Note 74.3 — Chapter IV · THE INCIDENT OF THE SUPERNATURAL BIRTH IN MÄRCHEN.
Reading edition
The population of Eastern Pomerania is probably in the main Slavonic. There the people tell of a queen to whom a beggar-woman brought two fishes to be eaten by herself; nobody else was to taste them. The cat, however, stole one; and she and the queen bore a son apiece.74.3 Outside the Slavonic populations, the incident in this form does not seem a favourite in Europe. But we find in Iceland a story of an earl’s wife, to whom three women in blue mantles appear in a dream, and command her to go to a stream at hand, and, laying herself down, to drink of it and try to get into her mouth a certain trout she will see there, when she will at once conceive. These women are doubtless Norns, for they appear again at the birth and pronounce the fate of the daughter who is born to the lady in consequence.75.1