GERTRUDE'S BIRD.

87

"Well,' said Gertrude, I can't give you anything; you must just go without, for all these bannocks are too big.'

"Then our Lord waxed wroth and said, 'Since you loved me so little as to grudge me a morsel of food, you shall have this punishment,-you shall become a bird, and seek your food between bark and bole, and never get a drop to drink save when it rains.'

'He had scarce said the last word before she was turned into a great black woodpecker, or Gertrude's bird, and flew from her kneading-trough right up the chimney; and till this very day you may see her flying about, with her red mutch on her head, and her body all black, because of the soot in the chimney; and so she hacks and taps away at the trees for her food, and whistles when rain is coming, for she is ever athirst, and then she looks for a drop to cool her tongue."

The curse pronounced upon the woodpecker in this story, that it shall "never get a drop to drink save when it rains," accords with the supposed intimate connection between the bird and the clouds, and points, perhaps, to the reason which first suggested that mythic relation. The green

* Dasent, "Popular Tales from the Norse," p. 230.

woodpecker is the best known of its genus in England, and is widely spread on the continent of Europe. Its loud cry, when frequently uttered, is commonly supposed to foretell the approach of rainy weather. Hence one of its English provincial names is Rainbird.

Tales like that of Gertrude's bird are told of the cuckoo, and "They say the owl was a baker's daughter."* The cuckoo was a baker's or miller's man, and that is why his feathers are dusted with meal. He robbed poor people of their dough in hard times, and when the dough swelled by God's blessing in the oven, he drew it out and nipped off a portion of it, crying out each time, "gukuk (look! look!). To punish him, God turned him. into a bird of prey that is everlastingly repeating the same cry.† According to another legend, our Lord passed by a baker's shop, from which there came a pleasant smell of fresh bread, and sent his disciples in to beg for a loaf. The baker refused it, but his wife, who was looking on from a distance with her six daughters, gave it in secret. For this she and her daughters were placed in heaven as the Seven Stars (the Pleiades; English, hen with her chickens), but the baker was turned into a

*

Hamlet, iv. 5.

+ D. M. 641.

CUCKOO. STORK.

89

cuckoo; and so long as his cry is heard in the spring, from St. Tiburt's to St. John's day, the Seven Stars are visible in the heavens.* The cuckoo's connection with storms and tempests is not clearly determined, but the owl's is indisputable. Its cry is believed in England to foretell rain and hail, the latter of which is usually accompanied with lightning, and the practice of nailing it to the barn door, to avert the lightning, is common throughout Europe, and is mentioned by Palladius in his treatise on Agriculture.†

The stork, which in Holland, Denmark, and North Germany is everywhere a welcome guest, is known there universally as a fire-fowl and baby-bringer. There are obvious reasons why these offices should have been assigned to him. He is a bird of passage coming with the storms, departing with them; he is the attendant and messenger of the goddess, with whom he arrives in spring after her winter enchantment or banishment, and his red legs mark him also as a servant of the fire-god. In Hesse a wagon-wheel (emblem of the sun) is laid upon the roof for the stork to build his nest on. The house on which he builds is safe from fire, even though the neighbourhood be burned down. He must not De re rusticâ, I. 35.

* D.M. 691.

90

STORK.

CHILD FOUNTAIN.

be killed, for he is a sacred bird; nor must his nest be disturbed, lest the house be struck with lightning. At Rothenburg an incensed stork, whose young had been flung out of the nest, fetched a firebrand in his bill, threw it into the empty nest, and set the house on fire. When the storks are seen fluttering

*

round the steeple, a fire may be expected to break out somewhere; then they come with water in their bills, and let it fall from the air into the flames.†

Our English nursery fable of the Parsley-bed in which little strangers are found, is doubtless a remnant of a fuller tradition, like that of the woodpecker among the Romans and that of the stork among our continental kinsmen. Adebar or Odebaro, an ancient German name of the stork, means literally child or soul bringer; ‡ and it is not unknown to Hans Andersen's readers that Danish ladies are often obliged to keep their beds, because the stork, which has brought another little brother or sister to the house, has bitten mamma in the leg. There is hardly a German village that has not its kinderbrunnen (child fountain), where the stork takes up the little ones and brings them home.§

* Wolf, Beiträge, ii. 435.

D.M. 638. Kuhn, Herabk. p. 106.

Mannhardt, 193.

§ The Sanscrit word utsa, fountain, is a frequent Vedic appellation of the clouds.

FRAU HOLDA. THE VIRGIN.

91

The fountain is an image of the fire and light bearing cloud, and is named in many places after Frau Holda, or Lady Gracious, the goddess who sits in her radiant hall beneath the waters, and cherishes the unborn babes on her motherly bosom. Other accounts tell of a beautiful sunny garden, in the very heart of a hill or mountain (another image of the clouds), where the little ones play about under the eye of the divine protectress, and sip honey from the blossoms. A woman, whose child had disappeared, made her way into such a subterraneous garden, which she found thronged with babies. In the midst of them sat a lady of noble presence, clad in white, nursing the lost child on her lap. Instead of the heathen goddess, the Mother of God is commonly spoken of in modern times as the Lady of the Fountain. She has her nursery, for instance, in the Cunibert's Fountain in Cologne; and the Queckbrunnen * in Dresden, out of which "the clapperstork fetches the Dresden children," is sacred to her. Its waters, through our Lady's grace, make childless women fruitful, and a chapel was built over them in 1514, repaired in 1745, and enlarged in 1783. In place of a weather vane the chapel is surmounted by the figure of a stork, holding a

* That is, quick or 'live fountain.