United States or Dominica ? Vote for the TOP Country of the Week !
There I stood though I knew your board was covered, and that you were all impatient there I stood like " This promise, after many years, was broken, and Melusina, half serpent, half woman, was discovered swimming in a bath. For this breach of faith on the part of her husband, Melusina was compelled to leave her home.
In the tales just cited from Walter Map we have two important forms of the taboo, and in the legend of Melusina herself we have a third. The latter is an example of the ordinary objection on the part of supernatural beings to be seen otherwise than just how and when they please, which we have dealt with in a previous chapter; and little need be added to what I have already said on the subject.
How you writhe, how you coil in and out, sweet adder, with supple and spotted skin! Thy cousin the serpent has taught thee to coil about the tree of life holding between thy lips the apple of temptation. Oh! Melusina! Melusina! The hearts of men are thine. You know it well, enchantress, with your soft languor that seems to suspect nothing!
The other type may be named after Melusina, the famous Countess of Lusignan.
Melusina, who was years afterwards to be created Duchess of Kendal, had not yet attained to that completeness of lank, bony hideousness that was later to distinguish her in England. But even in youth she could boast of little attraction. Prince George, however, was easily attracted.
It is allied not so much to the stories of Melusina and the Lady of the Van Pool as to stories like that of the Croatian wolf-maiden. According to German and Slavonic belief the nightmare is a human being frequently one whose love has been slighted, and who in this shape is enabled to approach the beloved object.
In the later sagas, such as those of Melusina and the Lady of the Van Pool, it is again absent; though relics of the change of form frequently remain. Capture of the Swan-maiden proper is effected by theft of her robe: in other types either by main force, or more frequently with her consent, more or less willingly given, or by her own initiative.
These sagas bring us back to that of Melusina, who disappears, it will be recollected, not when the count, her husband, breaks the taboo, but when, by calling her a serpent, he betrays his guilty knowledge. A name, indeed, is the cause of offence and disappearance in many other of these stories.
"The Eulenspiegel," "The Four Sons of Haimon," "The Emperor Octavian," "The Fair Melusina," "The Beautiful Magelone," "Fortunatus," with the whole race down to "The Wandering Jew," were all at our service, as often as we preferred the relish of these works to the taste of sweet things.
If the mermaid form be of genuine antiquity, about which I confess to a lurking suspicion, it is another bond with the Scottish stories, with Melusina and with Derceto. We have now considered the principal points of the myth. The feather-robe, or skin, we found absent from all its more archaic examples.
Word Of The Day