78 ASHIEPATTLE: OR HANS SEEKS HIS LUCK 



Nor does this general competition for kingdoms, in 

 which the king's sons have no claim on their father's 

 kingdom, escape the old story-tellers themselves. They 

 find a reason for it, namely, in the fact that kings' sons 

 can themselves go and win princesses and kingdoms. 

 Thus in the Norse tale De syv Folerne, after Ashlad 

 has herded the foals, and so redeemed the princes, 

 and won the princess and half the kingdom, we 

 read : 



"You have got half the kingdom," said the king, 

 " and the other half you shall have on my death ; for 

 my sons can win land and kingdoms for themselves, now 

 they are again princes." 



It will be seen at once that if the king's daughter 

 carried by custom the future kingship, the king had in 

 the gift of his daughter's hand a valuable property to 

 dispose of. By setting a high price upon it, demanding 

 the fulfilment of some difficult task, he could more or 

 less recoup himself for the loss of influence which 

 followed on the appearance of ' the young king,' who 

 not infrequently took half the kingdom. In the tales 

 which bear the greatest marks of antiquity, it is the 

 daughter herself who chooses her husband, or sets the 

 task, or propounds the riddle, sometimes in concert with 

 her mother, but in the later tales we see this power 

 more and more usurped by the existing king a first 

 stage towards a patriarchal ownership of the women 

 with a view to ownership of the property. Thus the 

 task-setting by kings, such a curious feature of the fairy 

 tale, receives its interpretation as a step in the economic 

 evolution of primitive societies. We need no longer 



