Ed de Moel

Child Ballads - Additions and Corrections

29. The Boy and the Mantle

P. 269 b. Stones. Add the Magnet, Orpheus de Lapidibus, Leipsic, 1764, Hamberger, p. 318, translated by Erox, De Gemmis, cap. 25; and the Agate, "Albertus Magnus, De Mineralibus, 1. II, sect, ii, c. 7:" cited by Du Méril, Floire et Blanceflor, p. clxvi. G.L.K.

269 b, third paragraph. See the English Flor and Blancheflor, ed. Hausknecht, 1885, p. 189, vv. 715-20.

270 b, the first paragraph. Add: Grimm, Deutsche Mythologie, p. 931, ed. 1876. "Ebenso tragt die in dische Mariatale, so lang ihre Gedanken rein sind, ohne Gefäss das zu Kugeln geballte Wasser:" Kinderund Hausmärchen, III, 2C4, 9, ed. 1856. See Benfey, Orient und Occident, I, 719ff, II, 97. F. Liebrecht. For the Mariatale story (from P. Sonnerat, Voyage aux Indes Orientales, etc.), see 'Paria,' in Goethes lyrische Gedichte, erlautert von H. Düntzer, II, 449 ff, ed. 1875.

The dragon kept by the priests of Lanuvian Juno ate honey-cakes from the hands of pure maids who went down into its cave, but twined round the unchaste and bit them: Aelian, Hist. An., xi, 6, Propertius, iv (v), 8. See Die Jungfernprobe in der Drachenhöhle zu Lanuvium, C. A. Böttiger's Kleine Schriften, I, 178 ff. G.L.K.

Note f. In the English 'Virgilius' it is a brass serpent with the same property: Thorns, A Collection of Early Prose Romances, II, p. 34 of Virgilius, ed. 1827: cited by Sir Walter Scott, 'Sir Tristrem,' p. 432, ed. 1833, apropos of the trick of the shameless Ysonde. G.L.K.

271 a. Aqua potationis domini: see, also, Konrad von Fussesbrunnen, Die Kindheit Jesu, ed. Kochendorffer, Quellen u. Forschungen, XLIII, p. 81 f, vv. 573-88, 617-21, 673 ff. G.L.K.

A stunned white elephant will be resuscitated if touched by the hand of a chaste woman. A king's eighty thousand wives, and subsequently all the women in his capital, touch the elephant without effect. A serving-woman, devoted to her husband, touches the elephant, and it rises in sound health and begins to eat. Katha-sarit-sagara, Book VII, ch. 36, Tawney's translation, p. 329 f: H.H. Wilson's Essays, II, 129f. ('In the 115th Tale of the Gesta Romanorum, we read that two chaste virgins were able to lull to sleep and kill an elephant that no one else could approach." Tawney's note.) C.R. Lanman.

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