairy tales (cited by Rittershaus, p. 27) the enchanted prince is a polar bear.
Benfey communicates in an extract from the Somadevas collection a story where the daughter of a woodsman is married by a snake king ("Benfey kleine Schriften," 2 Bd., Berlin, 1892, I, p. 255–6; cited by Rittershaus). Rittershaus, p. 28, quotes in the same list one Reporco (Gonzenbach, "Sicilian. Märchen," Leipzig, 1870, 2 Bd., I., 42, p. 285 ff.).
In the stories of this group the bride forfeits the love, and the disenchantment of the bridegroom because she wishes to look at him at night and see when he sleeps with her as a man and awakes him by a hot drop from her candle or something similar. After many difficulties she attains a reunion and the delivery of her mate from witches, while under similar circumstances, Psyche[1] loses Amor and only again attains her beloved after great trouble. Venus plays the rôle of a sorceress. The many tasks to be fulfilled correspond to those which must often be carried out in dreams and the wish-deliria of the mentally disturbed. To many psychotics, for example, the confinement in an asylum itself and the work accomplished therein appear as one of the tasks, which they must fulfill, in order to attain the object of their desires.
- ↑ Apuleius, "Amor and Psyche." In English in Open Court Publications. Bolin's Library for Apuleius' Works.
