M. Henri Gelin tells a good story of a witch who transformed herself into a dog.[68]
- Date of account
- Published 1915
- Source
- Human Animals
- Reference
- Human Animals · selected passage 171
- Rights
- public_domain
- Language
- English
- Record updated
- 2026-08-24
Record summary
ce of the Mer-king, her father, but when she reaches years of discretion she visits the earth and falls in love with a handsome prince, forsaking her home and family and giving away her beautiful voice for love of him
Published source text
Read the available text below. Archive transcriptions may contain OCR errors; later context is labelled separately. A recorded claim is not a finding that it happened.
Source passage
Source text · mention onlyce of the Mer-king, her father, but when she reaches years of discretion she visits the earth and falls in love with a handsome prince, forsaking her home and family and giving away her beautiful voice for love of him. But she does more even than this, for she has to appeal to a witch to transform her into a maiden like the others who walk on land, and the process is a terribly painful one. The witch prepares a drink she has to take with her on her journey to the unknown country, and she is told that she must sit down on the shore and swallow the draught, and that then her tail will fall and shrink up "to the things which men call legs." When she walks or dances the pain will be as though she were walking on the sharp edge of swords or the edges of ploughshares. But she braves all these terrors and dances more gracefully than ever any earth-maiden could do, hoping that her prince will marry her and so give her the right to an immortal soul. Then the real tragedy occurs, for the prince loves her only as a beautiful child, and he marries a princess of his own kind, so that the mermaid's sacrifice seems to be thrown away.
Historical context
Contextual commentary · mention onlyThis material belongs to a folklore tradition. Story type, collector, community, transmission and literary editing matter when comparing it with other sources.
Modern context
Contextual commentary · mention onlyLattice compares motifs and reported features without assuming that a traditional being is a biological species or that similar stories document one external cause.
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