Note 70 — Siegfried

The motive of calumniation of the wife by a rejected suitor, in combination with the exposure and nursing by an animal (doe), forms the nucleus of the story of Genovefa and her son Schmerzenreich, as told, for example, by the Grimm brothers, in their German Sagas, II, Berlin, 1818, pp. 280 et seq. Here, again, the faithless calumniator proposes to drown the countess with her child in the water. For literary and historical orientation, compare L. Zacher, Die Historic von der Pfalzgräfin Genovefa, Koenigsberg, 1860, and B. Seuffert, Die Legende von der Pfalzgräfin Genovefa, Würzburg, 1877. Similar sagas of wives suspected of infidelity and punished by exposure are discussed in the XI chapter of my investigation of “Das Inzestmotiv in Dichtung und Sage” (The Incest Motive in Fiction and Legends).