t captors, has resemblances
to parts of the "Bear's Son" cycle. The second half of the story is a
well-developed member of the "Forgotten Betrothed" cycle, preserving,
in fact, all the characteristic incidents, and also prefacing to this
whole section details that form a transition between it and part 1. I
am unable to point out any European parallels to the story as a whole,
but analogues of both parts are very numerous. As the latter half
constitutes the major portion of our story, we shall consider it first.

The fundamental and characteristic incidents of the "Forgotten
Betrothed" cycle (sometimes called the "True Bride" cycle) are as
follows:--

A The performance by the hero of difficult tasks through the help of
the loved one, who is usually the daughter of a magician.

B The magic flight of the couple, either with transformations of
themselves or with the casting behind them of obstacles to retard
the pursuer.

C The forgetting of the bride by the hero because he breaks a taboo
(the cause of the forgetting is usually a parental kiss, which the
hero should have avoided).

D The re-awakened memory of the hero during his marriage ceremony or
wedding feast with a new bride, either through the conversation of
the true bride with an animal or through the true bride's kiss. In
some forms of the story, the hero's memory is restored on the third
of three nights sold to the heroine by the venial second bride. [62]

E The marriage of the hero and heroine.

Andrew Lang (Custom and Myth, 2d ed., 87-102) traces incidents A and
B as far back as the myth of Jason, the earliest literary reference
to which is in the Iliad (vii, 467; XXIII, 747). But this story does
not contain the last three incidents: clearly they have come from
some other source, and have been joined to the first two,--a natural
process in the development of a folk-tale. The episode of the magic
flight is very widely distributed: Lang mentions Zulu, Gaelic, Norse,
Malagasy, Russian, Italian, and Japanese versions. Of the magic flight
combined with the performance of difficult tasks set by the girl's
father, the stories are no less widely scattered: Greece, Madagascar,
Scotland, Russia, Italy, North America (Algonquins), Finland, Samoa
(p. 94). The only reasonable explanation of these resemblances,
according to Lang, is the theory of transmission; and if Mr. Lang,
the champion of the "anthropological theory," must needs explain in
this rather business-li