He desires
only "an ould coat, to keep the chill off of him these could
nights"; but as soon as he gets into the coat he resumes his
human form and bids them good by, and thenceforth they may
wash their own dishes and scour their own tins, for all him.
But we are diverging from the subject of swan-maidens, and are
in danger of losing ourselves in that labyrinth of popular
fancies which is more intricate than any that Daidalos ever
planned. The significance of all these sealskins and
feather-dresses and mermaid caps and werewolf-girdles may best
be sought in the etymology of words like the German leichnam,
in which the body is described as a garment of flesh for the
soul.[93] In the naive philosophy of primitive thinkers, the
soul, in passing from one visible shape to another, had only
to put on the outward integument of the creature in which it
wished to incarnate itself. With respect to the mode of
metamorphosis, there is little difference between the werewolf
and the swan-maiden; and the similarity is no less striking
between the genesis of the two conceptions. The original
werewolf is the night-wind, regarded now as a manlike deity
and now as a howling lupine fiend; and the original
swan-maiden is the light fleecy cloud, regarded either as a
woman-like goddess or as a bird swimming in the sky sea.
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