that fate has come by the power of a witch or a Troll, to whom an
unwary promise had been given. Thoroughly mythic is the trait in 'The
Twelve Wild Ducks', where the youngest brother reappears with a wild
duck's wing instead of his left arm, because his sister had no time
to finish that portion of the shirt, upon the completion of which his
retransformation depended.

But we should ill understand the spirit of the Norsemen, if we
supposed that these transformations into beasts were all that the
national heart has to tell of beasts and their doings, or that, when
they appear, they do so merely as men-beasts, without any power or
virtue of their own. From the earliest times, side by side with those
productions of the human mind which speak of the dealings of men with
men, there has grown up a stock of traditions about animals and their
relations with one another, which forms a true Beast Epic, and is
full of the liveliest traits of nature. Here, too, it was reserved
for Grimm to restore these traditions to their true place in the
history of the human mind, and show that the poetry which treats of
them is neither satirical nor didactic, though it may contain touches
of both these artificial kinds of composition, but, on the contrary,
purely and intensely natural. It is Epic, in short, springing out of
that deep love of nature and close observation of the habits of
animals which is only possible in an early and simple stage of
society. It used to be the fashion, when these Beast traditions were
noticed, to point to Aesop as their original, but Grimm has
sufficiently proved [Reinhart Fuchs, Introduction] that what we see
in Aesop is only the remains of a great world-old cycle of such
traditions which had already, in Aesop's day, been subjected by the
Greek mind to that critical process which a late state of society
brings to bear on popular traditions; that they were then already