time immemorial have passed for the most skilful witches and wizards
in the world, can at will assume the shape of bears; and it is a
common thing to say of one of those beasts, when he gets unusually
savage and daring, 'that can be no Christian bear'. On such a bear,
in the parish of Ofoeden, after he had worried to death more than
sixty horses and six men, it is said that a girdle of bearskin, the
infallible mark of a man thus transformed, was found when he was at
last tracked and slain. The tale called 'Farmer Weathersky', No. xli
in this collection, shows that the belief of these spontaneous
transformations still exists in popular tradition, where it is easy
to see that Farmer Weathersky is only one of the ancient gods
degraded into a demon's shape. His sudden departure through the air,
horse, sledge, and lad, and all, and his answer 'I'm at home, alike
north, and south, and east, and west'; his name itself, and his
distant abode, surrounded with the corpses of the slain, sufficiently
betray the divinity in disguise. His transformation, too, into a hawk
answers exactly to that of Odin when he flew away from the Frost
Giant in the shape of that bird. But in these tales such
transformations are for the most part passive; they occur not at the
will of the person transformed, but through sorcery practised on them
by some one else. Thus the White Bear in the beautiful story of 'East
o' the Sun and West o' the Moon', No. iv, is a Prince transformed by
his stepmother, just as it is the stepmother who plays the same part
in the romance of William and the Were-wolf. So the horse in 'the
Widow's Son', No. xliv, is a Prince over whom a king has cast that
shape. [27] So also in 'Lord Peter', No. xlii, which is the full
story of what we have only hitherto known in part as 'Puss in Boots',
the cat is a princess bewitched by the Troll who had robbed her of
her lands; so also in 'The Seven Foals', No. xliii, and 'The Twelve
Wild Ducks', No. viii, the Foals and the Ducks are Princes over whom