Note 114.1 — Chapter XIX · THE MEDUSA-WITCH IN MÄRCHEN.

Belief of a more or less serious character in the power of the witch’s hair is one for which readers who have followed the arguments and illustrations of previous chapters will not have been wholly unprepared. If a belief not very often exhibited in sagas, it is yet, as we might anticipate, not wholly absent. The Goodwife of Laggan, a Highland witch, one day showed herself in the form of a shivering, weather-beaten cat to a hunter, who was warming himself during a storm in his hunting-hut, in the forest of Gaick in Badenoch. His hounds were stretched by his side, his only company. As the cat entered they bristled up and rose to attack her. There is no record that the hunter was astonished when the terror-stricken cat addressed him with a human voice and the rhetoric of a century ago: “Great hunter of the hills, I claim your protection. I know your hatred to my craft, and perhaps it is just. Still spare, oh spare a poor jaded wretch, who thus flies to you for protection from the cruelty and oppression of her sisterhood!” On the contrary, he pacified his dogs, and invited her to come forward to the fire and warm herself. “Nay,” she replied, if we are to believe the grandiloquent reporter of the interview, “in the first place you will please bind with this long hair those two furious hounds of yours, for I am afraid they will tear my poor hams to pieces. I pray you, therefore, my dear sir, that you would have the goodness to bind them together by the necks with this long hair.” Here the hunter smelt mischief; so, instead of binding his dogs, he threw the hair across a beam of wood which connected the couple of the bothy. Supposing the dogs bound, the cat then drew near to the fire and sat down to dry herself. In a few minutes she began to grow. “A bad death to you, you nasty beast,” exclaimed the hunter jocosely, “you are getting very large.” “Ay, ay,” answered the cat, “as my hairs imbibe the heat they naturally expand.” But she grew bigger and bigger, until in the twinkling of an eye, she transformed herself into her proper likeness of the Goodwife of Laggan, and thus addressed the man: “Hunter of the hills, your hour of reckoning is arrived. Behold me before you, the avowed champion of my devoted sisterhood, of whom Macgillichallum of Razay and you were always the most relentless of enemies. But Razay is no more. His last breath is fled. He lies a lifeless corpse on the bottom of the main; and now, Hunter of the hills, it is your turn.” With these words the witch made a terrific spring at the hunter; and the dogs in their turn leaped up at her. A tremendous conflict ensued. “Fasten, hair, fasten,” she cried repeatedly, thinking the dogs were bound by it. The hair, obediently coiling round the beam, fastened so effectually that at last it snapt the timber in twain. Finding herself overmatched, she tried to flee. But the hounds had fixed themselves in her breasts; nor did they loose their hold as she trailed them after her, until she had all-to broken every tooth in their heads. Then changing herself into a raven she flew away over the mountains, while the bleeding dogs crept back to their master’s feet to die. When the hunter returned to his home, the Goodwife of Laggan was found sick unto death. I spare my readers the edifying scene wherein she most properly acknowledged her crimes in the presence of the hunter and all her neighbours, before breathing her last. It is written by Mr. Stewart in the purest Johnsonese he could command, together with the further narrative of the apparition which announced that the Evil One had finally seized her soul before it had time to reach the protection of the sacred precincts of the churchyard of Dalarossie.114.1