72 ASHIEPATTLE: OR HANS SEEKS HIS LUCK 



surroundings, and not features of the life of kings in a 

 long past age, it is pertinent to ask why the peasant 

 introduced so little else of the life of his own day. 

 Emperors and kings, Mother Church, monks and high 

 ecclesiastics, knights and lawyers, were all familiar, and 

 too familiar, to the mediaeval peasant, and quite as well 

 calculated to impress his imagination. Yet how slight is 

 the trace we find of them in genuine Mdrchen ! Why 

 should the peasant have left out these familiar things 

 and retained such unfamiliar features of the Mdrchen as 

 tiny kingdoms, through several of which a day's journey 

 would carry one, 1 and such a strange law of inheritance * 

 as that of the matriarchate ? There is little solution to 

 be found for such problems, if we do not grant that the 

 peasant simplicity of Mdrchen kings is as much an 

 original characteristic of the civilisation to which they 

 belong as the matriarchal law of descent itself. 



To appreciate better the position of women in these 

 little kingdoms, let us look a little more closely at some 

 of the queens and some of the kings' daughters. We 

 have already noted the position of influence taken by 

 the witch, and pointed out how witchcraft is frequently 

 associated with the women of the royal household, and 

 its secrets handed down from mother to daughter.' 2 



1 "Towards evening he came to another king's dwelling," is as frequent in 

 Scandinavian as German tales. Cf. Rige Per Kraemmer with Das Wasser des 

 Lebens. Or, " When he had gone a good hour he came to a king's house " ; cf. 

 GrimsborTcen. We find precisely the same profusion of kings in the Lapp tales 

 of The Luck-Bird and The Humane Man and the Angel. 



2 It is a general rule that the man, as in De leiden Kunigeskinner or in 

 Bruderchen und Schwesterchen, is no adept at magic, he must be aided by the 

 woman. Only very rarely, as in Pitchers Vogel or Das singende springende 

 Loweneckerchen, do we find a wizard. The dwarfs are the only males with a 

 recognised power of working magic. 



