Ed de Moel

Child Ballads - Additions and Corrections

3. The Fause Knight upon the Road

P. 20 a. Add: C. 'The False Knight,' communicated by Mr. Macmath, of Edinburgh.

For the fool getting the last word of the princess, see, further, Köhler, Germania, XIV, 271; Leskien u. Brugman, Litauische Volkslieder u. Märchen, p. 469, No 33, and Wollner's note, p. 573.

21, note. I must retract the doubly hasty remark that the Shetland belief that witches may be baflled by fliting with them is a modern misunderstanding.

Mr. George Lyman Kittredge has called my attention to Apollonius of Tyana's encounter with an empusa between the Caucasus and the Indus. Knowing what the spectre was, Apollonius began to revile it, and told his attendants to do the same, for that was the resource, in such cases, against an attack. The empusa went off with a shriek. Philostratus's Life of Apollonius, II, 4. Mr. Kittredge referred me later to what is said by Col. Yule (who also cites Philostratus), Marco Polo, I, 183, that the wise, according to Mas'udi, revile ghúls, and the ghúls vanish. Mr. Kittredge also cites Luther's expericnce: how, when he could not be rid of the Devil by the use of holy writ and serious words, "so hätte er ihn oft mit spitzigen Worten und lächerlichen Possen vertrieben; ... quia est superbus spiritus, et non potest ferre contemptum sui." Tischreden, in Auswahl, Berlin, 1877, pp 152-154.

Sprites of the more respectable orders will quit the company of men if scolded: Walter Mapes, De Nugis Curialium, ed. Wright, p. 81, Alpenburg, Deutsche Alpensagen, p. 312. No 330, So Thetis, according to Sophocles, left Peleus when he reviled her: Scholia in Apollonii Argonautica, IV, 816. (Mannhardt, Wald- und Feldkulte, II, 60, 68.)

22. Add version C.

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